Update: just to clarify, in response to a comment, in this headline, “Checkers” refers not just to Nixon’s dog, but is a metaphor for his humanity.
Jennifer Rubin’s article at Commentary, Trying to Reinvent Obama, starts out quoting Dee Dee Meyers, who seems to have identified a (gasp!!!) flaw in the messiah. She finds him “calm,” “cool,” and “self-possessed.”
But while eschewing emotion — and its companion, vulnerability — Obama should be careful not to sacrifice empathy, the “I feel your pain” connection that sustained [Bill] Clinton. This connection is the shorthand people use to measure their leaders’ intentions. If people believe you’re on their side, they will trust your decisions. Too often, Obama leaves the impression that he stands alone — and likes it that way. Clinton was fond of saying, “We’re all going up or down together.” Obama must make sure that people know that he needs their help as much as they need his.
But a Baghwan messiah has to be dispassionate. He wouldn’t be “cool” if he were human. This is the box they created for themselves when they created the political version of Max Headroom. Max is cool, because he’s not real.
See the similarity? Max is the likable one with a personality.
We’ve had a series of detached performances — Fort Hood and the Christmas Day bombing — in which he was weirdly unemotional. A snippy showing at the health-care summit. And an attack on the Supreme Court. Indeed, he seems most engaged when he’s attacking his opponents, as he refers to the growing number of those who disagree with him.
Obsessed with enemies, eh?
Myers gives campaign-style advice in consultant-speak (”reconnect his biography to his agenda”):
Obama also needs to remind people that things weren’t always easy for him. The campaign introduced the country to a man whose life story was both unusual — a Kenyan father and a Kansan mother, a childhood spent in Hawaii and Indonesia — and broadly shared: a single mom who worked hard and sacrificed for her children and a family that faced difficult times but never lost its faith in the future.
Aside from the fact that his mom didn’t sacrifice diddly, and ran off and dumped him with gramma, this is compelling exactly how?
But that all seems beside the point, oddly inappropriate for the presidency as opposed to the campaign. (There really is a difference between the two.) Something more fundamental is going on here: Obama seems not to respect his fellow citizens — the uninformed rubes who crashed the health-care town halls — nor care what they think. All his energy now is devoted to disregarding their strong aversion to his idea of health-care reform and forcing through a vote on something the public doesn’t want. It’s hard to bond with the American people, which is what Myers is suggesting, when your agenda conveys disdain for their concerns.
Jenny’s on to something. Even Nixon maintained that there was a “silent majority”. Obama isn’t even pretending popular support any more. He’s basically saying that he knows best, and the public just needs to be educated. That’s unprecedented.
Myers gets closer to the nub of the problem as she concludes:
Obama maintains a reservoir of goodwill. Even people who don’t approve of the job he’s doing like him personally. Most think he understands their problems and cares about people like them. In other words, people want to have a beer with him. They’re just not sure he wants to have a beer with them.
Translation: Obama is a dick.
Now looking back, some American presidents are more admirable than others, and some are more personable than others, and some knew how to carry themselves better than others. When we look back over the past 50 years, only one even comes close to being as peevish as Obama, and that’s Dick Nixon. But Nixon, peevish as he may have been, at least didn’t try to be a Vulcan. In fact, he had a kind of personable peevishness. His famous “Checkers” speech is heralded as political genius:
One other thing I probably should tell you, because if I don’t they’ll probably be saying this about me, too. We did get something, a gift, after the election. A man down in Texas heard Pat on the radio mention the fact that our two youngsters would like to have a dog. And believe it or not, the day before we left on this campaign trip we got a message from Union Station in Baltimore, saying they had a package for us. We went down to get it. You know what it was? It was a little cocker spaniel dog, in a crate that he had sent all the way from Texas, black and white, spotted, and our little girl Tricia, the six year old, named it Checkers. And you know, the kids, like all kids, love the dog, and I just want to say this, right now, that regardless of what they say about it, we’re gonna keep it.
The Obamas tried the dog thing, just like the Clintons did. Somehow, it rings hollow. But back to the Nixon speech:
I say that a man who, like Mr. Stevenson, has pooh-poohed and ridiculed the Communist threat in the United States — he said that they are phantoms among ourselves. He has accused us that have attempted to expose the Communists, of looking for Communists in the Bureau of Fisheries and Wildlife. I say that a man who says that isn’t qualified to be President of the United States. And I say that the only man who can lead us in this fight to rid the Government of both those who are Communists and those who have corrupted this Government is Eisenhower, because Eisenhower, you can be sure, recognizes the problem, and he knows how to deal with it.
That was then; this is now.
But just let me say this last word. Regardless of what happens, I’m going to continue this fight. I’m going to campaign up and down in America until we drive the crooks and the Communists and those that defend them out of Washington. And remember folks, Eisenhower is a great man, believe me. He’s a great man. And a vote for Eisenhower is a vote for what’s good for America.
And that, in a nutshell, is why Obama can never lower himself, as Meyers intimated, to having a beer with us. Nixon loved his country. Obama doesn’t. And his numbers are dropping like a rock for a number or reasons, but the biggest one is the intangible sense that so may of us are getting that he not only doesn’t love this country; he actually hates the country, and all of her citizens.
The essential difference is that peevish as he may have been, Nixon was a human and a patriot, and his dog showed that. This is something that Barack Obama can’t fake. He’s never had to pretend to love his country at any time in his past, and now, a few years short of 50, he can’t.
He’s got Nixon’s peevishness, but not his soul. That’s why he could never give an emotional speech about a dog. He just doesn’t have it in him.
