Nooners' Torch Song For President Obama

Ahh, Peggy Noonan.  When one needs the opinion of President Obama by a woman with the same dysfunctional love-hate relationship as a drunken stalker ex on a lost weekend, you can always count on Nooners.

But that actually is not what I want to talk about. I want to talk about something that started to become apparent to me during the debt negotiations. It's something I've never seen in national politics.

It is that nobody loves Obama. This is amazing because every president has people who love him, who feel deep personal affection or connection, who have a stubborn, even beautiful refusal to let what they know are just criticisms affect their feelings of regard. At the height of Bill Clinton's troubles there were always people who'd say, "Look, I love the guy." They'd often be smiling—a wry smile, a shrugging smile. Nobody smiles when they talk about Mr. Obama. There were people who loved George W. Bush when he was at his most unpopular, and they meant it and would say it. But people aren't that way about Mr. Obama. He has supporters and bundlers and contributors, he has voters, he may win. But his support is grim support. And surely this has implications.

Ahh, we're back to Nooners being spurned by the imaginary Old Spice Guy she sees the President to be and instead she sees the bloodless, frigidly logical Vulcan who inspires nothing in the depth of her own broken soul, and that's pretty much normal Nooners.  Oh, but she's really, really mad at the President in this week's column.

The secret of Mr. Obama is that he isn't really very good at politics, and he isn't good at politics because he doesn't really get people. The other day a Republican political veteran forwarded me a hiring notice from the Obama 2012 campaign. It read like politics as done by Martians. The "Analytics Department" is looking for "predictive Modeling/Data Mining" specialists to join the campaign's "multi-disciplinary team of statisticians," which will use "predictive modeling" to anticipate the behavior of the electorate. "We will analyze millions of interactions a day, learning from terabytes of historical data, running thousands of experiments, to inform campaign strategy and critical decisions."

This wasn't the passionate, take-no-prisoners Clinton War Room of '92, it was high-tech and bloodless. Is that what politics is now? Or does the Obama re-election effort reflect the candidate and his flaws?

He's too intelligent, too nerdy, too analytical, and he's failed failed failed FAILED to stop the naughty Tea Party from ruining her cotillion or whatever.  Look, the only thing more gorram obnoxious than the stupid President Angry McBlackhulksmash stuff is the President Tuvok bullshit, and I for one am personally getting sick of the cartoonish racism that says Barack Obama is only capable of two emotional states, endless rage or nothing.

If you argue that President Obama is even capable of complex nuance, you're a hopeless Obot chump, apparently.  Clinton just "got people" and Dubya just "got people" and Obama just "doesn't get people", so he's a flippin' caricature, the kind of two-dimensional meatbag you find in a Michael Bay film.  He's always, always too angry (and makin' the white folk swoon with his ethnic rage) or just dead inside, and it's getting to the point where people just don't choose to understand that there's a cultural difference in when, where, and how a black man in America is allowed to display emotion as opposed to a white man, let alone when that man is President of the United States.

I understand the need of the Village to distill everything down to sound bites and political cartoons that sum up Presidents in a split second, but that's not who Barack Obama is.  The sound bites are not the man, and when this much is at stake with the Tea Party literally trying to destroy the economy in order to take POTUS out, relying on cardboard standies is not only bad judgment, it's bad for the country as a whole.

So yes, President Barack Hussein Obama is a complex, complicated man.  He has a unique perspective on a lot of American culture and on American politics.  He is staggeringly intelligent.  He has a loving family.  He was raised by a single white mother in Hawaii.  He challenges all the preconceived notions of what a black man is in America in 2011.   But what do we get?  Reductio ad Noonium.  She can't handle the truth.  Hell, tens of millions of Americans can't.

Oh, and Nooners is totally hawt for POTUS.  Just so you know.