I think it’s a stupid notion to look at this election as a troubled marriage between the president and the people who voted him into office. Maybe there are some people who are disappointed in the president, but no one likes Mitt Romney. And I mean no one. But it’s not all about Mitt Romney. The Republican Party has spent the last twelve years demonizing Muslims. It’s been bashing gays with gusto since at least 2004. It’s been blasting away at Latinos ever since President Bush got the crazy notion of doing immigration reform. It’s actively doing everything it can to suppress the black vote. It insults Europe at every opportunity. There is one Jewish Republican in all of Congress. The GOP has been waging an all-out assault on women’s reproductive rights and has opposed equal pay for equal work with religious fervor. Who the fuck is left who might might want to vote for these assholes?
Where this administration has fallen short, whether it be through obstruction or lack of vision or even a lack of nerve, the Republicans offer no succor. Want Gitmo closed? Romney won’t do that. Want out of Afghanistan quicker? Romney doesn’t. Want cramdown for underwater mortgages? Don’t ask Mitt. Want more regulation and accountability on Wall Street? You know the answer to that. What a more equitable tax system? Please.
And we can go down the list.
Want more investment in schools?
Want less defense spending?
Want more sane drug laws?
Want prison reform?
Want a less bellicose foreign policy?
Want a tougher line with Israel?
Want more humanitarian relief and debt forgiveness?
Want more economic protectionism?
Want a stronger labor movement?
Want to balance the budget?
Want to protect Social Security and Medicare?
Want to address climate change?
Want cheaper college tuition?
I mean, you can find fault with the Obama administration on many, many things, but you won’t find any movement in a better direction from the Republican Party on any issue under the sun.
This is not about people being disappointed in Obama. This is about the Republican Party having very unpopular ideas and a determination to insult and alienate almost everyone in the county who doesn’t strongly resemble Karl Rove.
Why aren’t the Republicans doing better?
What a dumb question. Why are they polling competitively at all?
These Republican strategists are trying to figure out how to get people to divorce Barack Obama. They ought to give up that moronic idea. They aren’t winning because they aren’t very appealing.
The Grand Odious Party has been singing most of the same tunes since 1964. They added one in the mid-1970s by formally begin the assault on equal rights for women. And by 1980 had co-opted Carter’s “born again” Christian crap. Yet, they still win elections and trade off the WH every eight to twelve years with Democrats who sell a softer and fuzzier version of most of the same thing.
This always feels like a tautology to me. The people who tend to reaffirm a version of that sentence also tend to spend about zero percent of their time explaining what exactly these faults are, and what should be done about them.
I listed about a dozen left-wing critiques of this administration. We can rationalize them. We can dismiss them. We can disagree with them. But whether we accept their failure to address those issues or not, we know the GOP will not address them and will in most cases makes them worse.
A de facto one-party state (in terms of nominally acceptable outcomes) ultimately devolves into panglossian wanking and cheerleading. Because it’s pragmatic that way.
I guess I don’t really believe that you have genuine issue with the administration’s approach to environmental policy, or foreign policy, or drug policy or criminal justice, or financial reform, and could just as easily list five reasons apiece why everything the administration has done on each of those fronts is well-considered, pragmatic and sensible under the constraints of congress.
It feels like the lefty version of fair-and-balanced. I actually have more respect for those who just haul-off and say the Obama administration is flawless and immaculate and ohmygodohmygodohmygod. It’s hard to take people seriously when they say they are opposed to prolonging the Afghanistan war, for example, when they spend approximately zero time even talking about it just because pointing out that thousands of people getting killed and dismembered over there the last few years might reflect poorly on the administration’s judgment. Far easier to just say how brave and bold and amazing they were for shooting bin Laden in the face instead.
Think of it like a marriage. Not in the sense the GOP is talking about marriage. In the sense that you make a dozen little compromises because you don’t want to be old and alone and unloved and uncared for. Maybe you wish many times a day that things were different and better, but you don’t harp on that because you need peace, and because you have a dozen flaws yourself that your partner has to overlook.
You push your spouse in the direction you think is good for her and good for you and good for both of you, but you do it gently and with care and with humility.
That’s a progressive’s space within the Democratic Party when faced with the alternative of the modern GOP.
Your first paragraph outlines many of the reasons why Eastwood’s so-called humorous skit was nothing but projection of the worst the GOP offers. That you and Gilroy found it humorous and acceptable is shocking to me and one reason I take long leaves from this website.
Hey, if a Hollywood actor wants to go in front of the GOP convention and tell ‘go-fuck-yourself’ jokes to born-again Christians, I’m gonna laugh. That’s just me.
I thought the whole performance was pretty rich. Somewhere between Andy Kaufman, Ashton Kutcher, and Sasha Cohen.
Was it a straight-up Punk?
Will we ever know?
In any case, brilliant.
Just look at the amazing amount of creative response it aroused. How could it not be an inspired act?
Brilliant? Because it stole the show from Romney?
Adios.
Because he advocated closing Gitmo before feeding them a line about the foolishness of trying terrorists in Manhattan.
Because he advocated for leaving Afghanistan tomorrow and made them cheer for it.
Because he told dirty, racy, sexual innuendo jokes to a bunch of abstinence-only born-agains.
Because he talked to a freaking chair instead of following a script.
Because he ruined Mitt’s big night.
Because it was mind-blowing and no one knows what to make of it.
It did bump the Romney biography video out of prime time, which was his greatest, biggest, and best shot at getting voters to consider him human. He can’t gt that back.
I hope you’ll stay.
PS
Maybe you spend too much time watching movies. I have no reverence for Clint Eastwood or for hostility thinly disguised as humor. A technique as old as people.
George Carlin was funny. Maher, Stewart, Colbert, while not in Carlin’s league, are funny. Poundstone and Sedaris make me laugh. But Andy Kaufman and Sascha Cohen make me cringe; guess that’s why Eastwood did as well. Thanks for the explanation.
Ew, Maher is not funny. He always makes me cringe.
Didn’t say that he couldn’t make me cringe — but often makes me laugh as I cringe.
Stewart’s obsession with false equivalence is obnoxious but otherwise, provides much needed laughs.
To me, Eastwood was funny in the “WTF?!?!, you can’t be serious!!” kind of way. You have James Lipton and Roger Ebert saying that it was sad to see Eastwood basically end his career this way. That it’s sad this will be how younger generations remember him. You have Michael Moore saying that Eastwood was doing his best McCain impersonation(“Get off my lawn!!”) but more creepy(considering Moore’s own run-in with Clint at some kind of awards presentation). Then you have Teahadists thinking it was the greatest thing ever, just because Clint was there in the flesh. So yeah, WTF?!?
If Romney loses, do you think Clint Eastwood will blame himself?
Keep in mind, he’s an old, huge Hollywood star.
Here’s a piece by Lenny Bruce that is designed to make you cringe.
See how that works?
Laughed forty years ago when I first heard it and while stylistically somewhat dated, the point remains relevant. (Harriet Beecher Stowe commented on the same hypocrisy in Uncle Tom’s Cabin.)
One of the main things that is dated about that piece is that we feel like we are in on the joke. But, at the time, even in the “sophisticated” venues he was performing, most of the audience shared a lot of the prejudice that Bruce was parodying. He was mocking his audience and making them laugh at themselves. He was punking them.
Now, the real question with Eastwood is why he took the GOP’s talking points and dutifully ran through them, all the while seemingly mocking the audience and creating a spectacle. Was he addled as the people who are “sad” assume he was? Or did he know exactly what he was doing, even running long and disrupting the program?
Did Eastwood not know that Romney wants to stay in Afghanistan or that he also has a law degree or that his audience never wanted to close Gitmo? He’s not stupid. He’s a brilliant and astute man. Why did he wait for the last moment to ask for a chair? Who was the joke really on? Not Obama. Not Biden. Why’d he tell “go fuck yourself” jokes to a religiously conservative audience?
Personally, I thought it was quite a creative performance. Inspired, really.
For real?
You think Clint Eastwood set out to punk the Republican Party?
He’s been a Republican for a long time. He was a Republican elected official.
He wasn’t a Republican elected official. His position was non-partisan.
Clint Eastwood is an environmentalist who is pro-gay rights and pro-choice. He’s extremely close friends with people like Morgan Freeman. His masterpiece is Unforgiven, which is in my top ten movies of all time. You should watch it and think about why he wrote it and what it means about his relationship to his persona. His Million Dollar Baby movie is about, in part, the mercy of assisted suicide. Another major film he did recently was about Nelson Mandela and the South African rugby team and racial reconciliation.
Who do you think you’re dealing with when Eastwood apes a wingnut?
He wasn’t a Republican elected official. His position was non-partisan.
“When we were way behind. Honestly, [Eastwood] was suggested in not an altogether unserious – Well, he was a mayor. He was a Republican mayor,” former Bush campaign chairman and Secretary of State James Baker said.
He was clearly enough of a Republican for James Baker.
Let’s see.
Eastwood is:
Pro-choice
Pro-gay marriage
Fought for ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment
Is an avid environmentalist
Endorsed and raised money for Gray Davis twice
Endorsed and raised money for Rep. Sam Farr
Called Nixon’s Vietnam policy immoral
Opposed the wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan
Has made movies about:
the virtues of assisted suicide
the greatness of Nelson Mandela
what a shithead J. Edgar Hoover was
several Jazz heroes
gay cowboys
the evil of the death penalty
the bullshit of glorifying gunslingers
the stupidity of big game hunting
what am I leaving out?
That he’s a big admirer of Noam Chomsky?
His personal life is certainly nothing the “family values” party can admire. He has seven kids from five women, only two of which he ever married, and his current wife is multiracial.
I’m sure this profile suits him perfectly for the Tea Party and Mitt Romney.
You underestimate Bruce’s audiences — they got it even if it made them uncomfortable.
Nobody in the GOP convention hall experienced Eastwood as mocking them because he didn’t. If he were that smart, he would have mocked the things about his party that he doesn’t like such as their obsession with lady parts and what gay men do in their private lives. Repeating lies that Republicans believe without hinting in any way that it was all bs isn’t brilliant performance art.
You might be overthinking this. Eastwood wasn’t toying with the audience. Possible that he toyed with Romney, but it’s not really Eastwood’s style to waste his time with a prank.
That would be obvious. He wasn’t going to go out there are contradict the wingnuts on choice or gay rights or global warming or civil rights.
If Eastwood had a point, it wasn’t to let people in on the joke.
There wasn’t going to be a punk moment, like this: “I hope you kill every man, woman and child in Iraq, down to the lizards. And may George W. Bush drink the blood of every man, woman and child in Iraq.”
That’s Cohen ending the charade. But Cohen’s best work happens when he doesn’t end the charade, but let’s it speak for itself.
Now, that’s tragic, and I’ve always wondered if Cohen cried himself to sleep after pulling that off.
If you think Eastwood is a moron, that’s your business. I would tell you with a high degree of confidence that Eastwood is not the fool people think he is.
Oakey dokey — Eastwood was like Cohen, the convention hall audience was like the bigots in the bar, and liberals watching it on TV were like the movie audience that were in on the joke. Would have been truly brilliant if more than the genius Eastwood, you, and ?? got it.
Don’t go, Heart of the Rockies, I’ll miss you. Just accept that Boo and I have warped senses of humor, if you must.
I have to say that the Democrats that I work with, while disagreeing with the content of Eastwood’s monologue, also recognized his talent. He IS a professional actor and at 81 ad libbed better than the professional politicians could read their teleprompters. And at least half of them thought that Eastwood channeling Obama telling Romney off RIGHT IN FRONT OF ROMNEY was hilarious. So, slow down and cool down. You think we’re wrong, OK. Forgive us this disagreement. Stay. Please.
Marriage is a stupid analogy. We bought a used car from this man. It had some faults. The question is, are we willing to trade it in on another used car from a guy who most recently ran a wrecking yard and his partner that says we don’t need a warranty.
To continue my analogy, about half of us recognize the used car he’s trying to sell us as the same worn out 1980 piece of crap that we got rid of four years ago. The newer car may have problems but it’s less likely to strand us.
I noticed this pattern a few years ago:
First, Republicans make something up because it sounds good, or because they need to counter a message. Something like, “Obama is only good at reading off a teleprompter,” or “the global warming conspiracy has been debunked!”
Then, they turn around and believe the thing they just made up. After all, they saw it repeated and defended by many different sources that they find reliable. (Funny how that happens in Republican-land, when they all start saying exactly the same thing at exactly the same time, and they don’t even have enough shame to be embarrassed when it’s blatantly obvious.)
Then, they take that thing they just made up and use it as the basis of their political strategy. This is where they really get into trouble. The pick of Sarah Palin was partly a consequence of the line they made up about people only supporting Hillary Clinton because she was a woman. If women vote like that, then we can totally get a bunch of Hillary voters to support McCain! Um, no.
Now, they’re doing the same thing with the line they made up about Obama voters being star-struck and shallow, who were only voting for “the biggest celebrity in the world.” This isn’t going to work, either.
Where the divorce analogy falls down, unfortunately, is that we can’t just stay single for a while until someone better comes along.
I think the outright warfare began around 1992. Pat Buchanan and his Culture War speech maybe. Before that gays were a species that “people” knew existed in the wild but thought they didn’t have to encounter in public situations. They only came out at night after the kids were safely tucked away in their beds. The AIDS epidemic started to bring “them” into the daylight, out of their caves. “They” were furious and demanded their grievances be addressed, as a whole generation of their species was dead or dying with no relief in sight.
When “they” started getting all uppity, demanding “special rights” the battle lines were drawn.
The rest is history. The war is almost over. Obama is signing the peace treaties as quickly as they can be negotiated. Now “they” are “people” too and we ALL won. But there are some dead-enders out there who refuse to admit defeat. The Republicans continue to nurture them.
No one really has a perfect marriage. It’s all about making compromises. For me, for us, Obama’s been an imperfect husband but probably the best one we’re gonna find. Just look at the other suitors out there and it’s blatantly obvious.
And there I go, rambling again. Like a doddering old spinster, still single.
From reading the article, it looks like the trouble marriage analogy comes from Mark McKinnon. It has its flaws as an apt analogy of Obama’s relationship with his base, as you note, but as a basic premise of strategy it has certain merits.
The important thing to note is that the Romney campaign will be actively working to exacerbate perceptions among the President’s ‘008 base in order to depress his turnout. They’re treating this as an attempt to swing former Obama voters into the Romney camp, but they know better. The real goal is to convince voters to stay at home.
Judging by his recent work, I’ve been thinking that Clint has been a recovering Catholic for years. Probably he’s also a recovering republican. Thanks Clint, for not asking the chair if he felt lucky.
I’m glad he stole the show. Sometimes the court jester will kindly and humbly change policy.
Early on in his presidency when we got a too small of a stimulus lacking in the most critical element imo, infrastructure jobs, and moved onto the ACA lacking a public option and the appointment of the Catfood Commission, I was greatly concerned that disappointment and disenchantment might lead to many divorcing themselves from the relationship. I suppose one could argue that this did play a role in the half-win the repubs got in 2010.
To many, they had elected someone repub-lite, which dovetails nicely as I see it, with the things on your list. Applying that to an earlier point in another post, the ONLY things repubs could legitmately criticize, are things they are in agreement with him with, that left many of us lefties with a bad taste in our mouths, like abandonment of new laws benefitting labor, JD efforts on marijuana dispenseries, and my personal fav, his silence on the issue of this or any other time, climate change. It’s been a question of what he hasn’t done as much as what he has, that has strained the marriage. And most of those things benefit the darkside, and not those struggling to stay in the light.
The fear that the accumulative effect of all the disappointments would result in sufficient apathy from the base to potentially give a repub candidate a win this fall, were quickly dissipated with the rise of the Pree Party, who as you rightly noted, have brought the long existing worst of the right front and center for all to see. I wouldn’t confine this to their islamophobia, homophobia — bigotry in its many forms — because it’s clear an inarguable that they are warring against faceless workers, women, etc, on pocketbook issues as well. They’ve taken their guerrilla class war and put it front and center, and unashamedly so by putting and supporting Ryan on the ticket. Romney already had his prior support for the Ryan plan to deal with, but now he has a problem he can’t etch-a-sketch away.
The one with a divorce problem isn’t BHO, because there will be a reconciliation between him and his base based upon the need to vanguish our common foe, the rightwingnuts and their rightwingnuttery that is no longer even in part, still in the closet. The one with the divorce problem is the repubs, who have not only diveorced themselves from reality on more fronts than I need cite here, but also from the majority of the electorate who are in the final analysis, a center left group. That contention can easily be validated by an examination of the polls on most of the issues we already live with, like SS and Medicare, and some like taxing the rich that are currently being debated.
This http://www.google.com/search?q=the+myth+of+a+center%2Fright+nation&rls=com.microsoft:en-us:IE-Se
archBox&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&sourceid=ie7&rlz=1I7GGHP_en is what underlies the reason why I think the Romney campaign is doomed, as is the last hurrah of the bowel movement he represents going forward — the fear of rightwingnuttery they are solely responsible for cultivating and growing, will serve as the thing that keeps the disappointed in BHO tethered to him, as well as the why behind their own undoing.
And of course, it’s also the reason naturally, why he and they are so unappealing.
Why such a hypocrite?
You oppose protectionism.
You oppose non-interventionism.
You don’t care about a balanced budget.