Dee Dee Myers is the latest Democrat to step forward offering advice to Obama. Her bottom line: change your personality. She finds him “calm,” “cool,” and “self-possessed.” The result, she says:
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.
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.
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.
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. 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.
But that reservoir is being depleted over time. And who wants to have a beer with someone who doesn’t listen to anything you have to say?
It’s hard to conceal your personality in the 24/7 news cycle and in the most prominent job in the world. What was intriguing in the campaign — that cool, “superior” temperament — is now a liability. But it’s hard to change who you are. If Democrats are queasy about the president’s lacking warmth and empathy, not to mention some executive skills, there isn’t much they can do about it. Their dream candidate turned out to be rather flawed in ways that are critical to a successful presidency. They — and we — will have to live with that for a few more years.
Well, I guess my childhood racism was pretty comprehensive then. If I recall accurately, I “yucked” a number of things from fried okra and black-eyed peas to Mexican pig brains to Brussels sprouts in cream sauce to Indian curry dishes. I thought kimche was really gross, when a Korean kid’s family brought it to a class picnic. I remember crying when I was forced to eat paella at the age of seven or eight. (It had all those scary crustacean parts in it. To me, seafood was white fish on a plate.) Corn soup? I’m not even sure whom I was being racist against, with my reaction to that. I can’t stand corn soup to this day. But it seems to be a favorite with a lot of different ethnic groups.
Better just haul me off, Brits. I’m sure there’s no statute of limitations of alimentry racism.
The country that made Wimpy’s famous is caviling at children’s suspicion of strange foods?
Priceless.
My four year old says “Yuck” if I try to feed him hamburgers or hot dogs. I guess that make him anti-American!
When do they open the reeducation preschools?
I can’t stand gefilte fish. Yup, it’s time for me to join the Nazi Party. I am just so disgusting.
Kids who think the government is yuck will report promptly to re-education camps.
David Thomson admitted, “I can’t stand gefilte fish.”
David, how can you be against an entire species?
Fortunately, I missed out on the opportunity to say “yuk” (except to Lima beans) until an adult. Growing up, my father was allergic to many foods, so our diet was a mixture of the bland and unexceptional. Spaghetti and meatballs was exotic. Of course “yuk” was the reaction (among other symptoms) that my siblings had to ingesting foods to which they had inherited the allergic reaction. I missed out on that inheritance.
Didn’t Nanny Bloomberg just say “yuk” to cannoli?
Racist taste buds. Just when I thought the politically correct left couldn’t get more ridiculous–or more frightening. The National Children’s Bureau’s indoctrination program for infants sounds like something out of “Nineteen Eighty Four.” Are British babies sexist if they don’t like bon bons? Homophobic if they don’t like bangers?
If Obama is elected President, I’m sure he’ll create similar indoctrination bureaus here.
“It’s broccoli, dear.”
“I say it’s spinach, and I say the hell with it.”
(Dinner exchange between mother and daughter.)
ID: 38868, Published in The New Yorker December 8, 1928
The kid at her food cried out “yuck”
Her teacher responded, quite terror-struck:
You’re proven a racist;
An un-PC disgracist;
Your conduct makes us upchuck.
TomCom,
James Thurber had a long passage about that cartoon in “The Years with Ross.” It became so famous that “I say it’s spinach” was the title of a popular song. For a time the word “spinach” came to mean something like “baloney.”
I forget in which Marx Brothers movie Groucho had a “strange interlude” in the style of Eugene O’Neill. It contained the line, “The world would be a better place if the parents ate the spinach.”
The year is 1984. The goal is to suppress human nature. The method is re-education and brain washing. Next what: killing fields?
This has to be the ultimate in Orwellian zero brained zero tolerance.
There is an old Hebrew (I think it may be Talmudic) saying, בטעם ורח, אין להתוכחח (or, in matters of taste and smell, there is no point in arguing — sounds better in Hebrew because it rhymes).
I guess the National Children’s Bureau will now find it necessary to stoke the fires and burn all those Talmuds, in the name of progressobabbelianism.
Hershel Ginsburg,
Jerusalem / Efrata