"There’s this saying that Biden, and then Harris, both repeated... 'building a middle class from the bottom up and the middle out.' What the hell does that mean?"

"So the first thing is there’s this kind of consultant language that just needs to go away. That was always annoying to people. But when your opponent, Donald Trump, is clearly not on any consultant-speak, it just makes it more glaring that you seem like the typical politicians."

Said Ben Rhodes, who's recommending "authenticity." He's quoted in "Obama’s Not Going to Save Democrats, but This Might/Michelle Cottle and Ben Rhodes on what Democrats misunderstand about authenticity" (NYT).

And then there’s a second piece of this, which is, Democrats have these public debates that astound me where it’s like, “Maybe we need to go on TikTok” or “We need to go on that manosphere podcast.” If you can do that, if you can make a cool TikTok video and whatever your thing is that allows you to do that, that’s great. If you can’t, then please don’t. Please don’t go there. If you can go on “Joe Rogan” because you are up to speed on the conspiracy theories or you have a background in standup comedy or you know something about ultimate fighting, that’s great. But don’t go on “Joe Rogan” to talk about building an economy from the bottom up to the middle out. That will make his audience hate Democrats more. 

And so I think what Democrats miss about authenticity — it’s not like what platform I’m on. The point is that authenticity is about being yourself. It’s not about being what you think this demographic wants a politician to be.... [M]y point is essentially, Democrats love to, for instance, sit around and be like, “What’s the policy agenda that will win back America?” I — nobody cares. There’s great ideas out there — the abundance agenda and all the rest of it — but nobody is going to read that right now. That’s a great idea for Democrats if they actually win back power or maybe if they’re in power now.

Rhodes has his "a" word for saving Democrats — "authenticity" — and I see him glancing over at Ezra Klein's "a" word for saving Democrats — "abundance." What are some other longish "a" words that could be used by an elite commentator bullshitting about reinvigorating the Democratic Party? 

Well, you know what to do with a question like that, and that's just what I did. Do not read any further if you don't want to read something written by Grok:

1. Adaptability - Emphasizing the party’s need to evolve with changing times and voter priorities.
2. Aspiration - Focusing on inspiring voters with bold, forward-looking goals.
3. Accountability - Highlighting a commitment to transparency and responsibility to rebuild trust.
4. Altruism - Advocating for a selfless dedication to the public good over partisan gain.
5. Ambition - Calling for grand, unapologetic plans to energize the base and attract new supporters.
6. Articulation - Stressing the need for clearer, more compelling communication of values and policies.
7. Audacity - Urging the party to embrace fearless, unconventional strategies.
8. Atonement - Suggesting a reckoning with past missteps to reconnect with disillusioned voters.
9. Assimilation - Proposing a broader, more inclusive coalition that absorbs diverse perspectives.
10. Ascendancy - Framing the party’s path as one of rising dominance through moral and strategic clarity.

Obama already used #7, but now I feel like dabbling in crappy book titles, like "The Audacity of Altruism." Let's see... "The Articulation of Adaptablity," "The Assimilation of Atonement," "The Ambition of Accountability," "The Ascendancy of Aspiration."

Are we authentic yet?

"When you walk in by yourself, the look on the host or hostess’s face changes. It is sometimes a look of panic..."

"... like ‘What are we going to do with this person?’ Or sometimes it is a look of sympathy. I am just so tired of being treated like a second-class citizen."

Said Rajika Shah, "a lawyer in Los Angeles," who "is often led to the worst table in the dining room, neglected by her server, and then rushed out at the end of the meal," quoted in "Why Is Dining Alone So Difficult? With solo reservations on the rise but many restaurants still restricting tables to two or more, solitary Americans often feel left out or stigmatized" (NYT).

The assumption that people need to be coupled or grouped goes beyond restaurants, said Bella DePaulo... author of the 2023 book “Single at Heart: The Power, Freedom and Heart-Filling Joy of Single Life.”... Dr. DePaulo also pointed to a recent, highly circulated article in The Atlantic, “The Anti-Social Century,” which links practices like solo dining to reclusion and loneliness....

“People who are lonely are going to stay home,” she said. “They are not going to go out to a restaurant. People who go out on their own are confident.... We are a nation that really romanticizes romantic coupling and marriage, .and stigmatizing people who are single or do things alone is part of that”....

Here's a picture of me 17 years ago with my fisheye-exaggerated hand on a Bella DePaulo book, "Singled Out":

Obviously, I'm not alone. I've got Obama! I mean, I've got my tablemate, my photographer, and he was audaciously hoping, while I was preparing to do a Bloggingheads with Bella. And that Bloggingheads turned out to be momentous. It played a role in connecting me to Meade, as I described a bit later in a post called "Flashback '08: The Audacity Althousity of Hope."

So I'm always happy to see Bella DePaulo's name come up in an article, even though the important matter of living well while single isn't my personal concern anymore. I still care about it! And you don't have to be single to find yourself in situations where you need to or would like to eat alone in a restaurant and you waste part of your mind on the possibly disapproving expression on a restaurant employee's face and the way the other diners might be thinking, oh, that poor woman, no one loves her.

At least Obama loves us!

"Because he thinks the computer can lend 'half-baked thoughts the mask of tidiness,' he writes his first drafts longhand on yellow legal pads..."

"... the act of typing it into the computer essentially becomes a first edit. He says he is 'very particular' about his pens, always using black Uni-ball Vision Elite rollerball pens with a micro-point, and adds that he tends to do his best writing between 10 p.m. and 2 a.m.: 'I find that the world narrows, and that is good for my imagination. It’s almost as if there is a darkness all around and there’s a metaphorical beam of light down on the desk, onto the page.'"

From "Obama, the Best-Selling Author, on Reading, Writing and Radical Empathy He invited authors and historians to the White House and had already published a best-selling memoir. That didn’t make writing his latest book, 'A Promised Land,' any less of a grind" (NYT).

Suddenly hot to buy an Obamapen? Go here (Amazon Associates link). Now, get out your yellow pad and may your world narrow, may darkness encompass you, and may the metaphorical light beam down upon you.

"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.

Make America Possible Again.

From "I’m Not Yet Ready to Abandon the Possibility of America" by Barack Obama (an excerpt in The Atlantic from his forthcoming book "A Promised Land"): 

What I can say for certain is that I’m not yet ready to abandon the possibility of America—not just for the sake of future generations of Americans but for all of humankind. I’m convinced that the pandemic we’re currently living through is both a manifestation of and a mere interruption in the relentless march toward an interconnected world, one in which peoples and cultures can’t help but collide....

Our divisions run deep; our challenges are daunting. If I remain hopeful about the future, it’s in large part because I’ve learned to place my faith in my fellow citizens, especially those of the next generation, whose conviction in the equal worth of all people seems to come as second nature, and who insist on making real those principles that their parents and teachers told them were true but that they perhaps never fully believed themselves. More than anyone else, my book is for those young people—an invitation to once again remake the world, and to bring about, through hard work, determination, and a big dose of imagination, an America that finally aligns with all that is best in us.

In this rhetoric, America is something that has never existed in reality, only as a set of ideals. The "America" of Trump's "Make America Great Again" was not only never great in the past. It was never even America. At some point in the future, the dream of America may come true. Obama has considered abandoning the hope that America will some day come into existence, but he's holding off. He's putting his faith in the people, especially the "next generation," which might be the Millennials, but could be Gen Z. 

And don't forget the babies — the "Alphas" — and what they'll be thinking, seemingly second nature, after 10 or 15 years of whatever the Gen X and the Millennials inflict upon us. Somehow, something known as "the best in us" — be best! — will align with Mars, then peace will guide the planets, and love will steer the stars.

"But, of all the pleasures that first year in the White House would deliver, none quite compared to the mid-April arrival of Bo, a huggable, four-legged black bundle of fur..."

"... with a snowy-white chest and front paws. Malia and Sasha, who’d been lobbying for a puppy since before the campaign, squealed with delight upon seeing him for the first time, letting him lick their ears and faces as the three of them rolled around on the floor. With Bo, I got what someone once described as the only reliable friend a politician can have in Washington. He also gave me an added excuse to put off my evening paperwork and join my family on meandering after-dinner walks around the South Lawn. It was during those moments—with the light fading into streaks of purple and gold, Michelle smiling and squeezing my hand as Bo bounded in and out of the bushes with the girls giving chase—that I felt normal and whole and as lucky as any man has a right to expect."

The return of the prose style of Barack Obama, from an excerpt from his forthcoming memoir, published in The New Yorker under the title, "A President Looks Back on His Toughest Fight The story behind the Obama Administration’s most enduring—and most contested—legacy: reforming American health care."

I am emphatically not a fan of Obamaprose: "with the light fading into streaks of purple and gold, Michelle smiling and squeezing my hand as Bo bounded in and out of the bushes with the girls giving chase." Please don't do that. The light is aways in "streaks." Fading into streaks. No, it wasn't. The girls couldn't just chase the dog. They had to "give chase."

Now, I'm positive that this style of writing will thrill a certain sort of reader, and the people who eat up prose like that probably buy a lot of books.

Hey, remember when I argued with Michelle Goldberg and took the position that Sarah Palin's "Going Rogue" wasn't really that bad compared to "Dreams From My Father"? (Remember Sarah Palin?!)

And by the way, Obama wasn't really a dog person. The dog was a prop. The dog is still a prop... in the purple, fading, streaky sunlight. 

How Joe Biden can make Barack Obama President again.

I invite Joe Biden to pledge to follow this pathway to putting Barack Obama back in the White House. By pledging, he may improve his chance of getting elected. Who knows? The Ruth Bader Ginsburg Dying Wish must come true. The vacancy on the Supreme Court must remain open. I won't spend time on that step, because that's what everyone's already talking about. So let's jump forward to the new things:

First, President Joe Biden nominates Vice President Kamala Harris for the Supreme Court. He pledged to pick a black woman. Pledge kept. Now, he has the distinction of choosing not only the first black woman for the Court but also the first Asian person.

The choice would also meet a long-discussed goal of putting someone with political experience on the Court. This is something Bill Clinton wanted to do. In reminiscing — just a few days ago — about his choice of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, he openly talked about his original preference for someone political (specifically Mario Cuomo). Trump has shown the same interest when he put Ted Cruz and Tom Cotton on his Supreme Court list.

When Harris is confirmed, she will resign from the vice presidency, which will give President Biden the power to appoint the new Vice President. He can pick Barack Obama. Then all Biden needs to do is resign. He's feeling too elderly to serve. Oops! Thought I could do it, but turns out I'm getting weaker by the day. Whatever. Or don't even surprise us. Tell us now that you'll follow this path. Then, when you resign, you'll just be doing what you promised, keeping your pledge.

And don't tell me Barack Obama is term-limited. As Supreme Court nominees like to say, you read the text and you say what it means, not what you wish it would mean. Here's the text of the 22nd Amendment: "No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice...." There's no point in this scheme where Barack Obama is elected to the office of the President more than twice. He's appointed Vice President, and he assumes the presidency not by another election but by the resignation of President Biden.

ADDED: Meade is accusing me of "energizing Trumpers." Hmm. Do you think so?

IN THE COMMENTS: tcrosse asks "What's in it for Obama?" Well, for one thing, he gets to appoint the next Vice President. And then he's free to resign whenever it works best for him — so that he will have appointed the next President! He can restore what will be proclaimed "civility." Make us feel like we're good people again. Pat us on the head for behaving better. Make concerts in the White House great again. Pose with world leaders. Win another Nobel Prize.

ALSO: tcrosse's comment had more to it: "What's in it for Obama? It might get him off the hook for the huge advance he got for the book he has yet to produce." And the really cool thing is, then Obama could win the Nobel Prize for Literature! He won the Nobel Peace Prize without doing anything for it. He should win the Nobel Prize for Literature for figuring out the most high-flown, brilliant way of NOT writing a book. Conceptual art, blah blah blah. Stunning!!!

"Publishers Fret Over Obama’s ‘Failure to Perform’/Michelle finished her book. Why is Obama having trouble living up to his part of their lucrative contract?"

Headline at American Spectator.

Contracts that come with a reported $65 million advance, such as the one signed by Barack and Michelle Obama in February 2017 with Penguin Random House (PRH), will inevitably include [a "failure to perform" clause].... At the time the Obama deal was made in early 2017, insiders were telling Publishers Weekly that books by both Michelle and Barack would be released in fall 2018. Michelle’s book, Becoming, was released by PRH’s Crown division on schedule in November 2018 and has exceeded expectations. Barack’s book will be released at least two years behind schedule with no publication date in sight....

"'chunk" and 'chunks' two posts down. Lot of chunk-ing this morning. How often has that word appeared in your posts over the years?"

TML writes in the comments to a post that begins with the Trump quote "So they take over a big chunk of a city called Seattle."

The other post is about a city that "voted to name a park for a 1970 explosion that rained chunks of rotting whale flesh on curious bystanders."

So how often has "chunk" come up over the 16 years of this blog? Oh, maybe 50 or 100, but the most interesting thing is that one time, back in 2015, it came up twice in one day and I made it the word of the day:

"Chunk" is the word of the day here... for no other reason than that it's come up on its own twice: "invented something called the 'Cha-Chunker'" and "pegs in their hubs that can 'take chunks out of' the granite ledge." It's a funny word, isn't it? One thinks of "blowing chunks" or the "Goonies" boy Chunk or — if you're really old — "What a chunk o' chocolate":



The word "chunk" somehow devolved from "chuck" — the squarish cut of meat — and "chuck," like "cluck," is the English speaker's reproduction of the sound a chicken makes.

"Chunk" is a notably American word. Here are some of the quotes collected by the (unlinkable) OED:

1856   E. K. Kane Arctic Explor. II. i. 15   A chunk of frozen walrus-beef....
1833   J. Hall Legends of West 50   If a man got into a chunk of a fight with his neighbour, a lawyer would clear him for half a dozen muskrat skins....
a1860   New York in Slices, Theatre (Bartl.),   Now and then a small chunk of sentiment or patriotism or philanthropy is thrown in....
1894   Congress. Rec. 13 July 7445/1   Just one moment, my friend. You are a lawyer... Yes, a chunk of a lawyer.
1907   Chicago Tribune 8 May 7 (advt.)    It's really ridiculous the way we've knocked chunks off these Spring overcoat prices.
1923   P. G. Wodehouse Inimitable Jeeves xiii. 148   Eustace and I both spotted that he had dropped a chunk of at least half a dozen pages out of his sermon-case as he was walking up to the pulpit.
1957   T. S. Eliot On Poetry & Poets 49   Crabbe is a poet who has to be read in large chunks, if at all.

As for other uses of "chunk," there's Trump on June 12, 2020, also going on about Seattle: "They took over a city, a city, a big city, Seattle, a chunk of it. A big chunk."

And I myself used the word only yesterday: "We — some of us — prefer the multicolored distractions of illusionism on the flat surface of the embedded video on Twitter as protesters drag down another stately chunk of metal."

This is also me, on July 5, 2018: "You know, out there in New York, California, and Massachusetts, they may think of the Midwest as a big undifferentiated chunk of flyover country, but to those of us who live here, our state (and even our region within the state) is quite specific."

In 2017, I wrote: "The corpse of Salvador Dali was exhumed to cut out some body parts to test to determine whether he was the father of a woman who's seeking a chunk of his estate." You can see that I used "chunk" there to create a poetic connection between the estate and the fleshly corpse.

Back in 2014, I had the occasion to parody Bob Dylan:

Well, that wigged art blonde
With his wheel in the gorge
And Turtle, that friend of theirs
With his checks all forged
And his cheeks in a chunk
With his cheese that says "ouch"
They’re all gonna be there
On that 82-million-dollar couch

In October 2008, I said: "The most honest admission in the book, to my ear, was the confession that he spent a huge chunk of his formative years watching TV sitcoms with his (white) grandfather." I had just read Obama's "Dreams From My Father."

And speaking of "From My Father," I have something from my "Records From My Father" series. I said: "Unfortunately, this record, my 5th choice for this Records From My Father series, has a chunk taken out of it, and so I can't listen to Count Basie's 'One O'Clock Jump' or Dinah Shore singing 'Buttons and Bows.'"



What were all the other things? Mostly "chunk" appeared in quotes. The chunks tend to be of food, of time, of land or rock, and of money. I was pleased to see that in these years, I'd never once used (or even quoted) the trite phrase "chunk of change."

Obama steps into the fray? "Obama demands South Carolina TV stations pull misleading ad attacking Biden."

Here's the ad:



Do you see the problem?

The WaPo headline is "Obama demands South Carolina TV stations pull misleading ad attacking Biden." Here's the first paragraph:

Former president Barack Obama on Wednesday called on South Carolina television stations to stop running an ad from a super PAC supporting President Trump that uses Obama’s words out of context in a misleading attack on former vice president Joe Biden.

Ironically, the headline and that paragraph confused me more than the ad did. From the ad, what I'm seeing is the assertion — spoken by Obama — that Democrats cultivate the black vote with promises but don't really help black people. That's presented as a reason not to vote for Joe Biden, and there's no alternative offered. It's telling black people to be cynical about political promises.

From the headline, I thought Obama himself had spoken and told the TV stations to pull the ad. But, reading on, I see that there was just a statement issued by Obama’s communications director, Katie Hill, complaining that the ad takes "President Obama’s voice out of context" — it's from the audiobook "Dreams From My Father" — and "calling on TV stations to take this ad down and stop playing into the hands of bad actors who seek to sow division and confusion among the electorate."

The ad is definitely confusing: "Joe Biden promised to help our community. It was a lie. Here’s President Obama." Then there's the passage from Obama's book about broken promises to black people, but the passage is not about Biden. Obama was writing about the Democratic Party politicians he'd encountered in Chicago in his community organizing days.

So many ads have out of context quotations. I think the station should have a standard policy about censoring montages, not special treatment when the complaint is sourced to Obama.

Complaining about the ad gives it more prominence, but what's out of context is given a new context — the context of: Look at this lie!

If you look at it carefully, you see that a pro-Trump super PAC is trying to make black people cynical and confused, but you will also see that Obama himself was cynical and confused about politics when, as a young man, he first saw it close up. By making the ad specific to Biden, the super PAC missed the better argument and made itself look dishonest. If their goal is to make people cynical and alienated from politics, maybe they don't care if they look dishonest too. They've achieved their goal if they make black people think politics is all lies.

I'm fascinated by the unintentional ambiguity of the headline "This teen got vaccinated against his mother’s wishes."

I'm looking at "This teen got vaccinated against his mother’s wishes. Now, he’ll testify before Congress" (WaPo). Fine. I know the story. Ethan Lindenberger, after he turned 18, went and got his own vaccinations.

His mother, Jill Wheeler, told Undark, an online science magazine that first reported Lindenberger’s story, that her son’s decision was "like him spitting on me, saying 'You don’t know anything, I don’t trust you with anything.' "

Interesting topic. Feel free to expound on it in the comments.

What I want to talk about is the fanciful idea floating from the poorly written headline — that there could be a vaccination that would give you immunity not from a medical disease but from your mother's wishes — as if the dreams from your mother are analogous to disease and infect you and degrade and destroy you.

Dreams from your mother... it makes me think of "Dreams From My Father" — that strange old book that created a persona who came to be embraced as a President of the United States. And I wonder, did Ethan Lindenberger have a father? I can see hidden in the URL for the WaPo article — teen-got-vaccinated-against-his-parents-wishes-now-hell-testify-before-congress — that there were parents but the headline as written leaves us with only the mother.

Searching the article for "father," I find only this, "According to Lindenberger’s Reddit post, his father was less resistant to the idea since he was of legal age," and I infer that both parents were involved in withholding vaccination from Lindenberger when he was a minor, but dad is keeping his distance from the current public dispute. Dad sounds pliable or noncommittal or weak — leaving the mother alone as she worked her will and then leaving the boy alone when he became a man.

"This week, a friend texted me, 'I feel a panic that won’t stop.' I didn’t have to ask what she meant..."

"... we are, after all, less than three weeks from the midterms. '#MeToo,' I replied. Many women I know — though, of course, not only women — are walking around with a churning knot of terror in their stomachs. The confirmation of the cruel former frat boy Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court brought back the anguish and degradation so many of us felt after the 2016 election. Donald Trump grows more thuggish and mendacious by the day; 'gaslighting,' a term taken from a play about an abusive husband trying to drive his wife insane, has become a byword of our national life."

But who's the other person — the "husband" — trying to drive you insane? It sounds more like some new phenomenon, some kind of gaslighting yourself.

I'm trying to read the new Michelle Goldberg column in the NYT, "A Cure for Political Despair/Join the women trying to save America from Trump," but it's so hysterical and melodramatic. I guess you have to believe you're seriously ill before the proffered "cure" works. I'll bet there's some old play where characters believe some phony panacea worked because the purveyor of the cure began by duping them into thinking that they had a terrible disease. Which is to say: I'm not convinced there is a disease. But Michelle Goldberg sets up her pitch for the cure by asserting that America is full of women who are in a nonstop panic attack and feeling "a churning knot of terror." (What's a "churning knot"? Churning is an agitating movement, but a knot stops movement.)

So women (and some men)(at least those in the vicinity of Michelle Goldberg) are in some sort of horrid psychological state, perhaps because of a few political events (Trump's election, Kavanaugh's confirmation) and perhaps because somebody's trying to drive them crazy. But who?? Goldberg doesn't say. Goldberg vaguely gestures: "'gaslighting... has become a byword of our national life." But gaslighting means that you feel like you're going crazy because someone has a devious intent of making you feel crazy. If anyone is gaslighting here, it's Goldberg and her ilk, insisting that all the women she knows — come, join the group — are permanently panicked and have stomachs in a churning knot of terror.

The churning I'm seeing is an earnest and blandly ordinary effort to generate excitement about the upcoming elections. And after a few paragraphs, Goldberg settles in to this mundane business.

There is, I find, only one thing that soothes my galloping anxiety, and that is talking to women who are actually doing the work of campaigning. The people who are knocking on doors and organizing rallies tend to be much more cheerful and confident than those who spend too much time on Twitter obsessing over each new poll.

That is, now that I've made you gallopingly anxious, activate yourself and campaign for a Democrat. You'll become more cheerful and confident. Ah, yes, after a few more paragraph, she says it explicitly:

So if you, too, are scared, or furious, or despondent, find a Democrat close to you and go canvass for her (or him).... The only way to feel better is to do something to help.

Of course, it's not the only way. The other way is not to gaslight yourself in the first place.

ADDED: I'm just imagining one of these women coming to my door. I mean, I don't answer the door, because I'm picturing all sorts of characters I don't want to interact with, and now I have one more on my list. It's a woman who's been experiencing nonstop panic who believes the way to deal with her raging insanity is to get out and about knocking on doors. I am never answering the door again. Now, it's not just the kid selling bad peanut brittle and the environmental activist with the clipboard, it's the freaked out lady who thinks talking to me is some kind of cure for the churning stomach knots.

IN THE COMMENTS: Amadeus 48 said...

If I want to panic, I look for that old Blogging Heads episode with Althouse and Michelle Goldberg. Althouse is so sane; Goldberg is so crazy.

THIS WOMAN NOW HAS A COLUMN IN THE NEW YORK TIMES!! SHE'S ON MY DOORSTEP!! I'M GETTING A CHURNING IN MY STOMACH! I'M GOING TO RALPH!!!

Amadeus 48 then came back and said:

OMG! I just watched the later Althouse/Goldberg Blogging Heads from 2010(?).

Althouse, I am in awe. Sarah Palin's "Going Rogue" vs. "Dreams from my Father". Goldberg is as light as a feather. All hysteria all the time.

Well done.

Thanks. I just watched some of that. Very amusing from my point of view. Here:

"That pimp and hooker thing you did, wow!" — said Trump to James O'Keefe in 2013.

Writes CNN (drawing on O'Keefe's about-to-be-released book, "American Pravda: My Fight for Truth in the Era of Fake News").

According to O'Keefe, Trump "suspected Obama had presented himself as a foreign student on application materials to ease his way into New York's Columbia University, maybe even Harvard too, and perhaps picked up a few scholarships along the way."...

"'Nobody else can get this information,'" O'Keefe quoted Trump as saying. "'Do you think you could get inside Columbia?'"

O'Keefe said he explained to Trump that the request did not fall into his "line of work".... "Trump shook my hand, encouraged me to keep up the good work, and half-whispered, 'Do Columbia.'"

ADDED: Trump — if O'Keefe's story is true — seems to have had some idea that Obama's getting into Columbia and Harvard is evidence that he claimed to have been a "foreign student." But I've served on admissions committees at the University of Wisconsin Law School, and I do not think that being "a foreign student" would be very helpful in getting into Columbia or Harvard, compared to having precisely the life story that Obama claimed in "Dreams From My Father" and relied on as he ran for President. And how, in any plausible version of the facts, could Obama have presented himself as "a foreign student"? Let's imagine that he had been born in Kenya, he'd still at most be an immigrant, not a "foreign student."

But who came up with the term "foreign student"? Trump? O'Keefe? CNN?

By the way, who says "foreign student" these days? Inside the educational institution, I only heard "international student." I've long considered that a misnomer, but it seems to have become politically incorrect long ago to say "foreign student" or to call someone a "foreigner." But we call students who come to a school from another state "out-of-state" students not "interstate" students.

I looked up "foreign" in the OED to see if I could find a reason to feel averse to that word, and I discovered that the oldest usage of the word is: "Out of doors; outside. a chamber foreign: a privy (cf. branch B.). foreign darkness = ‘outer darkness’. Obs."

1297 R. Gloucester's Chron. (1724) 310 In to a chambre forene þe gadelyng gan wende.

The word is otherizing. Later meanings include away from home (the opposite of "domestic"), excluded, not part of one's family, and "Alien in character; not related to or concerned with the matter under consideration; irrelevant, dissimilar, inappropriate":

a1642 R. Callis Reading of Statute of Sewers (1647) ii. 103 The Lord of the Copyhold is not to be taxed for the Soil of the Copyhold; for although he might come to it by forfeiture committed, yet that is a forain possibility.

There's the idea of a "foreign object," which often comes up in the context of surgery. And when the word is used to refer to what is outside of one's country, the OED tells us that in British use, it didn't ordinarily apply "to (former) colonies chiefly inhabited by English-speaking people."

"I never understood why he wrote it that way. There are whole passages from that book that are essentially copies of his letters to me."

"I always found it ironic that he was using his love letters to me to write his book and then completely omitted me from the entire account."

Said Sheila Miyoshi Jager, Obama's former girlfriend, who plays a central role in David J. Garrow's new book about Obama.

Jager seems very smart. She's a professor at Oberlin. How is it she "never understood" why Obama wrote his book that way? I simply don't believe that statement. The truth must be something closer to: It hurt me that he used material that I believed was written to me and that he used that material in a book written to the whole world and then, making it worse, he made me invisible. I went from everything to nothing, and it's not that I don't understand. I understand, and it hurts.

AND: She's still saying "love letters." But he took the love out of those letters, her letters.

"Why is it assumed that atheists need to fill a void that religion somehow answers?"

"I find this column, and the many like it which the Times has published over the years, to be more than a little bit mystifying.... I feel no such void, and I rather doubt that many other atheists do, either. It has always seemed to me that the question should be reversed: why do religionists need to fill a perceived void that the rest of us don't feel? This life, this world, the values I hold, are quite sufficient for me; I feel no need to turn to some community professing belief in the supernatural to find meaning in life. I respect those who feel differently, but I do wonder why those professing belief need such an external reassurance of their own worth."

Top-rated comment at a NYT column "Religion Without God," by Stanford anthroprof T. M. Luhrmann. Let me extract from the column what I think answers the commenter's question:

[T]he British Humanist Association... sponsors a good deal of anti-religious political activity. They want to stop faith-based schools from receiving state funding and to remove the rights of Church of England bishops to sit in the House of Lords. They also perform funerals, weddings and namings. In 2011, members conducted 9,000 of these rituals.

So there are 2 (entirely divergent) needs : 1. anti-religion political activism, 2. rituals.

ADDED: I think many of the people who don't believe but want ritual in their lives simply continue to attend a traditional house of worship, perhaps keeping within the religious sect of their parents or grandparents or moving into the sect of their spouse. One might also enter a traditional place of worship that is nearby and seems beautiful in some way, perhaps because of the liturgy or the music, perhaps because of an eloquent minister and a compelling congregration.

And people with political needs also choose traditional religion without necessarily believing the metaphysical aspects. President Obama is the best example of that. As I wrote a few years ago, citing "Dreams from My Father," chapter 14:

While working as a community organizer, Obama was told that it would "help [his] mission if [he] had a church home" and that Jeremiah Wright "might be worth talking to" because "his message seemed to appeal to young people like [him]." Obama wrote that "not all of what these people [who went to Trinity] sought was strictly religious... it wasn't just Jesus they were coming home to." He was told that "if you joined the church you could help us start a community program," and he didn't want to "confess that [he] could no longer distinguish between faith and mere folly." He was, he writes, "a reluctant skeptic." Thereafter, he attends a church service and hears Wright give a sermon titled "The Audacity of Hope" (which would, of course, be the title of Obama's second book). He describes how moved he was by the service, but what moves him is the others around him as they respond to a sermon about black culture and history. He never says he felt the presence of God or accepted Jesus as his savior or anything that suggests he let go of his skepticism. Obama's own book makes him look like an agnostic (or an atheist). He respects religion because he responds to the people who believe, and he seems oriented toward leveraging the religious beliefs of the people for worldly, political ends.

Of course, if your political agenda is anti-religion, you're not going to take this path. And you're not going to get elected to much of anything.

How does Jonathan Gruber feel?

Contemplate the possibility that he feels good.

He didn't lie. He experienced discomfort with the lying nature of others and his own implication in it. Consider the possibility that he didn't get caught telling the truth: He felt a drive to tell the truth and he is immensely, awesomely satisfied that his truth-telling has burst out and is dominating the American consciousness.

This is just a theory. I don't know how the man really feels, and I acknowledge that my theory may conflict with what I presume is his policy preference — the success of Obamacare. This is simply a line of thought that occurred to me the moment I said: "I wonder how Jonathan Gruber feels."

Sudden fame is an interesting phenomenon. I was just reading this NYT article "Alex From Target: The Other Side of Fame," about a 16-year-old boy who got famous suddenly one day when a picture of him that had been taken without his notice got tweeted by a girl with the one word caption "YOOOOOOOOOOO." It can be surreal and upsetting to get a fame surprise.

But Gruber is not a teenager. And he wasn't just minding his own business. He's a professor who thrust himself into the political policy sphere. He got his work — Architect of Obamacare! — and he had his effect, but he had his outsider observations too, and he felt distanced and above it all, and he wanted to disclose his perspective to others. He spoke openly, in an academic setting, to others who feel distanced and above it all.* And now the whole world is listening in. Gruber didn't say it directly to us, which would have been rude. He confided to like-minded confidantes, and we overheard. The American people are the distanced observers of his sphere of activity — the professors. And I want to suggest that he's energized and alive and joyous to get his message across to the vast classroom that is all of America.

______________________

* I think Barack Obama himself is that sort of person, but he's taken that manner and repurposed it for general consumption. The manner often works for him, perhaps because it plays against a racial stereotype that Americans don't like to believe they harbor. But it doesn't always work, and it must be a very strange experience for Obama, if he has the time and disposition to notice his feelings and reflect upon them. And I think he does. That's the Obama memoir I want to read. And I bet he's writing it, and we will read it some day.

ADDED: And then there's Rich Weinstein, the "nobody... the guy who lives in his mom’s basement wearing a tinfoil hat." How does he feel?

"It’s terrifying that the guy in his mom’s basement is finding his stuff, and nobody else is," he says. "I really do find this disturbing."

"Much of the time, the law is settled and plain. But life turns up new problems..."

"... and lawyers, officials, and citizens debate the meaning of terms that seemed clear years or even months before. For in the end laws are just words on a page — words that are sometimes malleable, opaque, as dependent on context and trust as they are in a story or poem or promise to someone, words whose meanings are subject to erosion, sometimes collapsing in the blink of an eye."

Barack Obama, "The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream" (2006), page 118.

I ran across that quote after blogging about the book in the previous post. I'd searched my Kindle, not for anything about law — though I found the law quote interesting enough to make a new post — but because I'd searched the book for "solitude" — thinking I might find something apt for that other post — and I kept reading.

"Solitude" does appear in the book, once, as Obama is describing life as a senator in Washington, while his wife and daughters remain back home in Chicago:

Flashback '08: The Audacity Althousity of Hope.

Originally blogged on May 11, 2008, under the heading "The Althousity of Hope." 

I went back into the archive to find that after reading the comments on the second post of this morning, "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?" 

Commenter Kelly said:

Seems like it was only yesterday I saw all the cool kids walking around with a copy of Dreams From My Father tucked under their arm. Everything they needed to know about The One was right in there, or so they thought. The book was as shallow as its author.

And I thought, no the book the cool kids were walking around with was "The Audacity of Hope." See? It's right there on the table.

The comments at the May '08 post fascinate me. People say I look lonely — lonely on Mother's Day! — and I have to point out that obviously, I'm not alone, since somebody else is taking the picture, and my book is under my hand, which means the Obama book is the other person's book. But commenters persist, observing that you don't have to be alone to be lonely, and it's figured out that under my hand — my fisheyed hand, which is mocked as a baseball mitt, a man-hand, an alien hand, and a Lisa Simpson hand — is the book "Singled Out: How Singles are Stereotyped, Stigmatized, and Ignored, and Still Live Happily Ever After."

And Meade — the man I hadn't met but married a year later — said: "Like motherhood, marriage is way overrated."

I revealed why I had the book "Singled Out": I was preparing to do a Bloggingheads episode with the author Bella DePaulo. 

Here's a July '08 post about that Bloggingheads. In the comments, Meade quotes something I say in the episode: (referring to my then-unshared health insurance and pension benefits) "I've often thought I should just charitably marry someone... I'd just marry them to be nice..." He says:

Gee, I'm single now, happily single, and thought I'd just remain that way.

But considering all the benefits, I guess I'd really be a fool not to take a close look if Althouse were to, just out of niceness, propose to pity-marry me.

What could I offer in return? Let's see - I could prune those redbuds, take out the garbage, trap squirrels.

I don't respond, and the next morning, Meade persists:

I could fetch her newspaper, scrape snow and ice off her car, shovel the front walk. Draw her bath. Pick her up at the airport. Rinse and dry her wine glasses. Form a circle-of-safety to protect her from Hillary Clinton-type madwomen who randomly come up to innocent people on urban sidewalks and punch them in the back. I make excellent salads, grill superb steaks and vegetables. Play a piano sonata. Pick up dry cleaning. Wait patiently while she shops for shoes.

Again, I ignore it, and hours later, but directly underneath that, I write:

I have very valuable benefits that I'm not using because I'm unmarried. Maybe I should go for a cash transaction.

And Meade says:

Okay. Forget the services. I have cash - very very valuable cash.

So what are the benefits and just how much valuable cash do you suppose they're worth?

I say nothing, but — as Ignorance is Bliss says 2 comments down but a year later — "You know the weird thing is that in 1 year she actually will marry him." And a year after that, there's a comment from my son John:

Wow, Meade, way to come up with a plan and follow through!

The narrative arc is long, in life and in blog posts, like this one which I will end with the revelation that the cool kid with "The Audacity of Hope" who took the non-selfie on Mother's Day '08 was my son John.

Manned and unmmanned, in a crouch and on a couch... and not on a couch.

Sometimes Maureen Dowd gets weirdly caught up inside her own lingual playfulness. Today's column mostly poops on George Bush's new art project — a book about his father — but let me highlight this:

Even though both Bushes protested that they didn’t want to be put on the couch, historians will spend the rest of history puzzling over the Oedipal push and pull that led America into disasters of such magnitude....

W.’s fear of being unmanned led to America actually being unmanned. We’re in a crouch now. His rebellion against and competition with Bush senior led directly to President Obama struggling at a news conference Friday on the subject of torture. After 9/11, Obama noted, people were afraid. “We tortured some folks,” he said. “We did some things that were contrary to our values.”...

The Bushes did not want to be put on the couch, but the thin-skinned Obama jumped on the couch at his news conference, defensively whining about Republicans, Putin, Israel and Hamas and explaining academically and anemically how he’s trying to do the right thing but it’s all beyond his control.

Remember when it was completely the norm for elite cogitators to do Freudian analysis?

But what I to know is why Dowd — having analyzed Bush's writing a book about his father — gets to the topic of Obama and never mentions that Obama wrote a book about his father... especially when she's imposing a Freud template. Freud wrote "The Interpretation of Dreams," and Obama wrote "Dreams From My Father."

Let's be old-timey elite cogitators and crouch psychiatrically by Dowd's couch. When something so obvious is not said, that's a very meaningful statement. Why are you repressing that?

And speaking of repression, Obama's writing a book about his father is a magnificent repression of the truth of the childhood he actually lived, with his mother, not his father. That's the Oedipal dream, to have the mother all to yourself. What was missed — says the old codger cogitator dredging up Freudianisms — was the opportunity to kill the father. The father was already gone. Bush Jr., as Dowd expounds, had to develop his psyche in the shadow of a toweringly great father. (I chose tower as my image intentionally.) If you're writing a column... and, of course, column ≈ tower ≈ phallus... if you're writing a column comparing Bush to Obama, we've got a lot to talk about here. What happened to Obama, a man who began with the Oedipal dream fulfilled? He had to create his dream-book to resurrect the dead father to make something out of the nonachievement of beginning with the full possession of the mother.

If we're going to go old-school and get Freudian, let's say all the unsaid things. If you don't want to, I'll talk about your problem with repression.

And Dowd is highly attuned to language play, but I think she would have edited out the word "crouch" if she'd noticed the resonance with "couch," a word she used 3 times and which formed the concrete image of psychiatry (her central theme). I think "crouch" was an expression that slipped out, that missed the usual filter and is therefore quite telling. She uses "crouch" to signify weakness, but crouching has a closer association with a strong animal lying in wait, ready to spring:

Can you hunt the prey for the lion,
Or satisfy the appetite of the young lions,
When they crouch in their dens,
Or lurk in their lairs to lie in wait?

That was God — did you recognize His voice? — talking to Job.

(Freudian side note: Joe Biden calls himself Joe — not Joseph — so that you will hear the name "Job" in the spoken "Joe Biden" — Job by den — Job, crouching by the den, lurking and lying in wait.)

And why did Dowd say "jump on the couch"? The thin-skinned Obama jumped on the couch... A psychiatric patient does not jump on the couch, even when he is enthusiastic about beginning the session. It's a dog that jumps on the couch. So it slips out again, the animal imagery. Crouching. Jumping.  Why liken Obama to a dog? Why liken Obama to a dog at the precise moment when you are referring to his skin?

Oh! This Freudianism is great fun. Thank you, Maureen Dowd, for inspiring me to display these insights of mine, such as this revelation of your racism.

And thanks be to God who has put wisdom in the mind and given understanding to the heart...

Who can number the clouds by wisdom?
Or who can pour out the bottles of heaven,
When the dust hardens in clumps,
And the clods cling together?

ADDED: "When the weather was good, my roommate and I might sit out on the fire escape to smoke cigarettes and study the dusk washing blue over the city, or watch white people from the better neighborhoods nearby walk their dogs down our block to let the animals shit on our curbs—'Scoop the poop, you bastards!' my roommate would shout with impressive rage, and we’d laugh at the faces of both master and beast, grim and unapologetic as they hunkered down to do the deed."

Do you recognize the voice? It's Barack Obama, in that book about his father.

AND: "Rising ground, and on it something like an open-air latrine; a very long bench, at the end of which is a wide aperture. The whole of the back edge is thickly covered with little heaps of excrement of all sizes and degrees of freshness. A thicket behind the bench. I urinate upon the bench; a long stream of urine rinses everything clean, the patches of excrement come off easily and fall into the opening. Nevertheless, it seems as though something remained at the end. Why did I experience no disgust in this dream? Because, as the analysis shows, the most pleasant and gratifying thoughts have cooperated in the formation of this dream...."

Do you recognize the voice? It's Sigmund Freud in his book about dreams, pouring out the bottles of heaven.

"You take good care of Barry now... Make sure he doesn’t get lost again."

"It’s a common expression here... Usually, it means the person hasn’t seen you in a while. ‘You’ve been lost,’ they’ll say. Or ‘Don’t get lost.’ Sometimes it has a more serious meaning. Let’s say a son or husband moves to the city, or to the West, like our Uncle Omar, in Boston. They promise to return after completing school. They say they’ll send for the family once they get settled. At first they write once a week. Then it’s just once a month. Then they stop writing completely. No one sees them again. They’ve been lost, you see. Even if people know where they are."

So said Aunt Zeituni, quoted in Barack "Barry" Obama's "Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance."

Zeituni Onyango died yesterday at the age of 61.