Geez, it only came out last night. Yglesias also notes the parts about how Obama likes to "fake right and veer left."
Geez, it only came out last night.
That's like 1993 in blog time.
Becks, aren't you still nominally at the beach?
The people with real jobs came back on Tuesday. Only the professional bloggers are still there now.
From the article: a left-handed jump shot
Totally sinister.
5 gets it right.
The bastards. I want to be at the beach!
I want to be at the beach!
That didn't take long.
Yeah, Becks. Did you find something to do with all your relaxin' time?
Yes! I didn't spend much time sitting on the beach or by the pool (because of the short attention span) but I did spend a lot of time in the water attempting to use a wave board of some sort and inventing stupid pool games with fellow vacationers.
It looked really fun. If I hadn't also had the week off to enjoy leisure activities, my jealousy would have overwhelmed me.
" and inventing stupid pool games with fellow vacationers. "
"Hey! Look how my top came off again!!!"
Perhaps if I play basketball, I too can learn how to be black.
OK, I don't want to be a downer here - and certainly, any lost-bikini-tops stories are welcome - but let's not miss what this story is - yet another BS NYTimes "what's he really like?" story that, inevitably, makes fun of a Democrat. Gee, he didn't know any blacks until he started playing basketball? Working as a community organizer on the South Side? He "learned how to be black"? Why, it's almost like he's a flip-flopper who needs to hire a woman to teach him to be an alpha male.
I don't know what we can do to make the NYT stop this bullshit. Just the other day they ran an adoring story on Rudy that only makes sense if written (and edited) by someone who had never actually been in NYC during Rudy's mayoralty. Now it's time to write up Obama (not, I know, for the first time), and darned if it doesn't contribute to lots of RNC talking points about Dems in general and Obama in particular.
It's starting, people. We fight it now, or we fight President Rudy (or whichever Republican) later.
Does that mean NYT is for Hillary? Not very subtle.
He "learned how to be black"?
Wow. Just...wow.
What JRoth said. I hate these motherfuckers.
(am I allowed to say "motherfucker?")
Golly, do you kiss your mother with that mouth? (Motherkisser.)
17: Yes you are.
I say baseball bats to the heads of the lot of 'em: NYT, Supreme Court, Dick Cheney...
Cerebrocrat:
It is "Mudderfooker."
Scottish accent. Please try to practice.
You are also genuinely crazy. The article was awesome, and "He "learned how to be black"?" is totally legitimate and probably has the virtue of being a bit true. Did you people really not know any confused ethnics in college who were trying to "reconnect" with their roots?
I'm mostly with SCMT. There are a couple of cringeworthy lines in that piece, but overall it's pretty damn good.
JRoth, he started playing basketball in Honolulu in middle school, IIRC. And yeah, not a lot of black people. The difficulties of figuring out how to live in his own skin are very much part of the story Obama tells about himself.
At any rate it's a bit alarming that people are referring interchangeably to the quote from the brother-in-law, the story as a whole, and from Alameida's caricature of the story. Which latter is confused on this point, too.
Whereas John Kerry learned to be white by windsurfing. I read all about that in the NYT, too.
Yeah, seriously, the specific details of the article are, at most, 25% of the importance of it. Do you think that "he had to learn to be black" is going to A. resonate or B. not resonate, because it's part of his own personal narrative, blah fucking blah. Where the fuck have you been for the last 10 years?
In 2000, the NYT and the WashPo took the actually-documented fact that Gore's dad worked him (literally) like a hired hand and turned it into "Gore tells tall tales about pretending to work on a mythical farm." Meanwhile, they took Bush never showing up for Nat'l Guard duty and turned it into.... Oh, and they took Bush insider-trading himself out of bankruptcy with Harken and turned it into....
This isn't some fluke. This isn't some innocent reportage. This isn't a heartwarming slice-of-life look at a candidate. This is yet another bogus "personal story" that reinforces dubious storylines and paints a major Democrat as unnatural and untrustworthy (please point me to a major article about a Republican with a line as comically prejudicial as "fakes right, goes left"). The fact that the reporter is probably personally comfortable with fags and blacks is really irrelevant to what's happening here.
Huh. You know, again, generally I agree that that's a problem -- this article didn't set off my radar on that at all. It mostly seemed to butch him up, which can't do any harm, can it?
Yeah, I'm not getting the anger at all. Of course there will be all kinds of bullshit hit jobs on whoever the Democratic candidate is. But this story isn't one of them.
And I'd put this closer to the GWB regular brush-clearing guy BS than the stories on Kerry windsurfing, bird hunting, etc.
15: No, the NYT is not for Hillary, either. Which is my point. In the linked case, the NYT has been alerted 3 days in advance that they're about to print a demonstrably misleading, arguably false, depiction of her stance on her war vote. They don't care.
Again, for all we know, some of these people will vote for Hillary. But, professionally, they believe they have the most to gain by portraying Hillary as "calculating," Obama as racially ambiguous (and thus untrustworthy), Edwards as a faggot, Rudy as boldly heroic, and McCain as a heroically bold.
If you're OK with those terms of discussion, then by all means smile at this kind of article. I'm sure that, unlike the Whitewater stories that the Times has never retracted, there is at least some basis to this one. Whoop-di-fucking-doo.
25: Couldn't disagree more. One of the Dems big problems has been its inability to appeal to males, and specifically white males. 70% of male casual conversation revolves around two things: women and sports. And Dems never seem able to make use of that. This piece on Obama did it. "Fake right, go left" is a joke, and one that helps him in the primary.
When I read it, I assumed that the problem was that it was too Obama friendly, and would get called out on that ground.
Obama as racially ambiguous (and thus untrustworthy)
If racially ambiguous=untrustworthy, Obama is fucked regardless of what the NYT does.
26-28: If you think "It is a theme that runs throughout Mr. Obama's basketball career: a desire to be perceived as a regular guy despite great advantage and success. " is neutral or positive, then you're nuts.
But it hardly matters. The point is that this kind of story is bullshit. It doesn't matter if it's ostensibly positive or negative. It's not news - it doesn't tell us what his policies will be or whether he will, say, read his Daily Briefings. It's a fluffy story that pretends to tell us "who he is," but because of its very nature, it's only a vehicle for spin.
Look, maybe in 10 or 20 years I'll be willing to read this sort of thing again. But first, I want to see some penance - I want to see the Times, the Post, and all the rest proving to me that they can actually report on candidates' views and public positions, and the likely real-world impacts of them. Then it will - maybe - be time again for Dowd-style, "Frank Sinatra has a cold" reporting that attempts to tell us "who he is" - as judged by some reporter I've never fucking met.
Maybe.
I'd certainly agree that it's silly journalism, and that we'd all be better off if there were none of this sort of thing. I'm just having trouble reading this article specifically as a hit piece.
32.1: No, that's one of the "couple of cringeworthy lines" I mentioned in 22.
32.2, 3: But it matters immensely whether it's positive or negative. Gore and Kerry were hurt a lot by media fluff that purported to show who they "really are" by invoking a bunch of negative stereotypes. But Bush was helped a lot by equally vapid stuff invoking positive stereotypes. Sure, I'd rather have less fluff and more substance in the papers, but until we get there I'd rather have them fluffing Ds than Rs.
31: I thought of that as I wrote it. But it's very, very different hearing and thinking about Obama's race in terms of his words and his opponents', and in terms of how an "independent observer" reporter frames it. And every time a news story harps on it, it reinforces the idea that there's something unsettled - and unsettling - about Obama's race.
Just like the basic idea that Gore was smart and well-read on policy matters is not, on its face, a negative. But that got translated by a thousand "neutral" newspaper articles as "Gore's fucking egghead loser who thinks he's better than you." How's that working out for you, America?
As for Tim's 30, that would be great. Some of you may recall reading profiles in 2003 that talked about Kerry as being a lady's man who wore leather, rode a motorcycle, and windsurfed. Somehow that didn't some across as studly in '04, did it? It's almost as if bullshit emphasis on personal life provided a hook for ignoring policy substance and focusing on who'd be a better bar buddy.
Funny, that.
. Some of you may recall reading profiles in 2003 that talked about Kerry as being a lady's man who wore leather, rode a motorcycle, and windsurfed. Somehow that didn't some across as studly in '04, did it?
That's because being a ladies man who wears leather, rides a motorcycle, and windsurfs isn't studly. Nor, given the state of the NHL, is playing hockey. But sports that people actually like--it may not be studly, but it's normal and common-man-ish. Recall Harold Ford's (late) response to that commercial: "I like women and I like football. So what?" (paraphrase).
And if you think policy positions, especially those espoused during a campaign, are somehow not spin, then we deeply disagree. Recall, for example, "humble foreign policy."
Just to be clear, I didn't read it as a "hit piece." I just read it as yet another example of journalists abdicating their job to tell the public about complex issues (like the relative merits of the Edwards and Obama health plans) in favor of fun, easy pieces about unimportant issues. The fact that it seemed fluffy while containing clearly negative imagery is all the more damning.
Look, people want to "know" who their politicians are. So there's a place for fluffy family pieces. The trouble is when those pieces are supposed to tell us more. Clinton-the-philanderer is, in the Dowd School of Journalism, worse for women than Bush-the-Faithful. But it turns out to be 100% wrong. Its almost as if these fluffy pieces don't tell us anything useful about politicians.
The Society reporter can do stories about how much Obama loves b-ball, and Edwards' mill-working father, and Rudy's loving relationship with his children who hate him. But on A-1, shut the fuck up about it. Period.
36: There's plenty of BS on the trail. There's also plenty of easily-disproven BS (like Bush's dollar-for-tax cuts, dollar-for-deficit cutting line that no one but Krugman saw fit to point out was an outright lie) that the press is too busy fluffing about to engage with.
Also: do you live in a country where Ford won? Are things any better there, or about the same? I've been wondering.
Also: do you live in a country where Ford won? Are things any better there, or about the same? I've been wondering.
See "(late)". And he might not have one anyway. But no one seems to think that was a bad answer.
This is the biggest fluff piece on a Democratic politician I've ever seen. Obama's wife gets her brother to see if he hogs the ball or calls ticky-tack fouls? Obama's HLS buddies playing prison inmates? I mean fluff pieces are stupid and they suck and there were some bad lines in the article but I would think Obama has to be thrilled with this sort of stupid press coverage.
You know, if you can't dance and can't play the blues, basketball is the only way to discover your black essence.
Who knows whether this article will play positive or negative in the end, but JRoth is right that it symptomizes the fucked-upness of our politics.
"symptomizes the fucked-upness"....you read a line like that, you know you're looking at a real writer.