The Distillation Of The Village Disdain For Obama

Now in one convenient place for your consumption, courtesy of Richard Cohen of the WaPo reviewing HBO's documentary on Barack Obama's election.

In a conventional movie, the hero has to change. Something has to happen -- the moment when character is revealed. Maybe he loses the girl and has to get her back. In politics, something similar is supposed to happen. You've got to have your PT-109, your Sunrise at Campobello, your walk on the beach with Billy Graham, your combat epiphany in Vietnam, your impoverished childhood, your peanut-farming family, your mission work abroad, your haberdashery that goes bankrupt.

Obama has those moments -- abandoned by his father, biracial in a world that prefers things neat, raised in Indonesia -- but they are not cited as life-changing events. None of them, at any rate, are given much importance in the documentary. Even the bitter primary fight with Hillary Clinton -- all that ugly stuff about race and Bill Clinton, of all people, being accused of playing the race card -- could have been happening to someone else. Obama observes his own life. He's not a participant. He calls Hillary to congratulate her on some insignificant win. "Bye bye," he says without bitterness as he snaps his phone shut. He could have been talking to anyone.

Does any of this matter, or is it merely interesting -- themes for a columnist ducking Afghanistan for yet another week? I am not sure. If Obama ends the deepest recession since the Great Depression, if he enacts health-care reform, if he succeeds in Afghanistan, then his presidency will have been remarkable, maybe even great -- the triumph of intellect. The man will be his own movement.

But if he fails in all or most of that, it will be because it is not enough to be the smartest person in the room. Warmth and commitment matter, too -- a driving sense of conviction, the fulsome embrace of causes and not just issues. That is not something Obama has yet shown. See the movie.

And if that doesn't sum up everything in the condescending, backhanded-complementing, pearl-clutching, you-know-he's-just-not-like-us Villager idiocy department, I don't know what ever will.

That one's going into the Future Stupidity files, it's so bad.

He might as well have written "Le sigh, le moan, the unbearable malaise of Barack Obama" and copy-pasted it 150 times, thus getting 1500 words with as much if not more actual meaning.

Haberdashery. The guy actually uses the word "haberdashery". You can practically see the spectacles glinting in the smoky light while Cohen is writing this, looking like the f'ckin food critic Anton Ego from Ratatouille.

In summation:

This:

equals this:

Fin.