"Correction: A previous version of this post suggested that the real-life Jimmy Carter would never have recommended the Allman Brothers."

"In fact, he had a close relationship with the band."

Appended to "Obama and the End of Greatness," by Jeff Shesol, in The New Yorker.

"Obama plays 27 holes."

"After morning briefings on the crisis in Syria...."

6 ideas for Obama supporters on how to spin this:

1. Impressive to work on a Saturday, when most ordinary golfers head straight for the course.

2. 27! Wow! Most golfers poop out after 18 holes.

3. A round and a half. A circle followed by an elegant a semi-circle. Creative! Who but Obama thinks of such things? Brilliant!

4. Oh, how much new is there really on any given day about Syria? What difference at this point does it make?

5. Why do you think they call them "briefings"? They're brief.

6. You don't want to get into the weeds — in briefings as in golf. NOTE: You've got to be careful with the "weed" imagery. The mind drifts here, but the point is: Jimmy Carter micromanaged, and Obama is not like Carter.

"A candidate who actually nods when his opponent makes a powerful counterargument—as Obama did several times during the last debate—is a rare bird."

So wrote Slate Culture Critic Meghan O'Rourke on October 28, 2008, in a collection of short statements by various Slate writers, explaining who they were about to vote for and why. For some reason, this article isn't available on line anymore, but it turns up in a Google search as a "doc" file that downloads. I had the text to Google because my son John had blogged it back in '08, and he remembered it and emailed me about it after I blogged today about how I hadn't interpreted Obama's looking down and nodding in a negative way.

Here's O'Rourke's entire statement of why she was voting for Obama:

For his charisma, his cautiousness, and his cool. In a time of high stakes, we need someone who can sort out the best course of action without bridling in anger. A candidate who actually nods when his opponent makes a powerful counterargument—as Obama did several times during the last debate—is a rare bird. Of course, Obama is untested in many regards. My main concern about him is this: How will he deal with making an unpopular or tough decision? Can he keep his cool then without losing confidence in himself? I believe so, and that's why he has my vote.

If you Google that text, you'll get to the document that has the many statements of various writers. I predict there's a lot of raw material for analyzing the state of affairs today. State of affairs... the state of America's affair with Barack Obama.

If you love a man, his passive nodding means one thing. If you've fallen out of love, it's something else. Obama's demeanor at the first debate didn't diminish our affection for him; our reaction to it was evidence of how we already felt.

What can he do now? Act some different way at debate #2? If my hypothesis is correct, it doesn't matter what he does. We won't like it.

ADDED: I'm rooting around in that Slate document. Here's Tim Wu, evincing the classic '08 madness:

Most of all, I like his obvious inner calm. It suggests that his decisions will come from somewhere other than expediency, anger, or fear. It's like electing Obi-Wan Kenobi as president.

And here's some prescience:

Emily Yoffe, "Dear Prudence" Columnist: Obama

Please, please, Barack, don't become another Jimmy Carter.

"He’s not Jimmy Carter. He’s Tiger Woods — a natural who’s lost his swing."

"He has so many different swing thoughts in his head, so many people whispering in his ear about what the polls say and how he needs to position himself to get re-elected, that he has lost all his natural instincts for the game."

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"Obama is not a flaccid Jimmy Carter... He is instead a Franklin Delano Roosevelt -- but a bizarro FDR."

David Sirota strains to understand and characterize the President.

In forging such bipartisan complicity with what were once exclusively right-wing Republican objectives, Obama has achieved even more than what he fantasized about when he famously celebrated a previous bizarro FDR. In an illustrative 2008 interview with a Nevada newspaper, Obama lauded Ronald Reagan for "chang[ing] the trajectory of America" and "put[ting] us on a fundamentally different path."

Reagan was a truly strong executive -- but the Gipper was nothing compared to our current president.

Got that, wingers?

"What if the people who hate government are good at it and the people who love government are bad at it?"

Maureen Dowd observes that "Obama and John Boehner have been completely outplayed by the 'hobbits'":

Consider what the towel-snapping Tea Party crazies have already accomplished. They’ve changed the entire discussion. They’ve neutralized the White House. They’ve whipped their leadership into submission. They’ve taken taxes and revenues off the table. They’ve withered the stock and bond markets. They’ve made journalists speak to them as though they’re John Calhoun and Alexander Hamilton.

That term, "hobbits" (for tea partiers), comes from the Wall Street Journal and John McCain. I'm not sure what hobbits — the actual literary characters — have to do with "towel-snappin" and "whipping" anybody "into submission."

Dowd is not kind to President Obama:

As one Democratic senator complained: “The president veers between talking like a peevish professor and a scolding parent.” (Not to mention a jilted lover.) Another moaned: “We are watching him turn into Jimmy Carter right before our eyes.”

Obama’s “We must lift ourselves to a higher place” trope doesn’t work on this rough crowd. If somebody at dinner is about to kill you, you don’t worry about his table manners.

Kill you?! The hobbits?

From that Wall Street Journal article:

The idea seems to be that if the House GOP refuses to raise the debt ceiling, a default crisis or gradual government shutdown will ensue, and the public will turn en masse against . . . Barack Obama. The Republican House that failed to raise the debt ceiling would somehow escape all blame. Then Democrats would have no choice but to pass a balanced-budget amendment and reform entitlements, and the tea-party Hobbits could return to Middle Earth having defeated Mordor.

Sorry, but I don't remember all that "Lord of the Rings" stuff enough to understand that. Mordor is a place, right? Yes. "Mordor was the realm of the Dark Lord Sauron. It was a terrible land of darkness and fear, inhabited by Orcs and other evil creatures." Does that make Obama the "Dark Lord"? I understand the Journal's hope that the Tea Party will go back to their modest home towns after they do whatever they think is their mission in Washington, that "terrible land of darkness and fear."

The "Obama is like Carter" meme had been virulent lately...

... but the successful mission to kill bin Laden hits it hard.

(Review the history of Operation Eagle Claw if you don't get my point.)

Obama is more like Reagan than Carter, says Mark Schmitt.

But he needs the economy to recover so we can perceive it.

Reagan recovered... in time for the "Morning in America" election of 1984. And so we naturally forget those days when he seemed doomed to be the fifth consecutive president to leave office a failure, rather than the first since Eisenhower to complete two terms and leave more or less respected. (I was kind of shocked to learn of the magnitude of Reagan's slump myself, although I was alive and politically aware at the time.) He recovered not because of his message or his political operation... but because the economy recovered.

8 Presidents on an energy independence mission.

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"Miss me yet?"

A billboard out in Minnesota, in a place called Wyoming...



I've been saying "I miss Bush" for a while. Here, I said it in a post at the end of the year. And at least one commenter said it a year ago:

Patm said...

I miss Bush. He never said the time for talk was over.

2/10/09 4:26 PM

Ha! What a funny context. Patm was responding to this, from me:

Barack Obama says:

We’ve had a good debate, but the time for talking is over.

You hear that? Shut up!

That goes so deliciously well with the top story of the last couple days: Obama wanting to hold a summit with the Republicans over exactly the subject about which — a year ago — the time for talk was over.

Sometimes it's too late, and then, after that, it's morning again....

"Carter tried weakness and the world got tougher and tougher because the predators, the aggressors, the anti-Americans, the dictators, when they sense weakness, they all start pushing ahead."

Newt Gingrich, quoted in a Spiegel Online article titled "Obama's Nice Guy Act Gets Him Nowhere on the World Stage."

"Unless Obama learns to rely less on charm, rhetoric, and good intentions and more on picking his spots and winning in political combat, he's not going to be reelected...."

"The president's problem isn't that he is too visible; it's the lack of content in what he says when he keeps showing up on the tube. Obama can seem a mite too impressed with his own aura, as if his presence on the stage is the Answer. There is, at times, a self-referential (even self-reverential) tone in his big speeches. They are heavily salted with the words 'I' and 'my.' (He used the former 11 times in the first few paragraphs of his address to the U.N. last week.) Obama is a historic figure, but that is the beginning, not the end, of the story."

The mainstreamers are starting to regret the way they led the poor man on.

"President Obama yesterday did his best impression of a high-school sophomore participating in his first Model UN meeting, retailing pious clichés he learned from his pony-tailed social studies teacher."

Rich Lowry talks about Barack Obama's U.N. speech.

Has an American president ever expressed such implicit hostility toward his own nation's pre-eminence in world affairs? Or so relished in recalling its failings, or so readily elevated himself and his own virtues over those of his country?...

"For those who question the character and cause of my nation," Obama said, "I ask you to look at the concrete actions we have taken in just nine months." In other words, he's the redeemer of a nation....

Ugh. Sigh. And I thought Gaddafy was the clown. But that was yesterday, as I watched TV with the sound off, under the influence of post-toe-op drugs.

I'm torn. I was just thinking that Obama would have been so much better if he had made foreign policy the centerpiece of his presidency instead of perversely investing his reputation in complicated health care puzzles. Now, I'm thinking perhaps we're better off that he's gotten hopelessly distracted by insoluable insurance problems.

***

You know, Lowry's description made me think of Mr. Van Driessen on "Beavis and Butt-Head." I was going to embed some apt video clip of the hippie teacher — maybe something with him lecturing the boys about world peace — but all I could find was this and my inner Nancy Pelosi scolded me about this balance between freedom and safety.

"The guy forgot his keys, jimmied his way to get into the house... if I was trying to jigger into..."

I've already written about what Obama said about racism, Skip Gates, and the "stupidity" of the police. You can find the context of the issue there, including the whole text of Obama's remarks. This post is solely about the words "jimmied" and "jigger," which appear like this:

What's been reported though is that the guy forgot his keys, jimmied his way to get into the house. There was a report called in to the police station that there might be a burglary taking place. So far, so good, right? I mean, if I was trying to jigger into -- well, I guess this is my house now, so...(LAUGHTER)... it probably wouldn't happen. But let's say my old house in Chicago. (LAUGHTER)

Here, I'd get shot. (LAUGHTER)

(Okay, one additional issue: What blithe disrespect for the Secret Service to say he'd get shot! Okay, one more: The President should not make jokes about getting shot.)

Now, jimmy is the right word for what Obama was talking about. Dictionary definition:

to force open with or as if with a jimmy

"Jimmied the door" would be more precise than "jimmied his way," but "jimmy" is the j-word for the job.

Here's the dictionary on "jigger" (used as a verb):

intransitive verb
: to jerk up and down

transitive verb
: to alter or rearrange especially by manipulating <jigger an election district>

Obama's use of the word is a little off. I think "jigger into" is unidiomatic in a way that makes it hard to figure out if it's supposed to have the transitive or the intransitive meaning. But maybe he's picturing jerking up and down or manipulating. Whatever. It's not particularly wrong, but it's interesting that he shifted from "jimmy" to "jigger." If a white person made that shift in the context of this story, people might suspect racism (because of the word it rhymes with).

But I don't think he was drawn to the word "jigger." I think he was trying to get away from the word "jimmy."

Whatever you do, don't make them think of Jimmy!



Yikes! Who's that staring at him from the portrait in the hallway?

Somali pirates, U.S. crew, Rush Limbaugh, and Barack Obama.

I was listening to the beginning of the Rush Limbaugh show as I was cooking lunch this morning, and he was going on about the U.S. crew that was taken hostage by pirates off the cost of Somalia today. He'd slotted the story into his Obama-doesn't-know-what-to-do template and was riffing away about Obama's indecision and what he must be fretting about and how he'd probably want to apologize to the pirates and so forth. The big show was steaming along. (I thought a good ending would be: hostage crisis... it's Jimmy Carter all over again.)

And then he was slipped the news that the U.S. crew had taken their ship back, defeated the pirates. And Rush should have turned that big show around instantly. It should have been: Yay, America! Americans don't lie back and wait to be rescued. We're ready to fight. We're self-reliant. The government isn't the answer to everything. There were lots of great alternate Rush Limbaugh templates to mobilize right then. This is why we need to have our own guns. This is why the bitching about Bush after Katrina was all wrong. Etc. etc.

But Rush couldn't turn that big show — that big container ship — around. He couldn't let go of Obama doesn't know what to do, and I felt a little sad about my radio hero.

Come on, Rush, be agile! I thought you knew how to do that. Eh, enough about Rush, I want to celebrate the American crew. Go America. And to the rest of the world: Look on and admire. Learn something.