"Is it more important for me to tell a basic historical truth, let’s say, about racism in America right now? Or is it more important for me to get a bill passed..."

"... that provides a lot of people with health care that didn’t have it before? And there’s a psychic cost to not always just telling the truth... using your prophetic voice as opposed to your coalition building political voice. And I think there were times where supporters of mine would get frustrated if I wasn’t being as forthright about certain things as I might otherwise be. And then there are also just institutional constraints that I think every president has to follow on some of these issues. And it was sort of on a case by case basis, where you try to make decisions."

Said Barack Obama, answering a question on the Ezra Klein podcast at the NYT about how he decided it was worth it, politically, to refrain from accusing people of racism.

The question, asked by Klein, specifically referred to the Tea Party, and Klein asserts, based on reading Obama's book, that it was clear that the Tea Party was "at least partly" racist. Obama had been musing about understanding people and bringing us together, and Klein, seeming to want to bring some edge to the discussion, asked "How do you decide when the cost of that kind of truth outweighs the value of it?"

I've edited down the answer, but if you look at the whole thing, you'll see that what I left out was blander than what I quoted. Obama referred to the "basic historical truth... about racism," then immediately turned to political expediency. He acknowledged the "psychic cost to not always just telling the truth," by which I think he meant the cost to himself personally in devaluing truth-telling. And he strangely equated truth with "using your prophetic voice as opposed to your coalition building political voice." Prophetic voice? 

CORRECTION: This post originally said Obama was wrong to say "Sarah Palin... was sort of a prototype for the politics that led to the Tea Party, that in turn, ultimately led to Donald Trump, and that we’re still seeing today." I was wrong. He has the chronology right.

ADDED: I wish Klein had pursued Obama about the slippage between telling the truth and speaking in a prophetic voice! Maybe it's developed in his book, but I'd say, just offhand, that prophesy relates to the future, and, normally, when we talk about telling the truth, it relates to the present and the past. 

AND: I don't think the book uses the idea of the "prophetic voice," because I'm not seeing that phrase in connection with the book title. What I can see is that Obama's early speeches, when he first ran for President, were discussed in terms of a "prophetic" tradition among black Americans. I suspect that Obama conflated telling the truth about racism with speaking in the lofty, inspirational style associated with Martin Luther King, Jr.

"His almost zealous commitment to moderation rankled some progressives, who had assumed that his soaring campaign rhetoric meant he was a visionary bent on overturning the status quo."

"Whenever he felt stuck, he fell back on empathy and 'process.' They sound like incommensurate traits — one is inventive and literary, the other is bland and technocratic. But for Obama — who in this book demonstrates an almost compulsive tendency to imagine himself into the lives of others (whether it’s Hillary Clinton, John McCain, or, in one passage, a Somali pirate) — a sound process 'was born of necessity.' Decisions that were made after taking into account a variety of perspectives reassured him that he wasn’t blinkered by his own...."

I'm reading "In ‘A Promised Land,’ Barack Obama Thinks — and Thinks Some More — Over His First Term" (NYT). This new book review, by the regular NYT nonfiction book critic Jennifer Szalai. 

The book is 700 pages long and only goes up to May 2011 — which means it includes "his roasting of Donald Trump at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on April 30 and the killing of Osama bin Laden the day after" but does not reach "the 2016 election, his abdication of his own 'red line' in Syria, the entrenchment of the surveillance state and a discussion of drone strikes." But, Szalai assures us, "This isn’t to say that 'A Promised Land' reads like a dodge." Ironically, that reads like a dodge. Szalai could be thinking that cutting off at May 2011 was a dodge, but the dodge was well-shrouded in contemplative prose so that it doesn't read like a dodge.

WaPo provides "Perspective/Barack Obama’s summer reading list is everything we need right now."

I've heard about the "blue wave." This seems to have us lolling about on the beach. What does it mean to say "Barack Obama’s summer reading list is everything we need right now"? I hear: Remember the good old days? Wasn't Barack Obama great? It's okay to disengage from all the craziness of today and lean back and read some books.

But let's see what the books are. Maybe they're all about riling us up about today. Oh. Wait. There's this introductory material from WaPo.

It’s the classiest, most passive-aggressive move Barack Obama could make: He posted a list of books he’s been reading on ­Facebook...

The WaPo book editor (Ron Charles) is trying to deflect the message I heard. He's seeing AGGRESSION! in Obama's amiable communication. Classy aggression.

Obama didn’t rage against his enemies or attack the pillars of our democracy. He didn’t call anybody a “dog.” He didn’t brag about his own bestsellers — or the size of his book-reading hands.

Instead, he just presented a small window into the mind of a man who appreciates how books can alter the pace of our lives and illuminate the world.

“One of my favorite parts of summer is deciding what to read when things slow down just a bit,” Obama wrote, “whether it’s on a vacation with family or just a quiet afternoon.”

For a nation showered by the sputtering rage of his replacement, Obama’s implicit reminder of how incurious and aliterate the Oval Office has become is almost cruel.

La la la. Isn't he wonderful? And isn't his wonderfulness all we really need to make the argument that Trump is intolerably horrible?

Credit to Ron Charles for deploying the word "aliterate." It's different from "illiterate." It means "unwilling to read, although able to do so; disinclined to read" (OED).

ADDED: This post made me think of Obama and the waffle. Remember? "I was wondering why it is that, like, I can't just eat my waffle. Just gonna eat my waffle right now." (By the way, have you ever noticed that the waffle quote is virtually always remembered in paraphrase form, as "Why can't I just eat my waffle?" Go ahead, Google the verbatim quote, which I've provided, and you'll get lots of hits, all substituting the paraphrase.)

ALSO: Althouse on Facebook (but don't try to friend me)(click to enlarge):

"This week, I’m traveling to Africa for the first time since I left office – a continent of wonderful diversity, thriving culture, and remarkable stories."

That's Barack Obama, Facebooking platitudes. It's kind of refreshingly mellow and relaxing, isn't it?

Over the years since, I've often drawn inspiration from Africa's extraordinary literary tradition. As I prepare for this trip, I wanted to share a list of books that I’d recommend for summer reading, including some from a number of Africa’s best writers and thinkers – each of whom illuminate our world in powerful and unique ways.

I'm pleased to have the opportunity to use my old "Obama is bland" tag. So... should we read some books Obama recommends, something that illuminates our world?

There are 6 books on the list, and the first 5 are by African writers, with African subject matter. But the 6th book is "The World As It Is" by Ben Rhodes:

It’s true, Ben does not have African blood running through his veins. But few others so closely see the world through my eyes like he can. Ben’s one of the few who’ve been with me since that first presidential campaign. His memoir is one of the smartest reflections I’ve seen as to how we approached foreign policy, and one of the most compelling stories I’ve seen about what it’s actually like to serve the American people for eight years in the White House.

Few others so closely see the world through my eyes like he can. Does it take nerve or just obliviousness to write that when the freshest image we've got of Ben Rhodes seeing the world is...

Ben Rhodes reacting to Hillary Clinton's hilarious defeat in 2016 is the funniest part of the new Obama Documentary on HBO.

What makes it even better is throughout the documentary he brags how she is going to win. pic.twitter.com/MGBQNE5ATY

— The Columbia Bugle 🇺🇸 (@ColumbiaBugle) May 30, 2018

The Angry President.

I've been noticing so many news stories reporting that Trump is angry:

1. "Internal chaos at the White House, Trump angry" (MSNBC March 1, 2018): "President Trump say [sic] he is in a bad place -- mad as hell about the internal chaos and the sense that things are unraveling."

2. "The angry past 24 hours in Trump’s fight with his own attorney general, explained" (Vox March 1, 2018): "President Donald Trump’s public feud with Attorney General Jeff Sessions keeps getting uglier — and may soon lead to the unceremonious ouster of one of the president’s earliest and most enthusiastic supporters."

3. "Trump was angry and ‘unglued’ when he started a trade war, officials say" (NBC News March 2, 2018): "According to two officials, Trump's decision to launch a potential trade war was born out of anger at other simmering issues and the result of a broken internal process that has failed to deliver him consensus views that represent the best advice of his team. On Wednesday evening, the president became 'unglued,' in the words of one official familiar with the president's state of mind."

4. "Think the White House is in chaos now? Just wait" (CNN, Chris Cillizza, March 2, 2018): "The descriptions coming out of the White House describing Trump's state of mind over the last few days all paint a picture of a frustrated and angry executive who feels more and more isolated in his own White House." And maybe that's the way Trump likes it... "President Donald Trump has, throughout his life, embraced chaos as a life philosophy. (He's like Littlefinger in that way)"... and I seem to need to watch a "Game of Thrones" clip to understand the President's psyche.

5. It's nothing new. Look at this from last May, in Slate: "Why Is Trump So Angry?/The president’s uncontrollable rage powers his ruthlessness—and his ineptitude." The illustration artist seems to have been told, just show Trump as angry as you possibly can. He's got pointed teeth arrayed in a circular formation around the circumference of his gaping mouth. His eyes are black. What color are his eyes really? Blue, right? That question was weirdly hard to Google. I kept getting things about the whiteness of the skin around his eyes — the "reverse raccoon" look that might be highlighter makeup and might be from using eye protection while tanning. And I stumbled into "What is going on with Donald Trump’s eyes?" in The New Republic 2 years ago. The young TNR writer — who seems never to have heard of the way older people tend to need reading glasses — questions Trump's fitness for office based on the large size of the font in his printed-out notes. But, yeah, Trump's eyes are blue. And Slate (racistly?) made them black, because he's angry. Imagine if they'd made his skin black to convey that he's angry!

So I'm thinking, what about President Obama? Was he portrayed as angry? No, Obama had to be the never-gets-angry man, perhaps because he actually did not get angry (behind the scenes or in public) but perhaps because advisers and the media believed they had to mollify Americans who were believed to harbor racial stereotypes.

"Obama's Anger Management Problem/As the cool-headed president says goodbye tonight, one lesson from Trump: He should have picked more enemies" (January 10, 2017 Politico): "The best comedy about President Obama has been the series of Key & Peele sketches featuring Luther, the 'anger translator' who screams the unexpurgated thoughts the first black president would scream if he weren’t so chill, so deliberate, and so unwilling to scare white people.... And if you had to pinpoint one specific thing he’s done badly, you might start with his perplexing failure to get riled up about rile-worthy behavior, his no-drama reluctance to pick defining public fights. Obama has an anger over-management problem...."

That's after his party lost the election. Maybe the media wished they'd portrayed him as less bland, more fiery. Well, there was that one time.... "Angry President Obama Tears Into Donald Trump Like Never Before" (NBC June 15, 2016):



Chris Cillizza explained that in "Why President Obama is so angry about Donald Trump’s ‘radical Islam’ attack." I'm thinking maybe Obama was worried that his party was in danger of losing the White House and that he actually had to activate himself to generate support for Hillary Clinton. Cillizza says Obama genuinely disapproves of the "radical Islam" rhetoric and really hates having to do things "purely for the sake of politics."

Obama liked to tell us he was "mellow." Here he is in 2015 at the White House Correspondents Dinner:



Now, clearly, the press was much more favorable to Obama, and I think they portrayed him as exceedingly slow to anger because that's the way he and his people wanted him to look, but it probably had some truth to it. The press is so hostile to Trump, and they seem to be openly attacking him with reports of his anger — sometimes making him look like a scary rageaholic. But there must be some truth in it. Maybe the distortion is mostly in failing to comment on Trump's full array of emotions. He's an outwardly expressive guy, often joyful and ebullient. Another distortion is the failure to speak in positive terms when the anger is justified and properly targeted and a good and balanced part of the psyche of a human being.

Axelrod got everything he wanted.

From the podcast with Obama:

OBAMA: And you know, part of the reasons that I think I've stayed sane in what has been this remarkable journey, and you've known me a long time and I think you'd confirm that I'm pretty much the same guy as I was when we started this thing.... [Y]ou know, success came late to me, notoriety came late. And it -- it made me realize that to the extent that I had been successful, it wasn't about me.  It was about certain forces out there and -- and me hitching my wagon to a broader spirit and a broader set of trends and a broader set of traditions. And so, when -- when we came up with the phrase Yes, We Can, which again, to give you credit I was a little skeptical of, it felt a little simplistic when we first started. But...

AXELROD: You didn't like the logo either, but that's -- that's a different discussion...

(CROSSTALK)

OBAMA: The logo I thought was a loser, it looked like the Pepsi logo and I thought...

AXELROD: That's what you said, that's...

OBAMA: ... that seems a little...

(CROSSTALK)

AXELROD: That's what you said, it became more iconic than the Apple insignia. So -- I'm glad we straightened this out...

OBAMA: But look, I...

AXELROD: I've gotten everything I wanted...

Obama tags on this blog that have collected a surprising number of posts.

You can see all my Obama tags below the fold. I'll just list some I particularly like for various reasons — odd specificity, surprising usefulness, whatever:

Obama the mood elevator (74)
Obama the boyfriend (58)
Obama and manliness (24)
Obama's psyche (68)
Obama is everywhere (15)
Obama and irony (14)
Obama and pop culture (87)
Obama the father (19)
Obama the teacher (28)
Obama and the fly (13) (Let's see Trump catch a fly with his bare hand.)
Obama eats dog (12)
Obama attacked from the left (11)
Obama gets mad (3)
Obama is bland ( 63)
Obama's tired (5)
Obama is like Bush (78)
Obama is like Carter (15)
Obama is like Nixon (35)
Obama is like Reagan (4)
Obama is like Sarah Palin (4)
Obama's umbrella (5)
Obama says something strange (1)

I got played by the NYT — the headline is "Obama Criticizes F.B.I. Director: ‘We Don’t Operate on Leaks.'"

Then I watched the video:

'We don't operate on innuendo' — President Obama discusses Hillary, emails, and the FBI in an exclusive interview with NowThis pic.twitter.com/0J6tJyEYSh

— NowThis (@nowthisnews) November 2, 2016

That didn't come across as Obama turning around from the restrained, out-of-the-fray position he took yesterday, but the NYT has:

President Obama sharply criticized the decision by his F.B.I. director to alert Congress on Friday about the discovery of new emails related to the Hillary Clinton server case, implying that it violated investigative norms and trafficked in innuendo.

Where's the sharp criticism?!

Note that Obama, speaking very carefully, says:

I made a very deliberate effort to make sure that I don’t look like I’m meddling in what are supposed to be independent processes for making these assessments.

Interesting stress on how things look. But I think he means to keep looking like he's not meddling.

Now, Obama also says:

We don’t operate on incomplete information. We don’t operate on leaks. We operate based on concrete decisions that are made.

But he's speaking generally, not directly at Comey, and not purporting to say specifically that anything Comey has done constitutes "operating" on "incomplete information." You'd have to put that together yourself — or trust the NYT to do that for you.

Why aren't people paying more attention to the terrible flooding in Louisiana?

Do you think it's the lack of a name?

“This is a historic flooding event,” Gov. John Bel Edwards said Tuesday. “When you have a storm that is unnamed — it wasn’t a tropical storm, it wasn’t a hurricane — a lot of times people underestimate the impact that it would have....”

I don't:

The name "Katrina" got attached to what was mainly a flood, but I think the lack of attention isn't so much the lack of a name but the lack of a President people feel like attacking. But don't worry, sufferers of natural disasters, we're going to have one soon.

"But to really be in the presence of somebody who is the president and has been for eight years ... and to feel the incredible charisma and ease at which this guy handles himself..."

"I was a bit of a nervous wreck and he immediately put me at ease. I don't know how, I'm not easy to put at ease. I'm a nutbag." [Afterwards:] "I cried a little bit, right in front of Brendan. It was a weird moment for us, he handled it pretty well. ... A crew of people came and they started disassembling the tents that were on my driveway and then all the Secret Service got their stuff and they just were gone, it was all gone. I let my cats out of the bedroom ... and they were like, 'Can we have our house back, please?'"

Marc Maron recovers. 

ADDED: At The New Yorker, Sarah Larson wonders whether Maron could get to "the heart and soul of things" as he has with other guests:

Maybe. A President’s heart and soul tend to consist of deeply reasonable sentiments, unless he’s Lyndon Johnson. Obama is by nature rational and pragmatic.... His conversation, humor, and revelations are all intelligent and uncontroversial. Part of what has become second nature to him is speaking so reasonably that it’s almost aggravating. What does he do for fun? Watch his daughters grow up; he finds them spectacular. Play basketball, but he’s not as young as he used to be. When he mentioned parental craziness and the desire to not pass your own craziness on to your kids, Maron said, “How are you crazy?” Well, he isn’t.... He may have been as real as he gets....

"The Chancellor thinks Putin believes that we’re decadent, we’re gay, we have women with beards..."

"That it’s a strong Russia of real men versus the decadent West that’s too pampered, too spoiled, to stand up for their beliefs if it costs them one per cent of their standard of living. That’s his wager. We have to prove it’s not true."

Said an unnamed German official quoted in the New Yorker article "The Quiet German/The astonishing rise of Angela Merkel, the most powerful woman in the world."

As for what Merkel thinks of American Presidents:

“She does not really think Obama is a helpful partner,” Torsten Krauel, a senior writer for Die Welt, said. “She thinks he is a professor, a loner, unable to build coalitions.” Merkel’s relationship with Bush was much warmer than hers with Obama, the longtime political associate said. A demonstrative man like Bush sparks a response, whereas Obama and Merkel are like “two hit men in the same room. They don’t have to talk—both are quiet, both are killers.”

A demonstrative man like Bush sparks a response... Hmm... time to reexamine the old video:



She's smiling in the end, something you can really see in the longer video here, at Kos, where the assertion is that the gesture is "most unwelcome." How do we know?! I mean, I know you're not supposed to touch people unless you know it is welcome, but that doesn't mean we know it's not welcome.

Leon Panetta says Obama needs to "get in the ring" and "fight."

ADDED: Transcript:

Bob, there are--you know, having been in this town close to fifty years, you know, I've seen Washington at its best and Washington at its worst.... And this country cannot tolerate another two and a half years of stalemate. The President can't tolerate it. If he wants to be able to get the things done that he wants done, and I respect him for-- for what he wants to get done, he has got to get into the ring. Everybody's got to get in and fight to make sure that we do the right thing for the country....

He almost yelled "fight," so I sensed some real frustration there.

You know... I don't mind Presidents who have the quality of- of a law professor in looking at the issues and determining just exactly, you know, what needs to be done. But Presidents need to also have the heart of a warrior. That's the way you get things done, is you-- you engage in the fight. And in this town, as difficult it is-- as it is, and it is difficult. I mean you've got Tea Party members in Congress who basically want to shut the government down and tear it down. He still has to have the ability to engage and to try to work with people up there who want to get things done in order to make sure that we just don't stalemate as a country

Chuck Todd extracts the news that President Obama is sleepy.

On yesterday's "Meet the Press," Chuck Todd, enjoying his first day as the new host, hosted President Obama and asked him a few questions, including "Are you exhausted?" (He laid the foundation for the question by saying that people are saying that "He looks exhausted.")

President Obama said:

I actually feel energized about the opportunities that we've got. 

I think that's another way to say that he is exhausted by all the work. Obviously, he can't concede that he's exhausted, so Todd has simply handed him an opportunity to talk back to the people who say he looks exhausted. Why bother? There's zero hope of getting a serious, truthful answer. I'm not blaming Obama here. I'm blaming Todd.

Obama continues:

There are days when I'm not getting enough sleep because we've got a lot on our plate. When you're president of the United States...

Blah blah blah... insert references to problems he's dealing with and run out more time.

Todd ends the interview with: "Well, I think I need to pre-book you for next week, because I've got about another 35 questions." Ugh! Take out the comfy questions that do nothing but force him to bullshit and run out the clock!

Todd thanks Obama, who says: "I enjoyed it." I'll bet he did. And: "Great to see you." I'll bet it is.

Are educated, intelligent adults allowed to complain that they didn't get what Obama's smiling 2008 campaign persona made them feel they could get?

Ah, it's a free country. You can complain about anything you want, but you look foolish if you don't take responsibility for your own gullibility.

Thomas Frank interviews Cornel West:

Frank: I... remember... being impressed by Barack Obama who was running for president... I sometimes thought that he looked like he had what this country needed... That was a huge turning point, that moment in 2008, and my own feeling is that we didn’t turn.

West: No, the thing is he posed as a progressive and turned out to be counterfeit. We ended up with a Wall Street presidency, a drone presidency, a national security presidency. The torturers go free. The Wall Street executives go free. The war crimes in the Middle East, especially now in Gaza, the war criminals go free. And yet, you know, he acted as if he was both a progressive and as if he was concerned about the issues of serious injustice and inequality and it turned out that he’s just another neoliberal centrist with a smile and with a nice rhetorical flair.... 

Another neoliberal centrist with a smile and with a nice rhetorical flair? That's what I hoped I might get when I voted for Obama in 2008. He never assured us he'd be a left-winger, but some people — people who wanted that — projected their hope onto him, and of course, he invited everyone to see him as the embodiment of whatever it was they hoped for.

West: And we ended up with a brown-faced Clinton. 

That's crudely stated, and I wouldn't talk like that, but that's about exactly what I hoped for. A pragmatic centrist like Bill Clinton, and as a bonus, we get the first African American President. I didn't vote merely on that hope. It was also the case that John McCain lost me. It's always only a choice between 2 (or, rarely, 3) candidates. You can't get everything you want, and you can't know everything about what you are getting.

"Help me out, Ann," says Barack Obama in his newest email.

"Ann -- Nothing has ever been more important than fighting for folks like you. You are my priority."

Me? Really? What about those people in Ferguson? What about the Yazidis? ISIS cut off a reporter's head yesterday.

"And right now, a focus of that fight has to be getting people who really care about making things better for you elected."

What fight? Oh... the fight for folks like me. You're focusing on the fight for folks like me by getting people elected who care about folks like me. Could you be anymore bland and generic?

ADDED: If he really cares about me, he should send me an invitation to stay at his compound on the Vineyard or at least to one of those 5-hour dinners served up by the hunky Sam Kass.

"Why Obama won’t give the Ferguson speech his supporters want."

A headline for an Ezra Klein piece that really should have the second and third words reversed. It's a good question, but Ezra only poses as capable of answering it. I can think of 10 other answers to the question, but I'm writing this on an iPad.

ADDED: I've returned to my desktop, as you can see by the addition of tags, so I feel I should make good on my assertion that I have 10 other answers. I'll publish them as I proceed, beginning with one that is a tag.

1. Obama is bland. It's a tag on this blog that I've been using since April 21, 2009: "Yes. As in his campaign, Obama is very bland. For some reason — possibly vaguely racist — Americans liked the bland. But at some point, bland is not what you want." I have 55 posts with that tag. His fans may not want to believe it, but I've been observing it all along, and it's part of why I voted for him in 2008. I don't like demagogues.

2. Ezra speaks of Obama's 2008 "Race Speech" as the sort of speech that his opponents long for, but go back and read it. It's studded with lines like "The profound mistake of Reverend Wright's sermons," and "Reverend Wright's comments were not only wrong but divisive, divisive at a time when we need unity...." We may remember that speech as extremely powerful, but it was assurance of Obama's moderation. Supporters want what they feel they got in the past but their memory of the past is distorted.

3. The "Race Speech" was crucial to Obama's 2008 campaign. A lot of work went into crafting that speech: "... Obama dictated a lengthy draft of this speech to [Jon] Favreau, who edited the speech the next day. Obama stayed up until 3:00 a.m. Sunday night working on the speech, and continued to work on it Monday and in the early hours of Tuesday." Favreau isn't there anymore, and I don't think Obama has the time or motivation to put that much personal effort into a speech about Ferguson.

4. The Jeremiah Wright crisis in 2008 required a direct, decisive response from the candidate. There was no option of standing back and seeing whether things might work out all right without his intrusion and interference. But when he has the option to lead from behind, that's his style.

5. Obama doesn't want a replay of the Skip Gates fiasco, where he blurted out that the police "acted stupidly," when he didn't really know the the facts, and it turned out that what the police did was not stupid at all. In the case of the Ferguson incident, we don't know the facts. Today, I'm seeing: "Police sources tell me more than a dozen witnesses have corroborated cop's version of events in shooting #Ferguson." (Ezra Klein brings up Skip Gates, but doesn't mention that Obama got the facts wrong because he spoke too soon, only that "the White House no longer believes Obama can bridge divides.")

6. Michael Brown was no Trayvon Martin. Obama said "Trayvon could have been my son." And "Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago." But he can't (won't) say that about Brown. Yes, he could talk more generally about how racial profiling — real or feared — makes people feel and that's what the protests in Ferguson express and that matters even if Michael Brown strong-armed a shopkeeper and even if he threatened the police officer who killed him. But that's not the speech Obama supporters supposedly want. There is no cherubic boy with Skittles and iced tea. There's a very large, adult man with stolen cigars. It's harder to say deeply empathic things about Brown. And Obama cannot make that personal I-am-Trayvon kind of statement.

7. Obama must help his party in the Fall elections. I think this is the key graphic, the fight for the U.S. Senate. The toss-up states are Alaska, Arkansas, Colorado, Georgia, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisana, Michigan, and North Carolina. Whatever Obama says now must be calibrated for the effect in these states. Will emotive racial politics carry the Democratic Party through to November? Perhaps that seems like a risky bet.

8. Obama's tired.

9. "On December 11, 2006, I quoted Obama saying: 'I think to some degree I’ve become a shorthand or symbol or stand-in for a spirit....' I liked him for saying that. It was honest. I thought he'd have become something specific, and I'm amused to see that I added: 'Wouldn't it be funny if he didn't?'" I wrote that on February 18, 2008 in a post titled "Why I'm voting for Obama in the Wisconsin primary." It must get wearisome being America's shorthand or symbol or stand-in for so long, wearisome for all of us, and he knows it. Maybe not speaking is the best expression at this point in our long journey.

10. A truly brilliant speech about Ferguson — if he had the will and the time to craft the perfect statement — would not be what his supporters want, but something more difficult, challenging, and surprising.

"This is actually worse than Trayvon Martin, you have standoffs in the streets. [Obama] has met it with his dispassionate speaking."

"That is not useful.... We have a big racial problem, and he has tiptoed around it."

Said Anthea Butler, associate professor of religious studies and Africana studies at The University of Pennsylvania, quoted in "Should Obama Do More on Ferguson and Other Racial Issues?"

Belief in the power of Obama's speaking has faded. And yet... there's still a belief that he could solve problems through great speech. The word "dispassionate" reveals that remaining hope. As if injecting passion might work.

Obama’s caution on what happened in Ferguson is not surprising. It’s not just a racial issue, but one of policing and local control. Early in this tenure, Obama, at a press conference, had said Massachusetts police “acted stupidly” in arresting Harvard professor and Obama friend Henry Louis Gates, Jr. in front of his home. The police action was probably unwise, but the president was criticized for weighing into a local law enforcement matter.

So passionate speech doesn't do the trick either.

On the topic of Obama's failure, Thomas "What's the Matter With Kansas?" Frank emits the purplest prose that ever...

...  included the word "shitty":

The task facing the makers of the Obama museum, however, will be pretty much exactly the opposite: how to document a time when America should have changed but didn’t. Its project will be to explain an age when every aspect of societal breakdown was out in the open and the old platitudes could no longer paper it over—when the meritocracy was clearly corrupt, when the financial system had devolved into organized thievery, when everyone knew that the politicians were bought and the worst criminals went unprosecuted and the middle class was in a state of collapse and the newspaper pundits were like street performers miming “seriousness” for an audience that had lost its taste for mime and seriousness both. It was a time when every thinking person could see that the reigning ideology had failed, that an epoch had ended, that the shitty consensus ideas of the 1980s had finally caved in—and when an unlikely champion arose from the mean streets of Chicago to keep the whole thing propped up nevertheless.

The NYT ventures to opine that President Obama is "not good enough."

Yesterday, I avoided blogging the NYT editorial "President Obama and the World" because of its maddeningly bland demeanor. No. I'm kidding. "Maddeningly bland demeanor" is just one of the many phrases within which the editors' opinion was couched. And I got tired of searching around in between the comfy cushions of that couch looking for lost quarters.

"Mr. Obama has opened himself to criticism," but he's "precisely the kind of" President people say they wanted. He's "done a better job than his detractors allow." The criticisms are "overblown." "Some analysts have suggested... Others say... These criticisms have some truth... It is tempting to dismiss criticism from right-wing Republicans... It was disquieting to hear... But there is also powerful criticism from Democrats, liberals and centrists... His critics are inconsistent... people on the left and the right... find him unfocused, weak and passive.... the perception — of weakness, dithering, inaction...."

Everything is put in terms of what other people think. What other people think is apparently not exactly right, but how wrong is it?

Taken as a whole and stripped as much as possible of ideological blinkers, Mr. Obama’s record on foreign policy is not as bad as his critics say. It’s just not good enough.

Given how annoying it was to read this editorial — and I finally did  — I wanted to get a blog post out of it to give you something short and useful. What feels useful to me is: 1. Notice the extremity of the NYT editors' resistance to owning any criticism of this President, 2. The NYT editors must have some serious criticism they really do want to set down in print, even if they don't want readers to find it in the text, and 3. Perhaps the editors know that they have left themselves open to criticism, as they allow 8 years to pass without any serious criticism of a President.

There, now... did I find any quarters?

"Pop Culture Recasts Obama as Drone Master" — a NYT headline I misinterpreted.

That's the front page teaser for an article that has a slightly different headline "The Rise of the Drone Master: Pop Culture Recasts Obama." I clicked through because I thought it would be funny if pop culture had started mocking Obama's style of speech. He's no longer eloquent. He's verbose and dull — droning. The Drone Master.

But no:

In Marvel’s latest popcorn thriller, Captain America battles Hydra, a malevolent organization that has infiltrated the highest levels of the United States government. There are missile attacks, screeching car chases, enormous explosions, evil assassins, data-mining supercomputers and giant killer drones ready to obliterate millions of people....