Prez: "I've dumped punk funk, found my junk" (+) I will fight, fight, fight, (21 times in all...) (You can't be your own cheerleader, Prez).
Prez having famously declared himself ready, even eager, to fight the banks side by side with his new BFF, Paul Volcker, he elicits a soupcon of cynicism from one experienced political observer.
Robert Reich (may I say, the incomperable Prof. Reich) unburdens himself …in… … a … … trio… of posts the gist of which is, “anything that straightens Obama’s spine is a good thing, albeit it took electoral catastrophe to alert him to impending doom”
Reich does not venture to wonder, as do I, how Prez could have gotten so far, so fast, with such a tin ear.
Perhaps his inner “good boy” conspired with his inner “go along to get along” machine pol and they mugged his inner instinctive and self-confident leader.
Whatever.
We can only hope that this alleged truculence will not prove to be another of Prez’s extravagant (and meaningless) promises, too numerous and depressing to list here
Indeed, we may cherish the dream that we are seeing the arisal of Obama Agonistes.
Arisal is not a word.
However, "sandwich" IS.
Feel free to substitute.
January 22, 2010 4:36 PM | Reply | Permalink
arising?
January 22, 2010 4:56 PM | Reply | Permalink
Okay, Admiral Teratical.
the silence of the dems
or
arising of agony’s tease...
January 23, 2010 3:51 AM | Reply | Permalink
the silence of the dems
These sheep go quietly to the slaughter--"we don't wanna make no fuss."
January 23, 2010 5:22 PM | Reply | Permalink
arousal, with a side of mayo
January 23, 2010 8:35 AM | Reply | Permalink
no, no, no....arousal is like pastrami--you have it on rye with mustard. Don't ask for mayo with your arousal in NYC, they will know you are a midwesterner...
January 23, 2010 5:33 PM | Reply | Permalink
Certainly not in a Kosher Deli, and no chocolate milk to wash it down with, either.
January 23, 2010 5:36 PM | Reply | Permalink
chocolate milk
Oy. Somewhere, the last living Ratner's waiter (there were, of course, no waitresses....) just clutched his chest--fortunately, only heartburn...
January 23, 2010 7:24 PM | Reply | Permalink
hahahahah.
So is Mentally Deranged.
er...no that's two words.
Ok, how about Bismark. Now Bismark was a fuhrer of sorts, a battleship and a jelly donut.
Now there is a word.
If you wish you can add a c. I am not sure where but:
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=sink+the+bismark+johnny+horton&search_type=&aq=f
It's just...I mean why would anyone wish to sink a jelly donut?
And why on earth do you have so many letters in your donut?
So many questions.
And so little time.
January 23, 2010 2:56 AM | Reply | Permalink
What kind of sammich?
January 23, 2010 2:21 PM | Reply | Permalink
arrival? arousal? arousing?
WTF, I must have had one of them in mind...
January 22, 2010 4:57 PM | Reply | Permalink
Keep it simple, dude -- Sandwich.
Always works for me.
Other possibilities include: Doughnut. Donut.
Jeez I'm hungry.
January 22, 2010 5:03 PM | Reply | Permalink
Donut.
mmmm....Donuts (Now that you bring it up, why aren't the little hole things "nuts of dough" and the rings the leftovers...?)
January 22, 2010 5:20 PM | Reply | Permalink
Donut, or not done it?
January 24, 2010 12:56 AM | Reply | Permalink
oooh; I just took 3 sourdough loaves outta the oven. Cleanest, best smell in the world. Wisht I could send ya some.
January 22, 2010 7:25 PM | Reply | Permalink
ya some.
Fedex. When it positively, absolutely, has to get there tomorrow...
January 23, 2010 7:33 PM | Reply | Permalink
I heart made-up words. Like slide-y.
We also *hope* Obama ain't just a-woofin'. If he is, I may hafta slap 'im around myself.
O' course, we'uns is gonna hafta tell our Conress-schmucks what they gotta do, too.
January 22, 2010 7:24 PM | Reply | Permalink
I had doughnuts for supper. Four of 'em. Yeah, four of 'em. Glazed cinnamon twists. I'm still lickin' the goo off my fingers. hahahhaha I bought them for tomorrow's breakfast but then I remembered I'm starting a fast at midnight, so I ate 'em. All four. I did not share them. I did not eat them delicately. I crammed them into my maw, chewed a couple times and swallowed. And, I'd do it again in a heartbeat.
I yelled a couple of times at Dr. Reich because he wrote some dumb stuff. We both got over it and I have come to admire his writing because he doesn't yell. I reckon he's a honey guy instead of a vinegar one.
Second chances are a gift. I hope President Obama knows that.
January 22, 2010 7:56 PM | Reply | Permalink
Yeah, four of 'em
awesome.
(what second chance? We have a second chance?)
January 22, 2010 8:33 PM | Reply | Permalink
AWESOME!
About the doughnuts, that is.
Obama needs to learn to eat doughnuts like that.
January 22, 2010 8:31 PM | Reply | Permalink
check out time stamp--we were awestruck simultaneously.
(four donuts is an accomplishment...)
January 22, 2010 8:35 PM | Reply | Permalink
IMO, it's his management style. He seems to adopt the style of a delegator. He sets the goals and expects his people to use their skills to accomplish them. This school views any direct involvement in the portfolio as "micromanagement".
This style can be very successful *IF* you do a good job staffing. IMO, Obama ended up having a whole lot of competing interests when he staffed and didn't necessarily select people who were on board with his agenda (even though they were quite accomplished in their fields of expertise). The people he selected would almost require someone who had the "strong manager" style in order to all go in the same direction and he just handed them portfolios.
That has been bugging me since he staffed. It is not a formula for success to set up a team that requires a micromanager-in-chief if you view "strong management" as the antithesis of good style. It seems quite difficult for a delegator to have success with a "team of rivals" as by definition nobody WANTS to go in the same direction. IMO it was a clusterfuck from the get-go.
January 23, 2010 2:24 AM | Reply | Permalink
Yeah, take Christine Romer. 'No, YOU take her.'
Or Arne Duncan.
January 23, 2010 11:48 AM | Reply | Permalink
a clusterfuck
Why anyone would take direction from Doris Kearns Godwin eludes me...I think he really fell in love with that Lincoln analogy--but he ain't Lincoln and we're not in a civil war (yet...)
On the wider question of hie apparent fecklessness, I have, til now, been clinging to this explanation: He's letting the thugs over reach, the better to smash them with a counterpunch.(because, arguably, he's too smart to be sincere about this post partisan bullshit--this may be the flaw in the analysis...maybe he believes his publicity.)
Alas, this only works when you really have a punch to launch....and the stones to do so...this may be a problem for him....
January 23, 2010 1:09 PM | Reply | Permalink
I dunno. Seems like he landed a couple here:
http://tpmlivewire.talkingpointsmemo.com/2010/01/obama-i-will-take-my-lumps.php?ref=fpb
January 23, 2010 2:14 PM | Reply | Permalink
Well, that's a good opening rhetorical salvo. A year ago, I would be really excited by this.
But in light of the last year, the question in my mind is: will he go to bat with such passion over SPECIFIC policy. So far, he's been unwilling to stick his neck out draw a line in the sand. If he doesn't back it up with some hard actions, he's just making speeches.
January 23, 2010 4:22 PM | Reply | Permalink
He said "fight" alot. But he's trying to come up off the mat in the 8th round of a ten round fight, and he has yet to throw a *punch.
Where was all this "fight" when he had 70% numbers and some political capital?
*For instance:"I have fired Larry Summers, and directed Sheila Barr to shut down citibank."
January 23, 2010 4:38 PM | Reply | Permalink
I know what you mean, but the term delegator sounds dominant. Obama is hardly dominant. He seems more like a masochistic submissive who surrenders the control of his welfare to people who would mistreat and abuse him.
For example, analyze the sado-masochistic relationship he has with banking executives. When the banks crashed, instead of making direct loans to people who need money, Obama preferred to hand money over to the executives so they in turn loan to the consumers. But instead of cooperating with that understanding, they abused the trust. They gambled with the money handed over to them rather than making loans and pay themselves outrageous bonuses.
How did Obama responded that that kind of behaviour? He encouraged it. Months after the first wave of bailout, he decided to give unlimited support to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Its like he is begging banking executives to whip him because getting abused turns him on. And it took him an entire year to start breaking out of this abusive relationship.
Want another example? How about the relationship that he has with Senate Republicans and Blue Dogs. Instead of getting his hand dirty, he surrendered the control of the dialogue to Baucus's group of six and instructed Baucus to drop the single-payer plan from the HCR negotiation right off the bat. For the entire months of summer and fall he tolerated getting backstabbed and played by Grassley and Snowed and did nothing. Then he submitted to the demands of the likes of Landrieu and Nelson and he hasn't stop surrendering to demands ever since.
Want more? I suspect that he has similar relationship with the military, Black Water, and his own WH advisors.
My point is this: Obama is a submissive. He has great personal magnetism which he could use to make himself a charismatic leader, able to demand attention and cooperation from the people around him. Instead, all he does is submit to others in the process of seeking their approvals which only makes him popular. He has all the characteristics of a masochistic submissive, surrendering controls and tolerating abuses. Unfortunately with him as President, the great mass get surrendered along with him. No wonder people are angry.
January 24, 2010 5:16 AM | Reply | Permalink
When he said "I will take my lumps", my thought was that's the problem. He's been taking lumps and liking them. He should STOP taking lumps and get addiction treatment.
January 24, 2010 6:35 AM | Reply | Permalink
I will take my lumps
I wish you were wrong.
I would have liked to have heard
"I will tear thm a new one..."
January 24, 2010 3:25 PM | Reply | Permalink
Does anyone remember Reich ever saying anything about Obama which went beyond praising with faint damns?
Reich is nobody's BFF in this administration, and I think he must pout about this just about as often as he breathes. How awful it must be to remain "just" a professor dreaming of former glory.
January 23, 2010 7:53 AM | Reply | Permalink
You have been pushing for a long time the line that we can all dismiss Reich because he is just a professor dreaming of his former glory. I have recently asked you for particulars on this and you replied to the effect that it's just your sense of it. So I am assuming that again you are using an ad hominem put-down that you just pull out of your ass, instead of doing the serious business of responding to what seems to me to be quite serious analysis. Almost intellectually dishonest. You also say "Does anyone remember Reich ever saying anything about Obama which went beyond praising with faint damns? " So what? What if he never praised Obama at all? One still might feel some obligation to the content and substance of his criticism. By the way, I have not read anything you have written that contained any substantial or serious criticism. Can we just toss all your comments because quite obviously you are just angling to be invited to join this administration. More seriously, I think Reich's critiques have been immensely more valuable to me and to Obama had he been listening than all your formulaic defenses have been. You have not served the President or the causes you say you support so well by your knee-jerk defenses of Obama.
January 23, 2010 1:13 PM | Reply | Permalink
to Obama had he been listening
Boy, howdy!
January 23, 2010 1:31 PM | Reply | Permalink
pout about this
Maybe last month. Right now, he's like the guy who got to the wharf just in time to watch the Titanic sail, who sticks his useless ticket into his pocket disgustedly, not realizing how lucky he is not to be on board...Then, later, he gets the news...
January 23, 2010 1:29 PM | Reply | Permalink
I'm not a big Reich fan, but I like essay #2 very much, it's quite good. I think it's good because in that one he's the wise man seeing dejas vus allover again, it's clear as a bell, lessons a left leaner learned from hard knocks experience in the process of losing his position with Clinton, things he himself once advocated that he later learned would have been wrong.
January 23, 2010 9:44 AM | Reply | Permalink
big Reich fan
I am--have been ever since he came on Letterman in the 90's and said "Do I look like 'big government' to you?" (I want to say he was standing on the chair, but I think that might be the drugs...)
January 23, 2010 3:04 PM | Reply | Permalink
I appreciate his essays on PRIs Marketplace. Way better than the obnoxious and odious Frum, for sure.
January 23, 2010 3:05 PM | Reply | Permalink
Marketplace
I have destroyed several innocent radios because of the crap they broadcast N(ot) P(rogressive)R(adio) is bad enough, PRI sucks even worse!
January 23, 2010 4:10 PM | Reply | Permalink
oooooh, you destroy radios? I just yell at mine. I agree marketplace is mostly propaganda, but I keep up with it that way.
Look, it's NPR or Rush. I have a loooong commute. Whaddya want?
January 23, 2010 4:21 PM | Reply | Permalink
Whaddya want?
That's easy. Bob Edwards.
January 23, 2010 4:56 PM | Reply | Permalink
=D
January 23, 2010 5:02 PM | Reply | Permalink
It's never a good sign when they start counting your instancs of (empty) repetition...
"The president used the word “fight,” or some version of it, more than 20 times."
January 23, 2010 1:51 PM | Reply | Permalink
A similar thought from Atrios:
"Fighting
According to Obama, in his speech today, he won't stop fighting for us.
Fighting's good. Winning's better. Talking about fighting, not so good."
January 23, 2010 3:22 PM | Reply | Permalink
Talking about fighting
an LBJ legend (perhaps apocryphal):
LBJ and recalicitrant senator in oval office.
Before them, map of senator's state, with federal installations of all sorts represented by little light bulbs.
LBJ starts pressing buttons, one every five seconds, and a light goes out each time he presses a button.
Vote changed at button # 3...
That's fighting. I want to see him mobiize the awesome power of the president to bust balls.
You gotta bust some balls, you miserable punk!
January 23, 2010 5:06 PM | Reply | Permalink
The following from David Michael Green (Hofstra) under the title of "How to Squander the Presidency in One Year"
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/01/22-7
goes over fairly familiar ground and maybe says things a little more strongly than I would yet does recapture the painful "year of Obama":
"There's only one political party in the entire world that is so inept, cowardly and bungling that it could manage to simultaneously lick the boots of Wall Street bankers and then get blamed by the voters for being flaming revolutionary socialists.
It's the same party that has allowed the opposition to go on a thirty year scorched earth campaign, stealing everything in sight from middle and working class voters, and yet successfully claim to be protecting ‘real Americans' from out-of-touch elites.
It's the same party that could run a decorated combat hero against a war evader in 1972, only to be successfully labeled as national security wimps.
Just to be sure, it then did the exact same thing again in 2004. "
and
"One year ago today, there was real question as to what could possibly be the future of the Republican Party in America. That's changed a bit now.
And, speaking of ‘change', the one kind that Barack Obama did actually deliver this year was not that which most voters had in mind after listening to him use the word incessantly, all throughout 2008. Obama and his colleagues have now managed to bring the future of the Democratic Party into question, just a year after it won two smashing victories in a row.
...
What really upsets me, however, is what these fools have allowed to be done to the name of progressivism, and to the country.
Barack Obama has now, in just a year's time, become the single most inept president perhaps in all of American history, and certainly in my lifetime. Never has so much political advantage been pissed away so rapidly, and what's more in the context of so much national urgency and crisis. It's astonishing, really, to contemplate how much has been lost in a single year."
January 23, 2010 6:06 PM | Reply | Permalink
Not a lot to argue with--up till Mass. I was advancing the increasingly desperate meme that it was all a clever ruse...what a putz! (me, this time,not prez...)
January 23, 2010 6:46 PM | Reply | Permalink
A hard truth, but right on target. It really is a tragedy of major proportions when you consider just how nicely things had fallen into alignment to realize REAL change coming out of the 2008 election - and to witness how easily positioned the Fascist Right was to at last be knocked completely on their ass. To say that Obama squandered the opportunity is a gross understatement. He stepped all over it and got nothing but mud on his boots to be spread hither and yon.
January 23, 2010 9:04 PM | Reply | Permalink
A hard truth
But I'm gonna be better, smarter, less of a pu--oh wait--what a relief--you are agreeing with VL, not me....carry on.
January 23, 2010 9:29 PM | Reply | Permalink
Obama is still a fool if he thinks running against the banks will help him. It won't. The banks aren't running for office. REPUBLICANS are. Repubs will easily devalue his new-found populism as political opportunism. And he won't do a thing about it.
Obama, like Kerry, and Dukakis, and so many other Dems, is too stupid and witless to fight back against the daily barrage of propaganda from the right. They will lose it all. Too bad for everybody.
January 23, 2010 2:07 PM | Reply | Permalink
see below
January 23, 2010 5:00 PM | Reply | Permalink
too stupid
See, there's my problem. I can't see him as being as stupid as one would need to be not to recognize the reality you reference. Hence, my stated doubts about his guts.
I increasingly tend towards the fear that he his going to be trying to please his grandparents forever. And they were not 21st century people...
January 23, 2010 4:04 PM | Reply | Permalink
Obama siding now with Volcker on Banking Regulations is great, but may be perceived as phony by voters. (We know it is pretty cynical politics at this point.) Whether he 'fights' for true reform or not will be the thing. Congress won't be so happy, as their bills are almost set in stone, some good stuff, some bogus stuff.)
I just listened to some of the talking heads, and the memes are predictable:
From the Republicans: Massachussetts was a refutaion of O's policies re: Taxes, Terrorism, and HCR; he'll have to move further to the right. Fighting banks is ludicrous. The biggie: Fighting Banks or firing Bernanke will TANK THE STOCK MARKET.
From the Dems: O has to MOVE TO THE CENTER (please tell me what he's done that was Leftie? Make a lame stab at HCR? Giving so much to Pharm and Insurance Co.'s wasn't CENTRIST or PRO-BUSINESS?) Massachussetts was about not trusting government. MA was 'White Flight' from Obama.
And fighting banks or firing Bernanke will TANK THE STOCK MARKET.
So all are agreed the President must move further to the right, and reigning in Banks or not confirming Bernanke will TANK THE STOCK MARKET. Well, tough bananas. The stock market really doesn't rule main street economics; but they are all afraid it does
I think Reich and Krugman call out Obama's policies and economic team partly because they see Keneysian economics continually discredited. The one stab took at government absolutely needing to be the employer of last resort fell far short of what was needed in a stimulus package. And they are pissed, and disappointed. Now all can pretend to believe that this approach doesn't work, not pass a jobs bill, and start some Crap Commissions on reigning in the deficit on the backs of social safety net programs.
Crap.
Hope the President reads Frank Rich's latest column:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/24/opinion/24Rich.html?src=tp
January 24, 2010 12:20 PM | Reply | Permalink
I measure the sincerity of reform by the perceived pain in store for capital. Capital perceives very little pain on the horizon.
The Stock Marcketshould tank--that would be a realistic appraisal of looming redistributive justice--that it does not tells me that the smart money knows Prez is "all show and no go".
January 24, 2010 2:36 PM | Reply | Permalink
Obama siding now with Volcker
Yves Smith says that Volcker is being used merely as a prop--(It might as well be a cardb oard cut out standing behind Prez)
January 24, 2010 4:18 PM | Reply | Permalink