So wrong in so many ways

Maureen Dowd has assistants who outline her columns for her, then she goes in and adds the snark.  In today's case, she didn't even really do that.  She "relies heavily"--let's say--on the opinions of Jonathan Alter.  Alter has just finished a book on the Obama administration.  (I much enjoyed his biography of Franklin Roosevelt.)

Alter is worked up over the Obama administration's relationship with the press, but Dowd spins that to include the Washington establishment as well.  Obama is acting snooty to both of them.  "Obama is not a needy person, but he needs to think of himself as purer than this town."  (One wonders:  How could she possibly know this?)

They said the same thing about Bill Clinton.  "He trashed the place and it's not his place," as David Broder famously said.  He was from Arkansas, land of hillbillies.  What's he doing among us?  

The President is aloof from the Washington establishment, says the Washington establishment.  He doesn't schmo-o-o-ze enough.  Oh, if only he would reach out to us!  If only he would "reach across the aisle", we could break the legislative logjam and something could finally get done!

One wonders what planet these people are living on.  The President has reached out time and time again, and, each time, has met absolute intransigient resistance.  Alter and Dowd think this is a problem of etiquette?--or, more to the point, Obama's etiquette?

In my view, Obama has done too much of this, not too little.  It's not his job to make the people on the other side feel valued and appreciated.  It's his job to make the people who elected him glad they did.

David Plouffe told Alter that Obama was “better suited to politics in Scandinavia than here,” meaning, Alter writes, “that he was a logical and unemotional person in an illogical and emotional capital.”

So the situation would be better if Obama were less "logical and unemotional" and more "illogical and emotional" like everyone else?  The problem is Obama's sanity and reality contact?  

 

Comments

[lillianjane]

I remember enjoying her writing 20-some years ago. This seems to have given her tenure. If Obama winked at her just once I think she would write a very different column.

I can't buy their schmoozing argument when Bill Clinton was the best schmoozer of all time and they loathed him for it.

[John Petty]

Really good comment, especially the "wink" part.