My wife said two political things yesterday that I took to heart.
We were cross-country skiing when I said something very moving– to me anyway– about finding the friends who give me emotional support, when my wife said, You know you could give that guy in Congress a good go on the crying front. I said, Boehner? Yes, she said, I think you could take him. I really think you could win.
I felt embarrassed. I cry easily and my wife has been on me for years about it, a butterfly can do it for me. I find it weird in Boehner, I ascribe it to his big-family childhood, and therefore I think it’s a character flaw in myself, and has a similar root, in a word negative intimacy. Though I would note that Chris Matthews stands up for Boehner on this one. I think Matthews is also a cryer, he cried for Obama, and would defend passion in politics. But people don’t trust folks that cry a lot. So that was lesson one. I’m gonna get tight with my tears.
Later on we were watching TV when my wife looked at me with a grimace and said, “I think I’m over Barack.” This is huge. For years now whenever I criticized Obama, she would just shake her head in a daze and say, I love him. Sorry, I love him. What do you love, I’d say. Everything about him, she said. His manner chiefly, I think. The way he runs up on to the airplane, the cool humor, the effortlessness. Well yesterday she said it was over for her; she has come to realize that the calculating academic side of his character is dominant. People get a choice about what to emphasize in their characters, and he’s channeled this only.
What did it for you? I asked her. It was a carpenter friend’s disclosure of how much he now has to pay for healthcare, $1000 a month for one person, crazy, and what healthcare is doing to the economy. So Obama didn’t do it, didn’t show the change-leadership we thought he had. I brought up the Middle East stuff, and his kowtowing to Netanyahu and neocons and Israel lobbyists for 2012, and my wife said, Well it’s all the same. Later I reflected that David Bromwich was on to this a long time ago. This piece about Obama putting himself above politics, again at LRB….
Any observer of Obama realises that… he is always slow, always circumspect, and he has two distinct registers of diction: one for talking to very clever but abstracted people, the other for talking to well-meaning people who are very young or very old and certainly need remedial help. In the higher idiom he talks of a ‘critique’ of policy and ‘trend lines’ and the ways to ‘incentivise’ better care and ‘prioritise’ the next steps of government assistance to show that we are ‘doing everything we can to accelerate job creation’. It is the language of a technocrat, the man at the head of the conference table. In the lower idiom, there are lots of ‘folks’, ‘folks who oppose me’, ‘a whole bunch of folks’, interspersed with vaguely regional comfort words like ‘oftentimes’.
Obama’s largest rhetorical miscalculation – and it bears part of the responsibility for 2 November – was to suppose he could move people to admire and sympathise with government even as he encouraged them to disdain and deprecate politics. By holding himself above politics he cleared a path for an insurgent movement that put itself below politics.
