This conservative blog entry, especially the insults hurled at Obama in it, struck a thought in me. It seems to me that many conservative pundits I’m reading out there are attributing to Obama the same qualities that liberals ascribed to Bush: incompetent, stupid, someone whose policies (war in one case, economic in the other) will destroy the country completely (all three appear in the first linked blog), bad speaker, liar, ideologue above country, etc.
Am I on any sort of right track here? I’m not sure I can describe how, but the trend feels to me more significant than “just another laundry list of negative things people who disagree with any President call him.” If I am right, is this a deliberate attempt to “get back” at liberals who lambasted Bush for eight years, or else somehow deliberately “prove” that Bush wasn’t all that significant in terms of negative qualities? Does any of this have any significance outside political echo chambers, conservative OR liberal?
I think it’s just anger. Most of the people slamming Obama that I read are still slamming Bush, too. But they’re really up in arms over the way the ‘crisis’ was used to cram through a laundry list of liberal programs without proper debate or oversight.
Plus, they honestly believe that Obama has, so far, screwed the pooch. I tend to agree with that. He’s made some bad foreign policy blunders, his budget is completely out of control, he fanned the flames of populism instead of trying to tamp them down, and his public appearances have not been overwhelming for someone who was supposed to be the next Great Communicator.
Sam: I think you have a pretty accurate assessment of what the opposition thinks. What I’m wondering is if they’re deliberately using the same “accusations” against Obama that have been laid against Bush, or if the overlap is coincidence.
Actually, I think your premise is a little too generalized and draws connections where they don’t exist. I don’t hear a lot of people on the right calling Obama stupid. I hear them calling him inexperienced, or blinded by ideology, or maybe naive. But very few think he’s stupid.
Likewise, I don’t hear people calling him a failure in life, as they did with Bush. I don’t hear people calling him a drunk or a druggie as they did with Bush, even though Obama has admitted to fairly extensive substance use in his past. I don’t hear them calling him a tool of big business (i.e. Halliburton).
Most of the complaints I read about Obama are more likely to be about arrogance, inexperience, in over his head and doesn’t know it, blinded by partisanship and ideology, etc. The nuttiest or most extreme criticisms are that he’s a Manchurian Candidate - a tool of the hard left in moderates’ clothing. A Saul Alinksky-trained radical who wants to overturn the political order and the U.S.'s relationships in the world.
So I’m not really getting the Bush parallels that much. Oh, I think a few people are saying things like, “You thought Bush was stupid? He ran up less debt in 8 years than Obama did in a month!”. Or, “At least Bush was smart enough to know that you don’t give a DVD box set as a gift to the head of state of your strongest ally - and if he had, he’d at least have made sure it wasn’t a Region 1 NTSC box set.”
But that’s just gloating or snarking. In terms of substantive criticism, I really think it’s mostly different than what Bush got.
I guess part of my impression came from the epithet “Idiot-in-Chief” from the first link I presented. So you don’t think that’s typical, or it’s part of the “snarking” you mention? Actually, it also ties into the talking point of calling Obama outright “incompetent,” which is another keystone of the Bush pundit years, IIRC.
Another big part of it comes from the focus, like in the second link, on speaking ability.
One blogger doesn’t make a trend, though. I’m sure you can find lots of them calling Obama all kinds of names. But they don’t represent mainstream opinion. Calling someone an ‘idiot’ is a pretty common pejorative, and I suspect someone will call every president in the future an idiot at some point.
As far as criticizing the administration’s competence, that doesn’t surprise me at all, since it is in fact incompetent. So was the Bush administration. So were most administrations, because governments are generally incompetent by their nature, in my opinion. The governments that looked the most competent were the ones that did the least. And usually, partisans overlook their own party’s incompetence when they are running the show, and focus on the other party’s incompetence when they are in power. But the accusation of incompetence is pretty much a constant.
That resonates with me. As someone who’s daily circles in life split about 25-25-50 between Democrats, Repubs and the Libertarian sort (respectively) the center-of-gravity of opinion seems to be that Obama
Is a decent man
Is well-educated and sharp, in the textbook sense
Has absolutely no idea what he’s doing
Is getting rolled by Congress at every opportunity
Quite good, Sam. You use a phrase that has no real definition, that implies far more than it clarifies. You get a wholesale return of innuendo with a paltry investment of fact. And what a marvelous amount of territory is suggested without any direct culpability!
Its such a fine piece of work, I really ought to let you get away with it. Can’t quite bring myself to do it.
I disagree. “Lost without his teleprompter.”, “Empty Suit”, “Affirmative Action Hire”, “Economically Illiterate”. I have heard all of those insults from many different people.
“He’s never held a real job.”, “He didn’t publish at the Harvard Review, therefore he was just an affirmative action hire.”, “He hasn’t done anything with his life.”, “His record as a legislator is sparse.”
Those are pretty much the same as calling him a failure in life.
Yes, I have often heard the Saul Alinsky one, and the one’s about him being stupid from the same people. What unite the anti-Obama narrative to the anti-W narrative is that you can hear the same person cite his Machiavellian diabolism and his utter stupidity at different times. Both Presidents have that paradoxical narrative.
I’ve heard far far worse from the right.
Well it’s different but the narratives are very similar. He’s both stupid and a radical ideologue bent on subverting America. Smart enough to fool most people, but really he’s a moron. That’s pretty much in a nutshell the same narrative.
Leaper Suffice to say I know exactly what you are getting at.
He said in one of his books that he used to smoke a little weed in high school and that he occasionally tried cocaine, but that he stopped all that after he went to Columbia. That’s not anything close to an “extensive” history.
Bush, by contrast, was a drunk and a cokehead well into his 30’s with a multiple arrest record. There is no comparison in their histories.
As for the OP, I think there is a tremendous amount of resentment among the freeper types that Obama is a black guy who’s smarter than they are, so they’re trying to get a meme going that he’s basically an affirmative action hire who’s “in over his head” or “doesn’t know what he’s doing.” It’s all an exercise in bitter denial and wishful thinking, of course. Those insinuations are not backed up by any reality.
It’s not really a parallel to Bush, though. Just one more attempt to throw shit at the wall and see what sticks. It doesn’t really jibe well with their belief that he’s literally the Antichrist, though. The Antichrist isn’t supposed to be stupid or not know what he’s doing.
Here’s a CBS News article that quotes from “Dreams From My Father”:
That doesn’t sound like a guy who smoked a joint once or twice. He also said in the book that he would have tried heroin, except that he didn’t like the dealer who sold it.
He also said this:
Bolding mine. The picture I get is of a young kid who hung with a bad crowd and did a lot of drugs - mostly smoking pot, but harder drugs as well. But certainly the cites back up my claim that he used them ‘frequently’. That’s an exact quote from him.
But please don’t get me wrong. I’m not holding this against him. I’m come from a fairly tough background, and did my share of inhaling. I’m for complete drug legalization. I would be more worried if he had been an alcoholic than a heavy pot smoker. So it’s a complete non-issue for me.
Actually, what is really surprising to me is that the right hasn’t gone after him for this - especially the Christian right. But I hear almost total silence about his past drug use. Maybe it’s because he was so honest about it that he disarmed the issue.