What kind of pathological behavior did President Obama engage in? Maybe the media’s linking Obama to athletes involved in scandal might be pathological. And since when has Twitter become mainstream media? Mainstream media is The New York Post which had more cover stories (twenty) about Tiger than about 9/11.
Like the old puritan elders who condemned women who were manipulated by Hawthorne’s black man in the forest, Frank Rich signed up for the Tiger mania when he coupled Tiger Woods with the Enron scandal and like the Huffington Post, which printed a piece linking Tiger’s failure with that of Barack Obama’s that was so outrageous that it was pulled. Rich, under the category of “they all look alike” wrote:
Woods will surely be back on the links once the next celebrity scandal drowns his out. But after a decade in which two true national catastrophes, a wasteful war and a near-ruinous financial collapse, were both in part byproducts of the ease with which our leaders bamboozled us, we can’t so easily move on. This can be seen in the increasingly urgent political plight of Barack Obama. Though the American left and right don’t agree on much, they are both now coalescing around the suspicion that Obama’s brilliant presidential campaign was as hollow as Tiger’s public image — a marketing scam designed to camouflage either his covert anti-American radicalism (as the right sees it) or spineless timidity (as the left sees it).
Let’s see. As a result of the Enron scandals, pensioners lost billions of dollars, twenty thousand people lost their jobs and some of those tied to Enron committed suicide. Isn’t Rich’s linking of Tiger Woods and Enron as strange as that of a white writer at the end of the 1990s nominating O.J. as the individual who defined that decade. But his noticing a right and left agreement was right on target.
While for Rich, Tiger is the most scandalous figure of the decade and indeed defines the decade, for Americans, when asked by a Wall Street Journal/NBC poll “What public figure disappointed you most in 2009?” John Edwards came in at thirty-three percent. Tiger Woods came in at a distant sixteen percent. While Jan Crawford, chief legal correspondent for CBS, dubbed Caucasian Broadcasting for its lack of inclusion, said on January 3, Face The Nation, that Americans were beginning to question Obama’s competency, according to a USA Today/Gallup Poll, Barack Obama, among American men, was the most admired.
On January 3 on CNN, Peggy Noonan, who claimed to speak for “the American people,” criticized Obama’s domestic programs while being allowed to dominate a panel that included black Princeton historian Nell Painter, and when Ms. Painter attempted to challenge Ms. Noonan’s Republican talking points about higher taxes, blah, blah, with useful information, she was interrupted by Ms. Noonan whom Fareed Zakaria called a historian. Historian? Ms. Noonan is famous because she coined the phrase “A thousand points of light,” which meant that individuals and charitable institutions should be charged with relieving the country’s poor instead of the government, ignoring the fact that many of the main charities depended upon government support. On the Sunday that Ms. Noonan appeared, The New York Times reported that thanks to President Clinton’s Welfare Reform Act, for six million people, food stamps were the only source of income.
Ms. Noonan, Tina Brown and Maureen Dowd represent the creeping Antoinettism that is affecting the upper-middle-class sisterhood, but at least Ms. Noonan, who believes that health care is a frivolous issue, even though millions of her white sisters are suffering because of a lack of health care, does not believe that her situation is worse than that of the black, brown, yellow and white male poor, which is what was implied when Gloria Steinem said that “gender” is the most “restrictive force” in American life. According to Peter Manso, in a forthcoming revised biography of Norman Mailer, Ms. Steinem’s projects are backed by a Provincetown lesbian who is worth from two hundred to three hundred million dollars. Gender doesn’t seem to be “restricting” Ms. Steinem.
The year ended with progressives risking the traditional charge that blacks and Latinos are “invisible” to them. This is what Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man was all about. A former generation of “progressives” abandoning domestic issues, like home foreclosures and the poor, for crises that were taking place overseas. For today’s progressives, there is more interest in prison conditions in Gitmo than in Rikers Island, a few miles from where progressive Amy Goodman broadcasts Democracy Now. More concern about torture in secret prisons abroad than about torture in Chicago and Buffalo.
While progressive commentators insist that Obama is losing his base and that millions of progressives are abandoning the president his poll numbers among non-whites at the end of the year was a whopping seventy-three percent approving, twenty percent disapproving according to the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press.
On ESPN, a sports network, Barack Obama was linked to Michael Vick, another black male celebrity who was subjected to an endless Zapruder-like loop. To the dismay of sports writers, traditionally the most backward and racist contingent of the Jim Crow media, his teammates, the Philadelphia Eagles, applauded Vick’s courage by giving him an award and football fans gave him enthusiastic response upon his return to playing football.
Clay Travis of Fanhouse decided that he didn’t need fellow white panelists to help him weigh in on the ten sports scandals of the decade. He decided that he would be the single judge of their actions. Seven out of ten scandals involved black athletes, including Kobe Bryant. The night before I read about the Travis verdict, I had watched a sizable segment of Sacramento Kings fans abandon their team to cheer Kobe’s making a crucial buzzer three-pointer to defeat their team.
Travis is not the only one who is out of touch. The public that, when polled, found Obama to be the most admired of American men, disagreed with Frank Rich when he agreed with Rush Limbaugh that Tiger and Obama were “running neck and neck as the most unlikable frauds in the world.”
About the pundits, both of the left and right, meaning white when they refer to Obama’s “base,” or “his friends” abandoning Obama, Jamison Foser of Media Matters, December 23, wrote under the headline: “Why does Howard Kurtz use white public opinion as the neutral baseline?”
When you get past Howard Kurtz’s weird obsession with Tiger Woods, and his clumsy attempts to link Woods and President Obama, there’s another problem with his piece today about Obama’s race. (Take a look: www.washingtonpost.com)
“I have no doubt that no matter how deep a hole Obama digs himself, African Americans, who are already the most loyal Democratic group, will remain his fiercest defenders…”
In Kurtz’s formulation, the fact that white support for Obama is at only forty-two percent means that Obama has dug himself a hole. White support for Obama, in this construct, is the impartial baseline against which Kurtz assesses Obama’s “true” performance as president — he has dug himself a hole. And since African-American opinion of his performance doesn’t reflect that “true” assessment, African Americans will fiercely defend Obama no matter what. Kurtz’s formulation is simply a subtler version of Chris Matthews’ tendency to use the phrase “regular folks” when he means “white folks.”