Chris
Matthews was apoplectic: "There's a hot debate going on in this
country, and you know where it's being held? Here, on this network, is where
we're having this debate. We have our knives out. We go after the people and
the facts. What was he doing tonight? He went in disarmed!"
Ed Schultz was “absolutely stunned.” The president, he proclaimed, made a “deal with the devil" by saying he agreed with Mitt Romney on Social Security. (“A somewhat similar position” is how Obama put it.) Ed was not brooking any of Rachel Maddow’s excuses about how Romney muscled in for time: “The president needs to go in there and fight for that time. There’s people out there who expect him to fight for that time.” (Another ideological illusion: According to one analyst, Obama actually got 11% more microphone time than Romney, while saying 9% fewer words. The problem wasn’t time. It was energy.)
Note the tone of personal disappointment, even anger, in
these remarks. Matthews is acknowledging
that “we, here” (he and his MSNBC
colleagues) have been Obama’s surrogates, “having the debate” on his behalf
with “knives out” for months. He is pissed off that Obama did not show up to
have “our” backs. And you know that Schultz
sees himself as one of the “people out there” who expected Obama to join his
fight. Obama has betrayed the MSNBC
posse that has been doing all the warm-up combat for him.
As posses are wont to do, this one fails (or pretends, or
does not want) to understand that their leader is not the person they have been
telling themselves and others that he is.
He did not come armed for the fight they’ve been waging because it’s not his fight. Obama’s not really interested in the same
fight they are, although he often creates the fiction that he is. Throughout his presidency, and especially
during this campaign, the MSNBC crew has been doing the same thing that most
liberals and progressives did during the 2008 campaign: Based on staged and scripted events and
speeches, carefully targeted to people like them, they projected on to Obama
the image of a progressive politician who was determined – even if ever so
subtly, secretly, n-dimensionally, or from-behind – to defend the interests of
working people against the plutocracy, to redress the inequalities and
injustices of late American capitalism at home and abroad, and to fundamentally
change the way that our politics works.
In reality, he is not this, and has never been. The Obama they saw in the debates, in a
context where the discourse could not be so tightly controlled by his
production crew, was exactly the Obama we saw after his election in 2008: someone who continually seeks accommodation
with the most reactionary politicians and policies, because that is what he
wants and likes to do, because it is those policies – and not any “progressive”
ones – that he is more comfortable accommodating. Anyone who thinks it strange that Obama was so
passive in the face of – indeed, so inclined to be compliant with – Romney and
his principles, has not been paying attention to (or has been deluding
him/herself about) what Obama has been saying and doing for the past three and
a half years. Ed and his colleagues have
been so wrapped up in writing themselves into the Story of Obama that they
failed to notice that Obama has been making deals with the devil since day one.
(During the debate, besides pointing out their “similar
position” on Social Security, Obama said he “agreed” with Romney on substantive
issues six times, including on the need to lower taxes for corporations, and urged
Romney to agree that Obamacare is “a Republican idea,” in fact, “the same plan”
crafted by “the same advisers” as Romney’s plan in Massachusetts. Romney said he “agreed” with Obama three
times, mostly on Obama’s and Arne Duncan’s “chartist” education initiatives).
As I remarked in a previous
post, the MSNBC Obamicans spend all their time talking about Republicans
because, while it’s easy to trash them for being reactionary liars, it’s
considerably harder to coherently portray as “progressive” a president who is
quite obviously not very progressive at all. Therefore it’s better not to focus
on him too sharply. Obama is present in
their discourse mainly as an absence,
as the implicit other of the Republicans.
Obama, they suggest, without actually inspecting him too closely, is he
who, we can be confident, is the opposite of them. On Wednesday night, we
saw these Obama knife-fighters wake up for a moment, startled by reality of the
politician, which contrasts so sharply with the image they have been helping to
fictionalize.
As I said in another post,
Obama has been more adept than Romney at turning his deceptions into attractive
fictions. At Wednesday’s debate, that
dynamic was reversed. We cannot know, of
course, whether this new dynamic will persist through the remainder of the
campaign, or whether, as I think more likely, Brand Obama will re-establish the
dominance of its creative capacities.
We can, however, be fairly certain that Obama will be primed
to take a more aggressive tone in the next debate. It is important to note that the MSNBC posse’s
job is to gin up enthusiasm, and votes, for Obama, from wary, and erstwhile
antiwar, youth and liberals, and to do that they have been relying heavily on
some putative case for Obama’s energetic progressivism on domestic issues. One
of the things that must annoy them the most about his limp performance in Wednesday’s
debate is that it leaves them the daunting task of finding a way to spin his
performance in the upcoming debate in a way that retrieves his “progressivism”
for those strong left-liberal voters.
Good luck with that.
The main topic of that debate will be foreign policy, on
which Obama has established his imperialist credentials in ways that satisfy
even Dick Cheney and Ann Coulter. So there is likely to be a lot of agreement between Barack and Mitt on fundamental
principles. Since Romney is what he is
at the moment, this means that any attacks on Obama will be from the even-more
imperialist and Zionist right. And since
Obama is who he is, this means that his riposte will be to aggressively insist
that, no, he’s even-even-more imperialist and Zionist than Romney.
It will be fun, or maybe pathetic, to watch the “progressive”
MSNBC posse expound on that
fight. Of course, they’ll glow about
how Obama killed Bin Laden and how he will be a more effective enabler of
Israel. (Indeed, they are likely to
complain if he’s not aggressive enough on those topics.) Maybe they’ll even chirp a little about
“humanitarian intervention.” But they won’t want to dwell too long on
substantive issues like perpetual, ubiquitous drone warfare and the unfettered
presidential prerogative to attack foreign countries and assassinate American
citizens, since it is absolutely impossible to find anything “progressive” in
all that. Too much militarist posturing may
further discourage those already disillusioned base voters, so the MSNBC
commentators will probably gloss over the militarism, as they have done for
years, to focus on “style.”
If Obama comes across as more likeably assertive, he’ll be
declared the “winner.” And whoever wins
the debate, the more-imperialist-and-Zionist-than-thou discourse of American
politics will be ratcheted further to the right, with no tirades about that
from Chris or Ed.
Links cited:
http://beforeitsnews.com/2012/2012/10/ed-schulz-totally-stunned-at-obama-loss-in-debate-2437890.html.
Glenn Greenwald, “The Vindication of Dick Cheney” (http://www.salon.com/2011/01/18/cheney_72/).
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