Barack Obama Was Too Cool for the Press Room

[babylonsister]

https://www.thenation.com/article/barack-obama-was-too-cool-for-the-press-room/

Barack Obama Was Too Cool for the Press Room
The president’s insistence on thinking before acting drove the media around the bend... and toward Donald Trump.
By Eric Alterman
Today 5:05 am

EDITOR’S NOTE: This article is part of The Nation’s special issue on Barack Obama’s presidency, available in full here.


Our 44th president was the coolest guy in the room. It didn’t matter what room. He was always able to keep his head while everyone around him was losing theirs—and usually blaming him. Remember that viral meme from 2008, when it briefly seemed like John McCain might win? Everyone chill the f**k out, I got this, it read in block letters over a photo of Obama. Years later, after being lectured endlessly by Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu, Obama abruptly cut him off. “Bibi, you have to understand something,” he said. “I’m the African-American son of a single mother, and I live here, in this house. I live in the White House. I managed to get elected president of the United States. You think I don’t understand what you’re talking about, but I do.” That’s cool.

Yes, he made mistakes, especially in his belated willingness to face up to the mendacity of his opposition. Even so, Obama has proved himself the most consequential liberal president since Franklin Roosevelt. It’s not only passing health-care reform, saving the economy and the auto industry, and rationalizing relations with Cuba and Iran. It’s that he did so while leaving the country with a 4.6 percent unemployment rate, a 3.9 percent wage-growth rate, and one of the longest-lasting economic expansions on record. Then there’s the tone he set. As a rhetorician, he was a peer to FDR and John F. Kennedy. As an executive, he presided over eight years without a hint of genuine scandal. And he did all this while facing a nihilist opposition reinforced by a feckless media establishment that refused to make the most elementary distinctions between truth and falsehood. Was the president born in Kenya? Is he a Muslim? Satan himself? Who can say? Just so long as we give “both sides” a chance to make their case.

We know now that Obama’s appeal to the better angels of our nature did not, ultimately, succeed. The millions of onetime Obama voters who opted for Trump over Clinton chose an ignorant, ill-informed, racist, ethnocentric, dishonest, kleptocratic misogynist rather than the perfectly reasonable successor Obama had anointed. That’s their right. We can talk about why they made that decision. But there’s one factor that has gone overlooked in the election postmortems: the establishment media’s resentment of Obama’s thoughtfulness, his penchant for prudence and deliberation before embarking on any significant course of action. This stigmatization of intellect, I’d argue, helped pave the way for the monstrous manifestation of masculine id now poised to replace him.

snip//

By relentlessly promoting this kind of false equivalence between truth and bullshit, thoughtfulness and stupidity, the press sowed the seeds of the unimaginable disaster that our country and the world are about to reap in the form of Donald Trump’s presidency.

[Laurian]

1. And I therefore feel no need to look to the MSM

for "news". Fuck 'em, they are a main reason we're in this cesspool.

[zippythepinhead]

2. The truth is that

Obama saved this country. He is leaving office with low unemployment, stock markets at record high, saving the auto industry {which is vital for national security}, better health care, low inflation, a high popular approval rating, while being elected with the worst recession in american history.

He accomplished this with senator MccConnell saying "he hoped obama would fail." McConnell is a closet racist and a traitor to our country.

The same thing can be said of Bill Clinton. He left office with a surplus which was squandered by the next republican president.

Those are the facts recorded in history books.

George W stole the election with help from a partisan supreme court decision. Trump stole the rigged election with help from his good friend, Putin.

Another reason the republicans win is that they bribe the voters with tax cuts.

They blame the poor for the deficit but the truth is that the wars are the main reason for it.

Imagine fighting all these wars without taxes to pay for them. They borrow money instead to pay for them.

Plain fucking crazy. This is a country where most voters are motivated by their greed. Screw the children. Let them pay for it is the republican is the republican mind set.

[babylonsister]

3. I had a 'discussion'

with a trump fan yesterday who was poo-pooing climate change and thought dt was doing the right thing by making light of it. I suggested she might want to consider her kids and grandkids (not in exactly those words ) and she told me to leave her family out of it. As if that were possible...

[Crash2Parties]

4. And the GOP will shred it all, just out of spite that a black man lived in that house.

[demigoddess]

5. As usual, the democrat does a really good job, and the republicans convince

voters that the country is trashed beyond repair, so then we get a republican who WILL trash the country beyond repair until the next democrat comes into power and fixes it all over again. What else is new? It was an african american president that did the good job.

[babylonsister]

6. But 'this' "republican" is unlike anyone

we've seen before. I don't know if the damage he will do can be fixed.

[alarimer]

7. There are no better angels, not in Republicans anyway.

Those fucking shitheads are not ever going to play fair. And they are getting worse. Once Trumps finishes pillaging, we are done.

Just look at NC! They have staged a coup there. How could Obama or any Democrat even think these people have the best interests of the country at heart? They do not.

[loyalsister]

8. This stood out to me

"the establishment media’s resentment of Obama’s thoughtfulness, his penchant for prudence and deliberation before embarking on any significant course of action. This stigmatization of intellect, I’d argue, helped pave the way for the monstrous manifestation of masculine id now poised to replace him."

Obama responds to facts rather than assumptions and suppositions. He doesn't pick fights with name calling and making assumptions about motives because he's mature and thoughtful. Not appreciated in the age of conflict driven cable infotainment and reality TV.