Rooting Obama in the American middle class

sophia

Anybody who hasn’t seen the documentary ANYTOWN, USA by Kristian Fraga should check it out! It’s an entertaining story about a small town election with great colorful characters that we would all be entertained by in our hometown. In a year with larger-than-life politicians on a national level it is enlightening (and a whole lot of fun) to see what happens in a local mayoral race. This film brings the election home and shows that humorous–yet heartfelt–politics are right outside our very doors…in Anytown. Check out the film on IMDB or http://www.filmmovement.com/filmcatalog/index.asp?MerchandiseID=37

Austin Barry

Here in Denver the Clinton sense of grievance is palpable: the understudy has copped the lead role and the pantsuited harpy and junkyard, ol'boy attack dog are mighty pissed. So they will do what they can to sabotage Obama and Biden but make it look nice. If you speak to the naive Telluride girls, all pert breasts, gleaming teeth and nasal whines fronting the Obama campaign offices in Englewood, Boulder, Fort Collins, Colorado Springs and Pueblo, you get the impression that the Second Coming has come. It hasn't, yet: Hillary and Bill are running interference for McCain. They care zilch for Obama and less for the Democratic Party. Their take? The Clinton presidency is on hiatus until 2012: but it's coming. Hey, ask the Arkansas mafia in their tan jackets and 40" Chinos. They know. But the air in Denver is thin like death in the throat and the pale postcard mountains are backdrop to a thousand fantasies. Who really knows?

Frank Pulley

Janet Daley in her Daily Telegraph article today:

(http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2008/08/25/do2502.xml)

augurs that Barack Obama will not win the US election because he is 'not sufficiently American', rather than because he is black, as, she writes, the left is preparing to assert, if he loses. She is of course American, so I will heed what she says. However, there is an amusing segment in the article which I feel should be brought to the attention of Coffee House inmates.

>”The Left is preparing its excuse in advance for Barack Obama losing the presidential election. All together now, let’s hear it: It’s All About Race. However few Americans there may be who are actually prepared to utter the words, “I wouldn’t vote for a black man”, the truth, it is said, is that racial bigotry is at the heart of Obama’s failure to take a convincing lead.
Indeed, on some accounts, the fact of people refusing to utter those words is proof that racism is the main issue in this campaign. So if you say them you’re a bigot, and if you don’t say them, you’re a closet bigot. And on what evidence is this argument, which it is logically impossible to disprove, being based? From what I can see in the published versions, it rests largely on some crass jokes from the shock-jock community, the mumblings of gun-shop customers and a “virulent internet campaign”.

The first two categories are roughly the American equivalents of tabloid headline-writers and taxi drivers. As for the “virulent internet campaign”, the internet is much as it is here: the home of the Green Ink brigade who have got access to the Universe. How would you like it if the mood of Britain were to be judged by the blathering of that small army of dysfunctional men in dressing gowns hunched over laptops spewing out gratuitous hatred at an unappreciative world?”<

Oh Dear! I remember Janet being rather snooty and catty over a piece that Melanie Phillips wrote some time ago, so perhaps she is just pissed that she was not invited to run a blog on the Speccie website when Melanie was invited to park hers here. She seems rather dismissive of her journalistic counterparts - and taxi drivers - and like some other op ed journos she does get very exercised about enthusiastic amateurs encroaching on her bailiwick of ‘opinion’. I think if she were to spew out a little more 'gratuitous hatred' herself in the direction of those who are doing their best to destroy Western Civilisation, perhaps our small and dysfunctional army would have less cause for DIY bloviating.

She might also reflect upon the fact that a great proportion of the donations Obama has collected for his campaign has come from the pockets of the dressing gowns of generous bloggers and may well result in his winning the election, despite her prognostications.

I hope she’s right and that Obama will not win (who cares why?), but she’d better get used to the blathering of those hunched over their laptops, they're here to stay and some are doing a better job than some highly paid hacks. Amazing that such a superior lady of letters reads our vomitous tip-tappery, ennit?

Note to the moderator: could you print this in green ink please?

Verity

A "tribune of the middle class"? What wealth has he ever created?

What wealth has his wife ever created?

Verity

Frank P, with whom I march in lockstep as a rule, this is one instance where our opinions diverge.

Janet is absolutely right. Obama is not American. He comes across as a bait and switch guy, a smoke and mirrors guy, someone who is not ... there ... and never has been.

Let me pluck an example from my own mind ... Obama has the tall, slender shape and the big smile to be a cheerleader. If he were in a high school or a college, he would have been asked to be a cheerleader. No quesion. But he wasn't. To me, that is very odd.

Where is his history? There is nothing ... He seems to have drifted through his high schooling in the US without being noticed ... this boy who had lived in Jakarta and had a black father and a white mother ... yet he wasn't noticed ...

In my mind, he should definitely have been a cheerleader (it's an honour to be asked, and you get extra points), but nothing ...

What was his mother doing all those years? Was she working? Was she a den mother? Did she take kids on school trips? ... Was she on the PTA committee? ... nothing ...

There is no history ... Janet Daley is absolutely right.

All of a sudden, he was at an Ivy League - probably the one his father got his degree from ... Where did he graduate in his class? It's never mentioned. We know Jimmy Carter was around no. 30 out of 40 something ... But Obama? And then he slid seamlessly into editing the Harvard Law review - obviously a case of reverse discrimination because he looked good and his Dad graduated from the same university before disappearing, because he does not have an incisive mind ... (maybe the father didn't disappear back to Africa, but I think he did)... Then Obama gets in with the Chicago Democratic machine and gets favours ...

I think Janet hit the nail squarely on the head.

Verity

And what happened to the father? And how is it that Obama got a college education - at an Ivy League, at that - and that his half-brother George Hussein Obma lives in a hut in Kenya on a dollar a month? And there's another half- brother in Kenya, Obango or something, and he's in poverty and Obama's standing for the presidency of the United States ... yet Daddy had a degree from Harvard ... I thought the father had gone back to Kenya. Didn't he see his sons? And support them, given that he had a degree from Harvard? Has anyone seen a photo of Obama's mother? She seems not to have left much trace, except what Obama recounts ... Or did the father go back to Indonesia, where there are more half siblings who Obama also doesn't seem to see ...

Janet Daley hit the nail on the head.

Hereford

Did I click on Americano by mistake, or has the button for the Coffee House been re-directed?

anthony a

Doesn't the phrase "middle class" mean something completely different to Americans than it does to the British?

My understanding was that it is much more closely defined to income level. Therefore this is more about which candidate will make this group richer and less about some of the softer "American-ness" stuff?

This is an interesting election, yet both candidates are hugely underwhelming - each of them is "least worst" rather than "best".

Gnapat Ram

So great is the intelligence of Obama that I am concerned that the USA may not recognise this as fully as it deserves.

He should be crowned Emperor Obama the Great in a ceremony modelled on the coronation of that other hugely gifted man, Emperor Bokassa of the Central African Republic.

Emperor Bokassa's coronation ceremony, complete with carriages drawn by white horses in all the healthful, steaming heat of Bangui, is an event still cherished in the capacious memory of Africa.

Who among us will forget how the grateful citizenry of Bangui did rend the welkin with lusty cheers as, lined up under the sagging palm trees amid their elegantly rotting huts, the golden carriage swept by them, their Imperial Majesties waving graciously. Particular note was taken of the scarcely-earthly poise of the svelte Empress (weight: a mere 3 tons).

So overwhelming was the grandeur of this ceremony, that the very hippopotamuses in the decorously muddy Ubangui-Shari river on which Bangui's noble, gently deliquescing hutments stand, could not but unloose their most magnificent, spectacular yawns.

Here is an event, set in that very ancient land of his roots - Africa! - that Obama will be thrilled to replicate in Washington. We are convinced that Her Imperial Majesty Michelle Obama will show to no less advantage than did the Empress Bokassa.

This coronation of Emperor Obama, certain to glisten with a particularly grateful sheen at the top of the world's social register of glittering occasions, will serve to inaugurate an extremely desirable trend: America's shaking off of its woeful provincialism and its adoption of an only too needful willingness to learn from that first instructor of all mankind: Africa !

"Africa, Land of the Sun,
The King of Continents,
The Ancient One !

And now - o what unendurable Drama !
Thou - Land that Spewed forth Obama! "

Frank Pulley

Verity

We don't diverge on the general tenor of her piece; I was just teasing her about her general slight against bloggers and indeed other journalists - she can be a condescending bitch at times and anyone who attacks our Melanie is due for a sharp 'Grrr!' from me. I do generally read her pieces and agree with her. But I still think that she resents 'enthusiastic amateurs' and indeed anyone else invading her territory. I guess you're more forgiving than me; perhaps I should wear the nightcap with my dressing gown if it fits :-)

Btw, I've lock-stepped a few villains in my time and, believe me; it can lead to unintended and very embarrassing consequences. Sometimes you just have to lie low and let the moment pass. Or think of England, even.

Back to Obama (and his wife):
Florence King wrote a marvellous column in National Review last week. I'll have to type it out because unless you're a subscriber they won't let you link with it and I can’t cut and paste it for the same reason I suppose.

Addressing the question, "Why does the right hate Michelle Obama", she continues,

>"This is made to order for a three part hysteriathon that cable news calls a "Special" and flacks [great word!] for weeks ahead of time. A bevy of thoughtful and concerned vivisectionists will endlessly analyse Michelle’s timetable for loving her country, her murky college thesis and her alleged use of “Whitey”, all to no avail. If they want to know why the Right hates Michelle Obama, all they have to do is ask me. I can tell them in five words. Michele has Jane Fonda’s mouth.

I don’t mean the impassioned drivel that comes out of their respective oral cavities; I’m talking pure physiognomy here. I mean the mouth itself; Michele looks like Jane. It’s like looking at two Hapsburgs, one white and one black with the same unmistakeable hereditary jaw. The inbred Hapsburgs had a full underbite, i.e. the top teeth are behind the bottom teeth when the mouth is closed, so that when they talked their protruding lower lip looked like an infuriated plough. They may have smiled sometimes but nobody could be sure because it always looked like a sneer.”<

An inspired analogy, if ever I read one.

Florence continues in the same vein through her article and the whole piece is a delicious piss-take. But conjuring up the vision of a black Jane Fonda as First Lady does it for me. Despite Klute and Barbarella, I’ll still be rooting for Cindy McCain in the role of White House hostess; it would be unseemly at my age to do otherwise.

Frank Pulley

Gnapat Ram

Craig Brown, come out from behind that sobriquet! Or is Auberon Waugh returned from the dead?

Verity

Obama is Chance, the gardener. There's no "there" there ...

Why wasn't he a cheerleader? This is a big deal in the US and you have to have good grades, as well as to be the right shape, the right smile and be atletic ... It's very good to have on your cv, especially when you're first starting out.

Where are the letters from former schoolmates saying, "That Barack! What a joker! I remember one time when ...".

He seems to have no history. He went to a madrassah in Indonesia ... then what did he do? We don't know. Where's his father now? He must be dead, otherwise he'd be right there on the bandwagon. How did Obama come so far and the others are living in shacks in the jungle? Who pushed Barack? Who financed him? Who bought his schoolbooks for him? Did he go out on dates in college? No women have come forward saying, "Oh, he was such a clown!" Or, "He was always a serious kind of guy." Nothing. An empty space ...

Frank, I consider Janet Daley the most astute observer in Britain of American life and the American political scene. She has an acute eye.

She doesn't resent bloggers, otherwise, why would she have a blog?

Obama's history has been scribbled on water and I am astounded that so many of people don't feel more uneasy.

Some of my American friends do, but Americans are a forgiving bunch and they put their reservations to the backs of their minds "Give him a chance!" - but they're still aware ...

Ganpat Ram

Frank Pulley:

Iam not Craig Brown or reincarnated Auberon Waugh....just a guy of Indian descent who enjoys the hilarious, sharp-edged novels of Evelyn Waugh ("Scoop", "Black Mischief", "A Handful of Dust" etc).

Glad you enjoyed my little squib.