Dowderisation & Desperation (Over "You Didn't Build That!)

M2RB:  Steppenwolf

When rain drops fall and you feel low
Ah, do you ever think it's useless
Do you feel like letting go
Do you ever sit and do you wonder
Will the world ever change
And just how long will it take
To have it all rearranged

Tell me why these things are still the same
Tell me why no one can seem to learn from mistakes

The Dowderisation Machine:

Old.  Trite.  See and hears everything in black & white.

Rinses.  Lathers.  Repeats.

Daniel Foster over at National Review Online writes:

The GOP’s Use of ‘You Didn’t Build That’ Is Racist:  Sayeth Jonathan Chait:

“Mitt Romney’s plan of blatantly lying about President Obama’s “you didn’t build that” speech is clearly drawing blood. But what makes the attack work so well is not so much the lie itself but the broader subtext of it. Watch Obama’s delivery in the snippet put together by this Republican ad:

The key thing is that Obama is angry, and he’s talking not in his normal voice but in a “black dialect.” This strikes at the core of Obama’s entire political identity: a soft-spoken, reasonable African-American with a Kansas accent. From the moment he stepped onto the national stage, Obama’s deepest political fear was being seen as a “traditional” black politician, one who was demanding redistribution from white America on behalf of his fellow African-Americans.”

For #$&% sake, man. Really? I don’t even have an argument here — which I suppose is fine since Chait doesn’t either.

UPDATE:  Okay, on reflection maybe I’m not giving Chait enough credit. Maybe his implicit argument was that Obama should repeat his “You Didn’t Build That” bit, word for word, but this time as a “soft-spoken, reasonable African-American with a Kansas accent.” Then it would resonate. Then people would understand.

I’m all for it. If nothing else, it’d be a neat experiment into whether Jon Chait, or everybody else in America, is insane.

********************

Actually, it all makes sense ... once, you put it through PHUP's patented Dowderisation™ machine...

“Mitt Romney’s plan of blatantly lying about President Obama’s 'you didn’t build that' speech is clearly drawing blood.”

Cue spooky music with a deep voice-over “Mitt Romney, shadowy corporate and foreign groups funded by diabolical billionaires, who want to take over the world and fill it with dirty air and water while turning the poor out into the street to die, are planning and plotting to lie about our noble, young, morally-righteous crusader for the middle class, the poor, and oppressed and his speech where he actually said that small business owners weren’t that smart, that hardworking, and didn’t build that (including their own businesses or pay the taxes to build roads and bridges)

“But what makes the attack work so well is not so much the lie itself but the broader subtext of it. Watch Obama’s delivery in the snippet put together by this Republican ad:”

Yes, watch Obama’s delivery in the snippet put together by this Republican ad where President Obama’s tone is clearly taken out of context.  Can you not hear the Grand Kleagle’s bells and dog whistles?

“The key thing is that Obama is angry, and he’s talking not in his normal voice but in a ‘black dialect.’”

You see how those racists Republicans make Obama sound angry and manipulate the recording so that Obama sounds angry, doesn’t sound like he is talking in his normal voice, and sounds like an angry, black Huey Newton?  They couldn’t even make him sound like a minstrel-showy Hillary Clinton when she went into her spiel “I ain’t no ways tired…”?  No!  They had to make him sound like a BLACK MAN!

“This strikes at the core of Obama’s entire political identity: a soft-spoken, reasonable African-American with a Kansas accent.”

Well, the political identity that he constructed and we, in the media, perpetuated.  Imagine if the American public had actually been told that he really did join the Socialist New Party in January of 1996 or did, in fact, want a single-payer healthcare system?  He never would have been elected.

“From the moment he stepped onto the national stage, Obama’s deepest political fear was being seen as a ‘traditional’ black politician, one who was demanding redistribution from white America on behalf of his fellow African-Americans.”

In 2008, Obama had 2 really close calls with his persona being obliterated and those involved Reverend Wright and his comments to “Joe the Plumber.”  We, in the media, soft-pedaled both.  We glorified his “Speech on Race” as “groundbreaking” when it was nothing more than “I could no more throw Reverend Wright under the bus than I could my typical, white grandmother…”  We downplayed and ignored his “spread the wealth” moment on that Sunday afternoon in Ohio. 

We could.  Then.

The economy was in shambles, people were sick of Bush, McCain sucked, and Obama – even though he had the most liberal voting record in the Senate … and that includes being to the left of even the self-professed Socialist, Bernie Sanders – was a blank enough slate that people could reasonably project their hopes and dreams upon him without a pesky, public record getting too much in the way.  

Now, he is President.   

Now, he is the incumbent.   

Now, he has a record.  

Now, we can’t control the narrative completely since all of these TEA Party members, shadowy organisations and corporate groups funded by diabolical billionaires can spend as much money as left-wing groups, if not more.

 

In other words,  there is simply One. Thing. Left. For. Us. To. Do…

"The entire key to the rise of the Republican Party from the mid-sixties through the nineties was that white Americans came to see the Democrats as taking money from the hard-working white middle class and giving it to a lazy black underclass. Reactivating that frame is still the most mortal threat to the Democrats and to Obama. That is why Obama is reacting so urgently to reestablish himself." 

  - Jonathan "I Hate George W Bush, There I Said It" Chait, 27 July 2012

 

Dowderisation™ refers to the ability of Progressives like Maureen Dowd to hear and see the true intentions of their opponents even when their opponents don't have any idea that those are, in fact, their true intentions.  A famous example would be MoDo's ability to hear Joe Wilson say, "You lie, boy!" when he actually said, "You lie!"  Because Wilson was a white, Conservative, Christian Republican from South Carolina, he obviously could not have seriously meant that the President was actually misleading the country with regard to Obamacare's coverage of abortion...even though it is covering abortion in several states (PA, NM, etc.) already...  No.  He actually meant something far more nefarious.   

After all, it is much better to get the country screaming about a racist statement that wasn't made than whether Obamacare would cover abortions, which the majority of the country opposes.

UPDATE:  Jonah Goldberg reminds us of this post by Tim Noah in Slate from August 2008 entitled When "Skinny" Means "Black":

In the Aug. 1 Wall Street Journal, Amy Chozick asked, "[C]ould Sen. Obama's skinniness be a liability?" Most Americans, Chozick points out, aren't skinny. Fully 66 percent of all citizens who've reached voting age are overweight, and 32 percent are obese. To be thin is to be different physically. Not that there's anything wrong, mind you, with being a skinny person. But would you want your sister to marry one? Would you want a whole family of skinny people to move in next-door? "I won't vote for any beanpole guy," an "unnamed Clinton supporter" wrote on a Yahoo politics message board. My point is that any discussion of Obama's "skinniness" and its impact on the typical American voter can't avoid being interpreted as a coded discussion of race.

Chozick insists that she didn't intend her playful feature about Obama's physique as potential electoral liability to carry any racial subtext. "I can't even respond to that," she told me. "That's ridiculous." Bob Christie, Dow Jones' vice president of communications, phoned me in a flash to reaffirm that message. I believe Chozick and Christie when they say that the Journal never intended skinniness to serve as a proxy for race. (Full disclosure: I was a reporter in the Journal's Washington bureau a dozen years ago. I know neither Chozick nor Christie. Fuller disclosure: I phoned my former Journal colleague, Michel Martin, an African-American journalist who is now host of NPR's Tell Me More, which frequently addresses matters of race, to ask whether she was offended. She was not.)

But I firmly disagree that a racial reading of Chozick's story is "ridiculous," and I would counter that any failure on Chozick's part to recognize such is just a wee bit clueless.

Let's review the basics. Barack Obama is the first African-American to win a major-party nomination for president of the United States. African-Americans are distinguishable from other Americans by their skin color. This physical attribute looms large in our nation's history as a source of prejudice.

The promise of Obama's presidency, in many people's minds, is partly that America will move toward becoming a post-racial society. It's pretty clear, though, that we aren't there yet. When white people are invited to think about Obama's physical appearance, the principal attribute they're likely to dwell on is his dark skin. Consequently, any reference to Obama's other physical attributes can't help coming off as a coy walk around the barn. A whole genre of humor turns on this reality. A Slate colleague informs me that an episode of the TV sitcom Happy Days ("Fonzie's New Friend") had its 1950s-era characters nervously discussing the fact that a black man in their midst was so … skinny. Was it true that skinny people liked fried chicken? That they were good at basketball? And so on.

It might be argued that body weight differs from certain other physical characteristics (apart from skin color) in that it has never been associated with racial caricature. Chozick wasn't asking (and, I feel sure, would never ask) whether Americans might think Obama's hair was too kinky or his nose too broad. But it doesn't matter. The sad fact is that any discussion of Obama's physical appearance is going to remind white people of the physical characteristic that's most on their minds. Moreover, Martin points out, "The black male body has been commodified in this country from its earliest days. People were brought here for their bodies." Better either to leave the whole topic alone, it seems to me, or to address the question of racial prejudice head-on, as Juan Williams did in an Aug. 4 Wall Street Journal column. In the future, the press would be wise to avoid discussing how ordinary Americans will respond to the size of Obama's ears, the thickness of Obama's eyebrows, and so on.

Is that prohibition too inhibiting? I doubt it, unless you happen to be a political cartoonist, and therefore have no choice but to navigate these perilous waters. Indeed, a few paragraphs into her story, Chozick shifts her topic from Obama's appearance to Obama's eating habits—from something Obama is to something Obama does. The shift was probably necessitated because in reality, people don't think much about Obama's skinniness. Chozick could substantiate her hypothesis with only two quotes, one of which—the "beanpole" quote—she solicited on the Web. ("Does anyone out there think Barack Obama is too thin to be president?" Chozick queried. "Anyone having a hard time relating to him and his 'no excess body fat'? Please let me know. Thanks!") In the vastness of cyberspace, you can always find somebody who will say whatever you want.

Are Obama's eating habits a political liability? The question may be trivial, but at least it's not offensive. The only real objection you can make there is that Chozick's litany of healthy foodstuffs favored by Obama (he "snacks on MET-Rx chocolate roasted-peanut protein bars and drinks Black Forest Berry Honest Tea, a healthy organic brew") echoes a similar litany from the day before by John McCain's campaign manager, Rick Davis. ("Only celebrities like Barack Obama … demand MET-RX chocolate roasted-peanut protein bars and bottles of a hard-to-find organic brew—Black Forest Berry Honest Tea. …") But that possible misdemeanor lies beyond our purview.


Sophie:  Of course, it is just fine for media to ask "Is Chris Christie Too Fat To Be President?"

"Look, I’m sorry, but New Jersey Governor Chris Christie cannot be president: He is just too fat. Maybe, if he runs for president and we get to know him, we will overlook this awkward issue because we are so impressed with the way he stands up to teachers’ unions. But we shouldn’t overlook it -- unless he goes on a diet and shows he can stick to it."

- Michael Kingsley, Bloomberg, 29 September 2011

"You could argue that this is none of my business, but I disagree. Christie’s problem with weight ceased being a private matter when he stepped into the public arena — and it’s not something you can fail to notice."

- Eugene Robinson, Chris Christie's Big Problem,  Washington Post, 29 September 2011

"Nor is Christie just 'slightly overweight.' So there is no delicate way to ask this: Is Chris Christie too fat to win? Politics, after all, is a business of image and first-impressions -- and study after study shows that people judge the hefty more harshly than they judge those who are thin."

- Joel Seigel, ABC News, 29 September 2011

"You know who the Republicans want as their candidate is the tubby guy across the river, Chris Christie.  "You talk about tons of fun, here we go. I want Chris Christie in this race because just I want to be able to meaningfully say, 'Hey, bring it, fat boy!'  He's got to be close to 400 pounds. ... Take a look. ... Go to Google Earth." 

- David Letterman, 28 September 2011

“The last fat president that we had was President Taft…years and years ago, I should remember, I dated him! They had to make a special bathtub for him because he was too fat to get in it,” exclaimed Behar. “I don’t think the country’s ready for a fat president again.”

- Joy Behar, The View, ABC Television, 27 September 2011

Desperation - Steppenwolf

When rain drops fall and you feel low
Ah, do you ever think it's useless
Do you feel like letting go
Do you ever sit and do you wonder
Will the world ever change
And just how long will it take
To have it all rearranged

Tell me why these things are still the same
Tell me why no one can seem to learn from mistakes

Take my hand if you don't know where your goin'
I'll understand, I've lost the way myself
Oh, don't take that old road it leads to nowhere
We must return before the clock strikes twelve

It's so easy to do nothin'
When you're busy night and day
Take a step in one direction
And take a step the other way
So don't quit tryin' when you stumble
Don't give up should you fall
Keep on searchin' for the passway
That will lead you through the wall
Don't look back or you'll be left behind
Don't look back or you will never find peace of mind