Today's BoBo Blather Against Obama-Rama

I really was going to ignore this, seriously, but I thought I’d better not (I know I always say that, but it’s true); what we’re seeing is the next ever-more-childish media contrivance based on the whole “Barack Obama is an elitist” fiction. And who else to do the “honors” but the New York Times’ own David Brooks here…

(In the pox on democracy debate the other night) Obama piously condemned the practice of lifting other candidates’ words out of context, but he has been doing exactly the same thing to John McCain, especially over his 100 years in Iraq comment.

Not only is that wrong, but McCain himself can’t even make up his mind as to whether or not he’s referring to a combat presence of what amounts to a ceremonial one as peacekeepers and nothing else, unless hostilities broke out (a silly notion anyway considering that our very presence is fueling the insurgency).

…(Obama) made an iron vow to get American troops out of Iraq within 16 months.

From Obama's web site here...

Obama will immediately begin to remove our troops from Iraq. He will remove one to two combat brigades each month, and have all of our combat brigades out of Iraq within 16 months. Obama will make it clear that we will not build any permanent bases in Iraq. He will keep some troops in Iraq to protect our embassy and diplomats; if al Qaeda attempts to build a base within Iraq, he will keep troops in Iraq or elsewhere in the region to carry out targeted strikes on al Qaeda.

Also, on the home front...

(Obama) made a sweeping read-my-lips pledge never to raise taxes on anybody making less than $200,000 to $250,000 a year.

I’m not sure what Brooks is referring to exactly, but this tells us about Obama’s desire to create some kind of a “donut,” if you will, between the $96 limit on earnings subject to Social Security withholding and about $200-$250 K in earnings, conceived by Obama economic adviser Austan Goolsbee. Obama’s desire is to increase the amount paid into Social Security by the top 6.5 percent of earners in this country while protecting those whose salaries fall in the “donut” range from having to pay into Social Security if they decline to do so; I have to admit that I myself was wrong when I previously said that Obama wanted to get rid of the cap altogether.

Back to BoBo...

Then there are the cultural issues. Charles Gibson and George Stephanopoulos of ABC News are taking a lot of heat for spending so much time asking about Jeremiah Wright and the “bitter” comments. But the fact is that voters want a president who basically shares their values and life experiences. Fairly or not, they look at symbols like Michael Dukakis in a tank, John Kerry’s windsurfing or John Edwards’s haircut as clues about shared values.

(And of course, "voters" wouldn't look at how John McCain's wife Cindy has basically financed their high lifestyle and his entire political career since she's an heiress to a beer fortune, because that's OK since they're Republicans - give me a break.)

At this point, I’m going to defer to Glenn Greenwald who tells us here…

Brooks takes whatever opinions he happens to hold on a topic, and then -- without citing a single piece of evidence -- repeatedly asserts that "most Americans" hold this view, and then bases his entire "argument" on this premise. Thus, the only way for Democrats to have any hope of winning elections is to repudiate their radical, rabid Leftist base and instead follow Brooks' beliefs, because that is "centrism." This is actually a defining belief of the Beltway pundit, and it is as intellectually corrupt as an argument gets.

There is now this new invention called "polling data" which reveal what "most Americans" actually think about virtually any topic. Yet when Beltway pundits claim that "most Americans" think X (and, invariably, X = "the opinion of the Beltway pundit" which = "conventional Beltway wisdom"), they rarely cite polls because those polls virtually always contradict what they are claiming about what "most Americans" think.

Instead, Beltway pundits believe that they are representative of, anointed spokespeople for, the Average Real American, and thus, whatever the pundit's belief is about an issue is -- in their insular, self-loving minds -- a far more reliable indicator of what "Americans believe" than something as tawdry as polling data. Nobody uses this manipulative tactic more than David Brooks.

And in the prior comments from BoBo, just replace the phrase “most Americans” with “voters,” and you’ve got a typical BoBo rehash of his own biased beliefs dressed up in Broder-esque fashion as the opinion of Americans who, for the most part, long since stopped taking BoBo seriously anyway.

A generic Democrat now beats a generic Republican by 13 points, but Obama is trailing his own party. One in five Democrats say they would vote for McCain over Obama.

I honestly don’t know what “Obama is trailing his own party” means, but this tells you that Obama leads McCain currently 49-44 percent, while Clinton leads 48-45 percent (though I’ll admit that I think those numbers are nonsense because its waaay too early to take them seriously – it will only matter when Clinton finally faces reality and gives up, this making way for Obama vs. McCain to begin in earnest).

General election voters are different from primary voters. Among them, Obama is lagging among seniors and men. Instead of winning over white high school-educated voters who are tired of Bush and conventional politics, he does worse than previous nominees. John Judis and Ruy Teixeira have estimated a Democrat has to win 45 percent of such voters to take the White House. I’ve asked several of the most skillful Democratic politicians over the past few weeks, and they all think that’s going to be hard.

Yep, we’re dealing with more “conventional wisdom” here, people; some anonymous “skillful Democratic politicians” think the election will turn on high-school educated voters who think that Obama is an elitist over the whole “bitter,” “cling” nonsense.

According to the Gallup poll cited above, though (as Greenwald predicted), it looks like the majority of those surveyed have pretty much put that idiocy behind, unlike our media gasbags.

Well, at least he didn’t say Obama was “the new sex,” as he did here about memory (still don’t get that, honestly). However, there’s still months to go in the campaign, sadly, meaning there’s time for more pointless, stupid media narratives to be concocted in lieu of reality and reporting of substance (but then again, that will just give me more work to do).