VDH: Perhaps We’re Not All Doomed
Corner - Some 11th-Hour Advice to the Harvard Power Couple, by Victor Davis Hanson
The problem is deeper than occasional slips. For most of the last 25 years the Obamas’ contacts have been largely confined to universities (Occidental, Columbia, Princeton, Harvard, Chicago) as both students and employees, or to government-sponsored social agencies, or to the incestuous world of Chicago minority politics. These landscapes have proven liberal, sympathetic, and non-confrontational. I doubt very seriously in those environments that the Obamas have had any of their sometimes bewildering statements seriously cross-examined or questioned.
Michelle Obama, true, recites a litany of slights and grievances, but more likely she encountered highly educated white liberal audiences that were not about to cross her or challenge her assertions-a world away from steelworkers in Ohio, the Nascar crowd, the Mexican Americans in LA, the hungry wolves of the D.C. press corps for whom controversy trumps even shared liberal ideology — or Clinton, Inc. for whom power, status, and adulation outweigh everything, including liberal head-nodding, white guilt, and identity politics.
The result is that finally out on the campaign trail both are beginning to enter an arena where most of America does not faint at an Obama rally, but resents deeply a candidate’s spouse suggesting that she previously had no pride in her own country, and would think that generous college admission practices, scholarships, and loans were cause more for gratitude rather than resentment.
Hmm.
Of course I think this whole snafu is ridiculous. Everyone knows it was just a line in a speech meant to sound powerful and stirring and that she didn’t actually mean it, just like everybody knows that no politician ever means anything they say*. But I guess people still like to keep up the kabuki that politicians mean what they say and voters expect them to say what they mean and when they say things that can be meant to be bad voters will punish them for meaning the wrong thing.
Anyway, he brings up a good point. Maybe now he’ll start having to talk to people that will get kind of pissed off at him, rather than faint at his feet.
* Except Bush, and look what happened to him. He got everything he ever wanted to do done. But that isn’t what politicians want. All they see is that he’s the most hated man in America.
February 21st, 2008 at 5:49 am
That was no gaffe. Put together months of speeches and statements and Senate votes and a pattern begins to emerge. I think her statement fits everything that Barack Obama is saying - he puts it in a more respectful way, but the thinking is the same.
Where others hear uplift and optimism, I hear a message that is entirely negative: America has let us down, it´s a vale of tears, we are depressed, destitute, isolated, “our souls are broken”. No wonder we must hope for change. Somebody failed us and broke the promise and since Obama does not name his enemies that someone may well be America herself. Her past, her politics and culture contain nothing valuable unless Obama can use it to bolster his claims. That is radicalism.
And to get change, we must change first. Says Michelle: “Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed.” That´s you, voter. You are hollow men. You are a blank slate.
Who do these people think they are?
February 21st, 2008 at 9:18 am
I think VDH gets it right, and he could easily have counted Stanford and it’s environs among all those other institutions where the grievance rhetoric charms the educated elites like a lullabye…