The reviews of the Obama speech are getting more negative from both the right and the left. The president is all defensive, the claim is, in the Carter mode, and he was darn close to playing the hope-being-replaced-by-malaise card. And the whining! Nothing Obama faces is anything like the bloody mess that brought Lincoln to his knees. So the MSNBC Democrats are stuck with praising the convention AS A WHOLE.
The WHOLE has two parts: The FDR-Kennedy-Clinton-Biden Democrats and the Carter-Obama Democrats?? Certainly Obama can’t claim either to be a PROSPERITY DEMOCRAT (like Kennedy or Clinton [a kind of Democrat who's also roguish and light on the moralism]) or a WORKER AND WARRIOR DEMOCRAT like Biden has become. Has he become too much a CULTURAL [preachy, condescending] DEMOCRAT like Carter? Is that why everyone now agrees that Obama’s speech–a speech by a very gifted orator–was easily the worst of the major convention speeches?
This division depends on a selective reading of the president’s speech, which did have its confident parts. And it sounded more mediocre than mediocre-to-bad to me. So maybe the interpretations of the speech are being influenced by the facts on the ground.
September 8th, 2012 | 9:48 am
This was Obama’s last chance in his BEST venue. He is best at the podium, READING. He didn’t hit it out of the park because people realize he is a wimpy prom king at the helm of a battleship that he does not UNDERSTAND how to command. It’s a fundamental problem with electing a legislator to an executive position. The rhetoric is great at first, but FOUR YEARS OF EMPTY, “SOARING” RHETORIC IS A LOOOOOONG TIME. The “wings” have been clipped by the scissors of HIS OWN INEFFECTIVE, FAILING RECORD.
I think that once the two candidates go head-to-head in debates, Romney is going to do much better. Romney is underrated and underestimated; Obama is overrated and overestimated. Romney was not my first choice, but as time has gone on, I have come to like what I see/hear.
September 8th, 2012 | 11:55 am
I have only listened to part of the speech, but what it sounded like to me was a confident speech given by someone shaken in his confidence. He did something rough to his party in assigning blame for the enormity of the problems he faced as president. He said that he was overcoming the weight of bad policy that was decades in accumulating. Decades? Does he encompass the eight years of Clinton in that? How about Jimmy Carter? How far back does “decades” go? The theme of the convention was, don’t blame us if this is all too big. That’s not a confident place to stand. Of course, if he was confident he’d have to be delusional.
September 8th, 2012 | 12:40 pm
Well, I didn’t listen to the speech, but I trust Peter’s impression that it was at least partly good.
Zooly is right though that Obama more than any other president has relied on speech too much, and has generally spoken too much. What is more, with him in particular, at least for myself, it seems at a certain point the sane human mental system had heard all the Obama speech it can stand, and it simply will not respond to anymore. I reached that point perhaps 4 months into his presidency, maybe earlier. I’m a weird case…but my sense is I’m not the only one, Republican or Democrat, who has some kind of upper limit for Obama-talk, that once that has been exceeded, loses all ability to be stirred by it. This goes beyond the common phenomenon of getting tired of hearing someone–the effect seems permanent. I still have the duty to listen to the guy, he’s our president, but the phenomenon I’m describing seems unique to him. In some ways, he’s the ONE all right.
September 8th, 2012 | 5:30 pm
“I still have the duty to listen to the guy, he’s our president.” A professional duty(as a political scientist/blogger) or a moral duty(as citizen, universalized? or self-impossed?)
There is no constitutional duty to listen to the president. But as much as folks praise and blame Obama, I must admit the opposite tendency. It is almost addictive to listen to politicians, simply as a sort of curiosity or insight into what some sizeable group of people(democrats) respect and believe in.
Obama is certainly the most overpraised and overblamed president. As he said in the audacity of Hope, he is a sort of blank slate that folks project upon. So in Lawler’s work he becomes a blank canvas for projecting and preserving memories or brands of past presidents, like a living history. i.e. Carter, Kennedy or Lincoln!
I still don’t know much about the past other than “trademark”/”brand”/”reputation”. But for someone alive in the decade: Is this anything like the 1970′s?
I sort of like preachy and condescending, Carter is making a comeback in brand image. In any case Paul Ryan and the deficit hawks are sort of paroting an economic theory of bankrupcy and insolvency that only works mechanically pre- Bretton Woods, and I tend to think that it is the consensus that economically and politically the 1970′s are the decade to study. Something happened in the 1970′s! Ron Paul was right!? (he was there.)
So the truth is probably that the Neo-cons led by Kissinger and Nixon forsaw the problems predicted by Paul Ryan, and decided to change the legal/political economic foundations of society, by putting us on a pure fiat money scheme whereby most questions ceased being Austrian (and Ron Paul was thus left as a theoretician) and became more fully MMT or Keynesian/progressive, i.e. policy decisions made with complete autonomy, and much more severable and less subject to an analytical political economy. Thus in many ways ignoring and changing the preachy condescending moralism of Eisenhower’s famous america has limits speech…beware easy answers with money and the military industrial complex(such a damper on American Exceptionalism:)
In reply to Kate: “He did something rough to his party in assigning blame for the enormity of the problems he faced as president. He said that he was overcoming the weight of bad policy that was decades in accumulating. Decades? Does he encompass the eight years of Clinton in that? How about Jimmy Carter? How far back does “decades” go?”
I think the answer is 1971. Obama is actually extending an olive branch to Paul Ryan in saying that our politics has been messed up since 1971 (not quite the beginning of the progressive era, but perhaps the beginning of the aspect of that era when political facts became much more completly policy decisions.)
Of course I am just guessing on the basis of my own theory. (I only go back and listen to the speech after I theorize about its significance, I find that this doesn’t harm my theorizing but makes it more original, as if I have discovered hidden connections:). i.e. Eisenhower and Von Mises(and his congressional representative in american translation, Ron Paul) both warn of disaster from the opening of such a pandora’s box. Ron Paul’s answer is return to the gold standard… Obama is posturing that the answer is to return to discipline, but the entire deficit hawk argument really goes back to Eisenhower and fighting off the charms and fears of washington lobbies (to include the military industrial complex) who will always push for more funding.
So in my opinion since the end of Bretton Woods, any democrat who is “serious” about the deficit is going to end up being and sounding like Carter (or marketed/branded as such). Arguably it is also the case that Romney and Ryan sound a lot like Carter. So there is some sort of consensus between Romney/Ryan and Obama on “serious”, if entirely fictional/formalistic limits upon america’s capacity to spend dollars for projects of “greatness” or even promisory estopel.
If I had to guess it is because very few people have a real feel for what happened in the 1970′s.
If you are going to Bash Obama for his deficit-hawk stances some day you are going to get a democrat who actually dreams the full potentialities of the Keynesian-FDR progressivism unlocked since 1971,(i.e. the great historian Newt Gingrich) and not a relatively Eisenhowerish Obama.
September 24th, 2012 | 10:26 pm
[...] Latest Bankrupcy News September 25, 2012 3:22 amadminLeave a Comment Tweet Romney Could Win? In any case Paul Ryan and the deficit hawks are sort of paroting an economic theory of bankrupcy and insolvency that only works mechanically pre- Bretton Woods, and I tend to think that it is the consensus that economically and politically the 1970′s … Read more on First Things (blog) [...]
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