When you've lost Matt Taibbi
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The Vanishing Legacy of Barack Obama
“Even Scaled Back,” wrote Vanity Fair, “Barack Obama’s Birthday Bash Is the Event of the Season.” Not even the famed glossy Bible of the unapologetic rich seemed sure of whether to write Obama’s Birthday bash straight or as an Onion headline: what did the “Event of the Season” mean during a pandemic?
A former president flying half the world’s celebrities to spend three days in a maskless ring-kissing romp at a $12 million Martha’s Vineyard mansion, at a moment when only a federal eviction ban prevented the outbreak of a national homelessness crisis, was already an all-time “Fuck the Optics” news event, and that was before the curveball. Because of what even the New York Times called “growing concerns” over how gross the mega-party looked, not least for the Joe Biden administration burdened with asking the nation for sober sacrifice while his ex-boss raised the roof with movie stars in tropical shirts, advisers prevailed upon the 44th president to reconsider the bacchanal. But characteristically, hilariously, Obama didn’t cancel his party, he merely uninvited those he considered less important, who happened to be almost entirely his most trusted former aides.
There’s a glorious moment in the life of a certain kind of politician, when either because their careers are over, or because they’re so untouchable politically that it doesn’t matter anymore, that they finally get to remove the public mask, no pun intended. This Covid bash was Barack Obama’s “Fuck it!” moment.
He extended middle fingers in all directions: to his Vineyard neighbors, the rest of America, Biden, the hanger-on ex-staffers who’d stacked years of hundred-hour work weeks to build his ballyhooed career, the not quite A-listers bounced at the last minute for being not famous enough (sorry, Larry David and Conan O’Brien!), and so on. It’d be hard not to laugh imagining Axelrod reading that even “Real Housewife of Atlanta” Kim Fields got on the party list over him, except that Obama giving the shove-off to his most devoted (if also scummy and greedy) aides is also such a perfect metaphor for the way he slammed the door in the faces of the millions of ordinary voters who once so desperately believed in him.
Obviously, getting rich and not giving a shit anymore is the birthright of every American. But this wasn’t supposed to be in the script for Obama, whose remarkable heel turn has been obscured by the Trump years, which incidentally were at least partly his fault. The history books and the still-starstruck press will let him skate on this, but they shouldn’t.
Obama was set up to be the greatest of American heroes, but proved to be a common swindler and one of the great political liars of all time — he fooled us all. Moreover, his remarkably vacuous post-presidency is proving true everything Trump said in 2016 about the grasping Washington politicians whose only motives are personal enrichment, and who’d do anything, even attend his wedding, for a buck. Trump’s point was that he, Trump, was already swinishly rich, while politicians have only one thing to sell to get the upper class status they crave: us.
Obama did that. He sold us out, and it’s time to start talking about the role he played in bringing about the hopeless cynical mess that is modern America.
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So, Trump was right about this aspect of The Swamp...
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“I am fond of pigs. Dogs look up to us. Cats look down on us. Pigs treat us as equals.” ~Winston S. Churchill
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Democrats Finally Get Comfortable Saying Obama Is a Jerk
Last week, our Charlie Cooke spotlighted an MSNBC commentator insisting Florida governor Ron DeSantis is “more dangerous than Trump” and accurately dissected how Democrats talk about Republican officials in and out of office.
This is simply how Democrats begin to talk about Republican candidates whom they believe are capable of winning a national election. When such candidates reach office, they’re Hitler. When they’ve left office, they’re bad, but not as bad as the ones in office. And when they’re dead, they’re the sort of Republicans whom the living ones should be more like — yes, even if, when they were alive, they, too, were deemed to be Hitler.
There’s an inverse relationship with Democratic party lawmakers. The more time that passes since a particular Democrat was in elected office, the easier it gets for his fellow Democrats to acknowledge glaring flaws that they previously ignored or downplayed. Six years after Ted Kennedy died, it was safe to make a movie about Chappaquiddick – and lay out the facts that Kennedy left a young woman to drown. In 2017, nearly 17 years after Bill Clinton left office and when it was clear his wife would not become president someday, Matt Yglesias and Senator Kirsten Gillibrand could safely acknowledge that Clinton’s affair with an intern should have forced his resignation.
And now this appears to be the moment when Democrats feel comfortable publicly ripping into Barack Obama. There were moments during the 2020 Democratic presidential primary where candidates and factions within the party grappled with their disappointment and recognized that if Obama was as terrific a president as they insisted, the American people would not have elected Donald Trump.
Different Democrats will give Obama different grades, but many would acknowledge that on some level they were disappointed by the outcome of his presidency — if for no other reason, the gradual decimation of the Democratic party at the local, state, and national levels from 2009 to 2016. George Soros called Barack Obama “my greatest disappointment.”
Matt Stoller contends Obama was far too cozy with big corporations and backed bailouts. The Affordable Care Act turned out to be a much more mixed bag than Democrats expected. As Michael Brendan Dougherty observed, last night ten Democrats discussed health care at length and never mentioned Obamacare.
But what we’re seeing with criticism of Obama’s big birthday bash – particularly in Maureen Dowd’s column – is different; the focus is not merely policy disappointments, but an acknowledgement that Obama is being a narcissistic, self-absorbed, tone-deaf jerk.
“I think the nouveaux riches Obamas are seriously tone-deaf,” said the authority on opulence, André Leon Talley. “We all love Beyoncé. But people have so many things to worry about with Covid, voting rights, climate warming. People are afraid of being evicted from their homes. And the Obamas are in Marie Antoinette, tacky, let-them-eat-cake mode. They need to remember their humble roots.”
Obama was a cool cat as a candidate in 2008, but after he won, he grew increasingly lofty. Now he’s so far above the ground, he doesn’t know what’s cool. You can’t be cool if you diss the people who took risks for you when you were a junior senator — only a few years out from paying off your student loans — taking on the fearsome Clinton machine.
The theme of Dowd’s column is that Obama has changed, that he was once this humble, relatable, loyal and all-around good guy, but the riches and leisure of post-presidential life have corrupted him.
But… is today’s Barack Obama really all that different than the guy who took American politics by storm more than a decade ago?
You may recall the McCain campaign scoring a rare hit on Obama in the summer of 2008, with an ad calling Obama a celebrity, interspersing images of Britney Spears and Paris Hilton. Once Obama was sworn in, “a burst of entertaining took hold of the iconic, white-columned home of America’s head of state,” as the recession continued, with the Obamas threw parties serving “Maryland crab, Wagyu beef, Nantucket scallops and citrus salad,” in between party fundraisers with “quail egg with caviar and salmon ceviche.” It may not have derailed his presidency, but his critics saw a vulnerability there, with Mitt Romney declaring of wasteful spending in 2012, “I think the example starts at the top. People have to see that the president is not taking elaborate vacations and spending in a way that is inconsistent with the state of the overall economy and the state of the American family.”
Throughout his presidency, Obama rarely turned down an opportunity to make a cameo in some television show. Obama appeared on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno and The Late Show with David Letterman, slow-jammed the news on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, taped a question-and-answer promoting Conan O’Brien’s transition to The Tonight Show, taped a promotion for George Lopez, taped a video for The Colbert Report, taped a prime-time special with Oprah, grilled with Food Network star Bobby Flay, popped up in commercials during Thanksgiving football, and filled out his NCAA basketball tournament picks on ESPN every year, and of course, American Idol. (More than once.) He appeared on The View in fall 2012, and made his second appearance as president on Jon Stewart’s Daily Show that fall as well. He sat down for an interview with comedic actor Zach Galifianakis.
By 2014, Obama announced that ISIS had beheaded journalist James Foley, and then went straight to the golf course – on Martha’s Vineyard, of course.
Obama has always loved hanging out with celebrities, and always enjoyed the luxuries that come with being the most powerful person in the world. (His presidential portrait features him wearing a $15,000 Rolex.)
Should we be surprised that Sotheby’s is selling “President Barack Obama Player Exclusive deadstock Nike Hyperdunks for $25,000” now? The nearly $12 million estate on Martha’s Vineyard? (Say, wasn’t climate change and rising sea levels going to make Martha’s Vineyard waterfront property a risky investment?) The property in Hawaii, where he’s exploiting a loophole to keep a seawall in place, in opposition to environmental guidelines?
Obama accumulated all this, while lecturing the world’s rich: “There’s only so much you can eat. There’s only so big a house you can have. There’s only so many nice trips you can take. I mean, it’s enough.”
Obama has always been this guy. The only thing that really changed is that now it’s safe for other Democrats to talk about it.
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The watch:
https://www.hodinkee.com/articles/president-brack-obama-official-portrait-rolex-cellini-watch
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I guess the Obama honeymoon is finally over for this guy. How brave of him to write this expose so soon.
I'm no expert, but...
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@doctor-phibes said in When you've lost Matt Taibbi:
I guess the Obama honeymoon is finally over for this guy. How brave of him to write this expose so soon.
Yup. As the NRO article points out, it took 6 years after Ted Kennedy died to make a movie about Chappaquidick (sp?). And the "enough money" line made it in as well.
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We're still waiting for you to acknowledge that George Washington was an a-hole.
My Russian friend occasionally goes off on rants about John Knox ("THAT ASSHOLE!!!!"). He still seems to take it personally.
I'm no expert, but...
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@doctor-phibes said in When you've lost Matt Taibbi:
We're still waiting for you to acknowledge that George Washington was an a-hole.
He was. He was brutal, and had no compunction about using the lash (unlike the Brits, however, he avoided rum and sodomy afaik) or execution of deserters.
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We have the freedom to choose our actions, but we do not get to choose our consequences.
Yes, there are two paths you can go by, but in the long run, there's still time to change the road you're on. -
@improviso said in When you've lost Matt Taibbi:
So we can expect D.C. to be renamed soon???
Georgetown sounds good to me.
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@improviso said in When you've lost Matt Taibbi:
So we can expect D.C. to be renamed soon???
Baltimore has more of a legitimate claim to a new name than D.C. if you follow that line of thinking.
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@horace said in When you've lost Matt Taibbi:
CRT teachings are very clear that Washington was a jerk.
Which white people in history aren’t jerks according to CRT?
I don’t get where you stop without rewriting our entire history and the history of the world. But of course if you do that tons of people of color don’t fare well.
In fact it might be discovered that every political system that achieved dominance is inherently flawed.
I get so confused what I am supposed to learn.
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@loki said in When you've lost Matt Taibbi:
@horace said in When you've lost Matt Taibbi:
CRT teachings are very clear that Washington was a jerk.
Which white people in history aren’t jerks according to CRT?
I don’t get where you stop without rewriting our entire history and the history of the world. But of course if you do that tons of people of color don’t fare well.
In fact it might be discovered that every political system that achieved dominance is inherently flawed.
I get so confused what I am supposed to learn.
You, personally, as an adult human, are not supposed to learn anything. You are a necessary loss, sacrificed to the win of the younger minds.
The younger minds are to learn that history began at the point that people started doing bad things. The worst of those bad things was American slavery. Now, the small portion of human existence proceeding that original sin, must atone for it, by not being politically conservative.
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@horace said in When you've lost Matt Taibbi:
@loki said in When you've lost Matt Taibbi:
@horace said in When you've lost Matt Taibbi:
CRT teachings are very clear that Washington was a jerk.
Which white people in history aren’t jerks according to CRT?
I don’t get where you stop without rewriting our entire history and the history of the world. But of course if you do that tons of people of color don’t fare well.
In fact it might be discovered that every political system that achieved dominance is inherently flawed.
I get so confused what I am supposed to learn.
You, personally, as an adult human, are not supposed to learn anything. You are a necessary loss, sacrificed to the win of the younger minds.
The younger minds are to learn that history began at the point that people started doing bad things. The worst of those bad things was American slavery. Now, the small portion of human existence proceeding that original sin, must atone for it, by not being politically conservative.
I have thought this through with the young savants in my life.
I tell them they are pikers making fun of boomers. At their age I had already learned to not trust anyone over 30. If they looked at our culture in the 1970’s they still have a long way to catch up and they really haven’t invented anything new under the sun except maybe if you have to bake a wedding cake for everyone.
