The GOP's Fear of a Cool Obama

[KingOrfeo]

From The Nation:

The GOP’s Fear of a Cool Obama

Leslie Savan on April 27, 2012 - 1:43 PM ET

Republicans used to exult in fielding candidates that voters would like “to have a beer with.” This year, of course, their candidate doesn’t drink beer—in fact, Mitt Romney’s so socially challenged that his advance team is wary about letting him share cookies with voters. But lately Obama has been raising the ante on social comfort, asking which candidate would you like to share a song or nod to a pulsing beat with, and the GOP clearly considers this to be some kind of dirty trick.

And so in the two days since Obama and Jimmy Fallon “slow-jammed the news” on Fallon’s late-night show (specially taped at the University of North Carolina to underline the Democratic campaign to keep student loan interest rates from doubling), the Republicans have put out two web ads. Each tries to turn Obama’s strength into a weakness, insisting that the “Preezy” is too busy being cool to be presidential:


That was from the RNC, where heads seem stuck in the primaries still—the contrast between Obama’s supposed frivolity and Romney’s seriousness actually comes off as a contrast between O’s grace and Mitt’s forced emoting, but they can’t see that yet. Their ears are still ringing with triumphalisms from the debates about Obama’s “failures.” And here’s how Karl Rove’s American Crossroads PAC hit Obama just hours later:

Both ads, of course, are a reprise of John McCain’s 2008 “celebrity” ad, which likened Obama to Paris Hilton and Britney Spears and suggested that his fans had fallen into some kind of mass delusion. (McCain dropped that line of attack like a hot potato the moment he chose Sarah Palin as his running mate.) And both ads, aimed at college students’ swing-voting parents as well as the base, try to obscure the fact that Romney only recently came around to keeping student interest rates at 3.4 percent, under pressure from Obama. What’s more, House Republicans are still grumbling about paying anything more for education.

Nevertheless, the Republican media apparatus immediately picked up the tune, expressing horrified dismay that anyone in politics would stoop to being popular. “I think it’s nutso,” Fox & Friends’ Gretchen Carlson said of Obama’s appearance on Fallon, adding, “I just personally do not agree with the highest office of the land, the most important figure in the world, going on these comedy shows. I think it lowers the status of the office.”

Ann Coulter told Sean Hannity that it was “pathetic” for Obama to go on Fallon, where the audience, she said, is “only a few hundred thousand.” “Who are these shut-ins watching Jimmy Fallon?” (Apparently, about 2 million people tuned in the night Obama appeared.)

Never mind that Romney was on Leno recently or that during the primaries he read the Top Ten on Letterman (where he said, “What’s up, gangstas? It’s the M-I-Double Tizzle”) and is apparently weighing whether to host Saturday Night Live this fall. Almost every politician has been eager to do these comedy shows ever since Richard Nixon went on Laugh-In in 1968 to say, “Sock it to me?” There’s no good-faith argument here—per usual, the right is merely criticizing Obama for whatever he does, even when they do it themselves.

But as you watch the two ads above, it becomes clear that it’s not only Obama acting like a celebrity that has the GOP’s nose out of joint. He’s also “acting black”--in fact, he’s rubbing their faces in it, just like he did when he sympathized with Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. for getting arrested in his own home. And that gleams like troll gold to Republican strategists.

Obama has dared to be a cool black man more often lately. First, in January, he sang, “I—I’m so in love with you” at a fundraiser at the Apollo Theater, with Al Green in the audience, a totally engaging moment the Rove ad doesn’t fail to sneer at. (As Maureen Dowd wrote, “For eight seconds, we saw the president we had craved for three years: cool, joyous, funny, connected.”) Then, for a Black History Month celebration in the White House, Obama sang a few bars of “Sweet Home Chicago” with B.B. King, once again looking terrifically comfortable in his own (black) skin.

By March, the right was criticizing Obama for acknowledging, of Trayvon Martin, that “If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon.” Newt Gingrich called that comment “disgraceful.”

At some level, much of the GOP base still believes that Obama’s race is somehow disqualifying for the Oval Office, and they can barely keep themselves from overtly attacking him for it. But the demographics are daunting, and their professionals know it. To see a white guy like Jimmy Fallon acting black—doing a silly Barry White impression with Obama and Roots vocalist Tariq "Black Thought" Trotter behind him—reinforces the fear among some on the right that the hip youth culture is increasingly a black culture and that it’s inexorably taking over. Obama, half-black/half-white himself, is at the center of this race jam, which is as “impure” as topical comedy itself--a mélange of news and clips of political speech marbled with rap, R&B, tech-talk and global kid culture. (Let’s hope we see more of that Saturday night when Jimmy Kimmel hosts the White House Correspondents Dinner.)

It's all that mixing that sparks miscegenation imaginations, creating GOP fears about cool whites leaving them behind in electoral limbo, forever.

Or, as Stephen Colbert called Obama’s slow jam of the news, a “pathetically successful ploy to be appealing.”

 

[NeverEndingMe]

yes, what we need to do is reward GSA and all the other government fucktards for blowing billions of tax payer dollars

 

[Adre]

You just wait until Mittens really gets his cool on. Mormon, babyyyy!

 

[NeverEndingMe]

why don't we give obama another 4 years, so that we can have 80% of American's not paying income tax!

this will be awesome!

 

[miles]

Incompetence is so fucking cool.

 

[NeverEndingMe]

Incompetence is so fucking cool.

remember to pay all your taxes this year so that obama's secret service agents don't have to stiff the hookers. oh wait, I mean barter for their services

 

[unregistered]

 

[NeverEndingMe]

Orf is a hapless dunce.

well the obama did teach democrats that welfare is cool and a valid career path

 

[unregistered]

 

[islandman]

President Obama hasn't been 'cool' since he was Candidate Obama. No amount of Fallon or whatnot is going to change that.

And if he doesn't use the next six month to convince me that he can better the country and its people, he's going to be Unemployed Obama.

 

[semen4her]

I can just imagine what all the maroons above me are saying.

It's obvious that they are scared shitless.

I never saw old people move to fast to scramble to a thread.

 

[RoryN]

Yeah................but if you have to use Stephen Colbert to anchor an article you're writing, it's like, why bother? It's been said already.

 

[IrezumiKiss]

President Obama hasn't been 'cool' since he was Candidate Obama. No amount of Fallon or whatnot is going to change that.

Subjective viewpoint. Obama doesn't need Fallon to be cool, he's already got it and never lost it. That's why he's being attacked for his "coolness."

And if he doesn't use the next six month to convince me that he can better the country and its people, he's going to be Unemployed Obama.

That's only if you're the last one to vote, all the votes for both sides are dead even and your one solitary vote is the swing one that tilts the scale.

 

[islandman]

Subjective viewpoint. Obama doesn't need Fallon to be cool, he's already got it and never lost it. That's why he's being attacked for his "coolness."



That's only if you're the last one to vote, all the votes for both sides are dead even and your one solitary vote is the swing one that tilts the scale.

Gee, Zumi, ya think?

 

[Sean Renaud]

That's only if you're the last one to vote, all the votes for both sides are dead even and your one solitary vote is the swing one that tilts the scale.

Even then it wouldn't matter because we don't elect the president by a majority vote. In reality for it to come down to one man would require so much bullshit that we might as well skip to the part where we riot as obviously the computers were hacked.

 

[IrezumiKiss]

Gee, Zumi, ya think?

Hey, if that actually happened to you, don't tell me you wouldn't relish the absolute power to decide the next Leader of The Free World. You'd be like the Pope for a day.

 

[islandman]

Hey, if that actually happened to you, don't tell me you wouldn't relish the absolute power to decide the next Leader of The Free World. You'd be like the Pope for a day.

And we'd have a new President, Mormon or otherwise.

I'm *that* close.

 

[islandman]

Even then it wouldn't matter because we don't elect the president by a majority vote. In reality for it to come down to one man would require so much bullshit that we might as well skip to the part where we riot as obviously the computers were hacked.

Asimov has a short story on this very subject.

You'd do well to read it.

 

[KingOrfeo]

President Obama hasn't been 'cool' since he was Candidate Obama.

He's kind of a stiff, to be sure . . . But, this is politics, where cool is a rare endowment, and Obama looked way cool next to John McCain. Who would look way cool next to Mitt Romney, even if he died while I was typing this.

 

[derpybody]

derrrrrrrrrrrp!

 

[Liar]

Obama was never more than Carlton Banks cool.

But in Washington, that's Bootsy Collins cool.

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

What? done with Polgamy Mitt so soon?

... Just for the record, Romney’s father was not a polygamist; Romney’s grandfather was not a polygamist; his great-grandfather was a polygamist. Miles Park Romney died in 1904, so one can see why this would weigh heavy on 86 percent of female voters 108 years later.

Meanwhile, back in the female-friendly party, Obama’s father was a polygamist; his grandfather was a polygamist; and his great-grandfather was a polygamist who had one more wife (five in total) than Romney’s great-grandfather. It seems President Obama is the first male in his line not to be a polygamist. So, given the “gender gap,” maybe those 86 percent of American women are way cooler with polygamy than Governor Schweitzer thinks. Maybe these liberal chicks really dig it.

The exploding cigars are revealing not merely of Democratic hypocrisy but of a key difference in worldview between liberals and conservatives. Jeremy Funk and Governor Schweitzer reflexively believe that their dog-eating polygamy-scion is different from the other guy’s dog-transporting polygamy-scion. This is nothing to do with young Barack being six or ten years old and meekly eating whatever was put in front of him. He was 34 years old when he wrote the passage quoted above and ten years older when he recorded the audio edition. And, as both versions make plain, he thinks it’s kinda cool, and he knows that to the average upscale white liberal it has the electric frisson of the exotic other.

Obama is correct that certain cultures believe a man takes on the powers of whatever he eats. In Liberia, where presidential contests are somewhat more primal than in this effete republic, Samuel Doe was captured by some of his eventual successor’s, ah, campaign staff, who cut off President Doe’s ears and then fed them to him. They then removed His Excellency’s genitals and wound up in a fight over who should get them, believing that the still not quite yet late president’s powers would be transferred to whoever got to chow down on the crown jewels. I’m not suggesting that President Obama has eaten a human penis, because, if he had, he’d almost certainly have boasted about it to the impressionable NPR ninnies who gobbled up his memoirs. But I am suggesting that Mitt Romney might like to consider it for next year’s Inauguration Day.

I jest — just in case the Secret Service are taking a break from their Colombian hookers and are minded to investigate me for a threat against what Joe Biden would call the “big stick.” My point is that self-loathing cultural relativism is so deeply ingrained on the left that any revulsion to dog-eating is trumped by revulsion to criticizing any of the rich, vibrant cultural diversity out there in Indonesia or anywhere else. Most polygamy in the developed world is nothing to do with Mormons: It’s widely practiced by Western Muslims, whose plural marriages are recognized de facto by French and Ontario welfare departments and de jure by Britain’s pensions department. But “edgy” “transgressive” leftie comics on sad, pandering standup shows will reserve their polygamy jokes for Mormons until the last stern-faced elder in Utah keels over at the age of 112. In the United Kingdom, 57 percent of Pakistani Britons are married to their first cousins, with attendant increases in their children’s congenital birth defects. Bur the comics save their inbreeding jokes for stump-toothed West Virginians enjoying a jigger of moonshine and a bunk-up with their sisters. The editor of Washington’s leading gay newspaper was gay-bashed in Amsterdam, “the most tolerant city in Europe,” but by Muslims rather than the pasty rednecks who killed Matthew Shepard, so liberals don’t have a dog in this fight. Likewise, the epidemic of black-on-black murder vs. the once-in-a-blue-moon Trayvon Martin: To the liberal mindset, certain dogs won’t hunt. In one of his many bestsellers, Ayatollah Khomeini produced a hierarchy of “the uncleans”: Dogs are at Number Six, Infidels are at Number Eight, and Number Eleven is “the sweat of an unlawful ejaculation.” In the liberal hierarchy, conservative infidels are at Number One, dogs are somewhere between Eight and Eleven, and the sweat of an unlawful ejaculation isn’t on the list at all.

Axelrod is right. Obama’s appetite for dogs isn’t as critical as his appetite for spending and statism. But it was part of his cool. “Mitt Romney isn’t cool,” declared Brian Montopoli of CBS News this week in a story headlined “Can Mitt Romney Make Boring Sexy”? For economically beleaguered Americans, the more pertinent question is: “Can Barack Obama Make Cool Affordable”?

It’s not just that Obama ate the dog, but that he’s screwing the pooch.

Mark Steyn

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

Obama was never more than Carlton Banks cool.

But in Washington, that's Bootsy Collins cool.

BOOTZILLA!

 

[CandiCame]

This thread has all the sizzle of the old man bench at Wal-Mart.

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

This thread has all the sizzle of the old man bench at Wal-Mart.

Kentucky is a funny place...

On this side of the rivers, old men work themselves to death leaving behind youngish widows.