we still have not taken the measure of Obama: What sort of man is he? He is famously the man from everywhere, which means nowhere. He has a great and moving personal story, but he seems to withhold something -- to not need you as much as you need him. This is the essence of charisma: a cold love that goes only one way.This is how a columnist says that he doesn't like you while maintaining a scintilla of credibility amongst your equally vapid Washington scribblers. When you're too weak to just out and say you hate somebody's guts, you just pull together as many strawmen as you can find. "The man from everywhere, which means nowhere," is barely functional English. Seriously I would flunk a high school freshman for writing that. "Obama, seems to withold something." Really? Maybe he used to be a druggie? Maybe he was born to a single mom? Maybe he used to belong to a church that was unapologetically black? I think Obama should write a memoir which would then be hailed as penetrating and reflective. Yeah, that would get Cohen on his side
« Uhm, Chargers fans... | Main | Best speech at the convention » When you have nothing to say about Barack Obama27 Aug 2008 06:27 pm
Just make some shit up:
Comments (44)
In better news, it is official. Barack Obama is the first African-American nominee for President of a major political party in American history. Just reading the breaking news makes this white boy all teary. 
Honestly, column after column, I'm totally astonished that this man still has one of the most prestigious jobs in journalism.
Richard Cohen is an inspiration for lazy, untalented white people everywhere.
Well, wouldn't you admit that he doesn't quite have the typical politician's personality type? Or put it this way, the typical electorally successful politician's personality type. I'm just saying, if he loses, don't jump to blame his loss on racism and ignore the fact that a lot of people just didn't find him a terribly likable guy. Myself, I do find him personally appealing; I'll find it hard to vote for McCain because you rarely see a politician half as bright or reflective as Obama is. But he is a little introverted, a bit of a cold fish at times, a guy with a thinly concealed sense of self-satisfaction, a guy who's so smart that any attempt to connect with a broad audience is going to involve a degree of talking down to the voters' level - and in Obama's case he doesn't do a very good job of hiding the fact that he's talking down, whereas Bill was brilliant at that. None of those traits bother me in a politician, or in people generally for that matter, but I think many voters, if not most, are attracted to more gregarious sorts.
I'm not a fan of Santa's eyeglasses. They needlessly clash.
Asher, I guess. I have yet to see anything authorative that says "a lot of people don't find [Obama] to be a terribly likeable guy." Also, please don't wave the racism card. Given that racism isn't even mentioned in this post, it smacks of trolling.
Ahem, you're NOT your, please, in your second sentence after the quote. Wouldn't want you to flunk the functional English test. *s* Pax!
TC: The grammar police are here. Morzer: Mrs. Larson, is that you? (My 5th grade grammar teacher.)
Doody-heads [doods whose brains are feces] like Richard Cohen are fargin' iceholes. Maybe he could read Obama's first book. Doods like Cohen have a limited, impaired consciousness. Nothing Obama could possibly do would be acceptable to this special category of wingnutz. But they represent the past, and will be soon be relegated to garbage heap of history. I salute the nomination of Obama and am thrilled to my core. He's the first person since Bobby Kennedy who would be a better president that I would. That's saying a lot. Adin
Asher-- no, I'd like to have a beer with Barack Obama. Please notice how the Republican narrative virtually EVERY damned time out is to paint the other guy as an out-of-touch, effeminate elitist. Everything he does is labeled strange and aloof-- like vacationing in Hawaii, or taking his shirt off when swimming.
Richard Cohen suffers from a disease that led him to become paralyzed above the neck. He's a sad, pathetic person who has no business polluting the Washington Post with his profound stupidity.
Gawd, I hate that guy. I just read that passage to my Chinese fiancee who asked me if the guy (Cohen) is white. I don't know why she asked that and I won't ask.
we still have not taken the measure of Obama: What sort of man is he? He is famously the man from everywhere, which means nowhere. He has a great and moving personal story, but he seems to withhold something -- to not need you as much as you need him. This is the essence of charisma: a cold love that goes only one way. We still have not taken the measure of McCain: What sort of man is he? He is famously the man who gave his all for us, which means he has nothing left. He has a great and moving personal story, but he seems to withhold something -- to not need to respect and honor and care for you as much as he expects you to do all that for him. This is the essence of selfishness: a callous, dismissive belligerence that never ends.
I've never followed politics very closely before this election, the same cannot be said for sports. It's striking how similar politics journalism is to sports journalism. They are both dominated by mostly vapid commentary from people who are exclusively journalists and live completely in some meta-land, or those who have had a past careers and claim dubious expertise (ex-athlete, ex-political hack). And just often enough you find a gem of an article (Jackie MacMullan on Ray Allen's OCD, Jo Becker & Christopher Drew on Obama in Chicago) that's good enough to keep you coming back to sift through the drivel for another day (or week).
Shine, I am sure Ta-Nehisi can speak for himself if he would prefer not have a friendly voice point out a slip. I didn't make the rules for English, but I think it's worth writing a beautiful language correctly. If you differ on this point, please do explain why, but without the unhelpful sarcasm, if you don't mind.
It's striking how similar politics journalism is to sports journalism. Agreed, but at least in sports we can now look at statistics to prove points instead of just taking the journalists word on it. I do love it when those journalists have been proven wrong on the "conventional wisdom" by the data, but still spout it out like it's the truth.
Sid: Funny you should mention that. STEPHEN A. SMITH (all caps, an inside joke for Sports Blog devotees, b/c SAS likes to speak VERY, VERY LOUDLY), former Philly Inquirer columnist and current ESPN Shouting Head (and indie blogger!) was once on Hardball, I think after an Obama debate. He treated it like an athlete's performance ("HE DIDN'T BRING IT TONITE! I FELT LIKE HE WAS PHONING IT IN!"). Matthews was a bit befuddled, not because SAS didn't bring any insightful commentary, but because SAS actually showed passion (he looked downcast and angry, like his favorite team lost at the buzzer) rather than showing the phony, analytic remove pundits are supposed to possess. The Deadspin kids had good fun with it, but the commenters (some of the smartest around, when not making dick jokes) predicted that soon, political and sports commentary will be indistinguishable. After all, Olbermann came from sports, George Will is baseball geek, Bill Simmons wasn't allowed by ESPN to post his podcast of his interview with Obama, and Jay Mariotti recently quit the Chicago Sun-Times because he wasn't allowed to write a piece about Obama. Personally, I'm waiting for the Sean Hannity/Ron Artest interview. Or a cable news show. That would be awesome!
Because it's a blog with multiple, real-time posts a day without the benefit of an editor. I'm sure TC knows the rules of grammar. It's a very common typo, one that a spell check won't pick up. In fact, geek culture turned common typos ("teh" for "the") into their language. The previous proprietor of this space (as The Atlantic's liberal voice) was infamous for his many typos, and commenters made it into a fun, running joke. Your comment, while made with the best intentions, comes across as school-marmy. "Ahem, you're NOT your, please, in your second sentence after the quote. Wouldn't want you to flunk the functional English test. *s* Pax!" First thing I though of was "OK Mrs. Larson!" then trudging back to my desk. I was bummed for a second that TC wasn't going to be able to show his homework results to his Dad with a little star on it.
He is famously the man from everywhere, which means nowhere. With all the coherent writers out there, this guy has to crib ideas from Peggy Noonan?
you never see guys like cohen on the right.
Shine, I think you are streets ahead on the school-marm issue, and no doubt your teacher must take some of the credit. Now, do you have a real reason for people not to give Ta-Nehisi a friendly note about an error, or are you just going to play the all-American anti-intellectual card again?
Isn't this an utterly weird (and very unusual) word choice ("striver") in the headline to this "profile" of Obama by Jodi Kantor in the Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/28/us/politics/28obama.html?hp (The presentation of the note in the Wailing Wall story is strange too)
Don't bring an English teacher to a political campaign. The vapid, pretentious language hides the hard truth that what you want the federal government to accomplish is perceived by others to harm their interests and what they want it to do (or not do) is perceived by you to harm your interests. It is battle or, to paraphrase the Georgia Peach, politics is no pink tea, and mollycoddles had better stay out. It's a struggle for supremacy, a survival of the fittest. Here's an example of that vapid BS: That's why he's running — to end the war in Iraq responsibly, to build an economy that lifts every family, to make health care available for every American, and to make sure every child in this nation gets a world class education all the way from preschool to college. That's what Barack Obama will do as President of the United States of America. He'll achieve these goals the same way he always has — by bringing us together and reminding us how much we share and how alike we really are. He'll fix the economy by bringing us together? That fails English, Philosophy, Rhetoric, Economics and Latin. Man up and just say we'll help the poor by transferring money from the rich. At least its honest, direct and plausible. Like Mr. Coates says, its lame to When you're too weak to just out and say what you really mean or plan to do.
Even with people like Kristol and Krauthammer out there, Cohen still always manages to surprise me with the pure lameness that he is able to muster every week. However, I think this is an unfair read of his column. It seems to me his point was really more a criticism of Hillary Clinton for not doing a better job of endorsing Obama's personal characteristics. I disagree with him in the sense that I don't think that sort of endorsement was really what was called for and it wouldn't have seemed as genuine from her anyway. But his point is not really to disparage Obama. On the contrary, he feels that he would be well served by people hearing more of his personal biography from prominent party leaders like Hillary.
Man up and just say we'll help the poor by transferring money from the rich. Technically, all we're going to do is reduce the amount of money being transferred to the rich - typically, from the poor.
Richard Cohen is a grumpy old pseudo-liberal (recall his offense at Stephen Colbert's transcendent schtick at the otherwise useless and loathsome White House Correspondents Dinner and Wankfest). And the "what's this guy all about? He really needs to show me something" bit is nothing new. It's how lightweight pseudo-independents like Kathleen Parker and Megan McArdle justified their wildly unjustifiable support of George Bush, Jr. back in '04.
There's a bucket of Cohen's used Depends up on ebay, in case anyone wants to bid.
He'll fix the economy by bringing us together? That fails English, Philosophy, Rhetoric, Economics and Latin. I suspect you are being a bit disingenuous here. Is this really such a muddled statement for you? Certain types of politicians solve problems by gathering popular support for their proposals. Another way of saying that is "bringing people together." Hope that helps. Man up and just say we'll help the poor by transferring money from the rich. At least its honest, direct and plausible. This statement could be applied to any economic approach that isn't rooted in oligarchy or feudalism. In other words, unless one desires to return to the days of robber barons and indentured labor, there will always be some policy approach that can be described, within the context of a very limited mindset, as a transfer of wealth from the rich to the poor. The question for people who are not insane is finding the proper balance.
Sid Your description that sports journalism and political journalism are the same thing is slighty off. What you described is political punditry and TV football announcers have in common. A lot of noise telling you what you just heard in a campaign speech or saw on TV. Political journalism is closer to a radio announcer describing any sport but football.
Now, do you have a real reason for people not to give Ta-Nehisi a friendly note about an error, or are you just going to play the all-American anti-intellectual card again? No, I have no real reason for people not to point out typo's. I do have issues with didactic finger pointing. You simply could have said something like "Ta-Nehisi, its, you're, not your, please ..." Like I said, it happened with Yglesias all the time, and commenters had fun with it. Maybe you were, but I missed it. However, you wrote "you're NOT your, please ..." That's the online equivalent of raising you're, ahem, your voice. I was going to write something about your "all-American anti-intellectual card," but you misread my reference (it's a gamer reference), so I'll leave it at that, Anyway, this is silly. I'm done with this post. Since I'm sure you'll need the last word, flame away, morzer.
Nothing all night. T-N C is a hard one to figure out.
Hey Morzer, Ta-Nehisi does use the correct version of "you're". It's for "you are". "Your" is a posessive noun, right? So it wouldn't have been correct to use it in that sentence.
"Just reading the breaking news makes this white boy all teary." Benjamin, you said it for me. We are hip deep in history, and I love it. We're still slogging through molasses with a hundred pounds of rocks on our backs, but the ground has now shifted, and it & we can never go back. We've moved it, people! And I know the campaign's rule is never bring up race (case in point, the Convention), but with all those "Asians for Obama" and so on bumperstickers offered on his website, I wish they'd had the guts to put out one for us white folks. You know, "Honkies Who Love Obama" or something like that. I'd buy one!
I've heard rumors of a "rednecks for Obama" bumper sticker. But I suspect that's a different ethnicity than Honkies for Obama.
Corrected it after Morzer pointed it out. Sorry Mike. I'm with you guys tonight. Will be getting myself an AirCard after this one.
Corrected it after Morzer pointed it out. TNC- Besides, I'd hate to see the commenters be encouraged to turn into a hundred little Strunks and Whites, rather than addressing the substance of the posts. Since the comments are strong right now, I suspect that would reduce the value of them, and make them somewhat less interesting. Just the other side of the coin.
I despise Richard Cohen and agree the paragraph you quoted is puerile, but still this post is unfair to him by taking it out of context -- right after that paragraph he wrote: Still, what commends Obama to me is the impressive testimony of those who have known him over the years. In private conversations, they've told me -- sometimes in an awed way -- of what they describe as his special qualities, particularly the piercing intellect. This is the sort of testimony the American people have not heard -- or not heard enough of yet. The point of Cohen's post was to dog on Hillary for not offering any personal testimony on Obama's character -- not to say that there was something actually wrong with Obama's character.
JordanT: Agreed, but at least in sports we can now look at statistics to prove points instead of just taking the journalists word on it. I do love it when those journalists have been proven wrong on the "conventional wisdom" by the data, but still spout it out like it's the truth. Yeah, if you actually look at polling data, it's striking what a different picture emerges than you'd get from the talking heads. The same thing happens with actual election results--remember how Dean was the unbeatable front-runner in 2004, until someone went through the formality of counting a few votes? (And then, he was more-or-less destroyed by looping a funny-sounding scream over and over again on radio and TV, and making fun of it. I wonder if that happened because a lot of journalists felt burned by their comments about his frontrunner status early on, and his failure to win more votes.)
Just to put it in perspective, this is the guy who took up space in the Washington Post last year to write that math wasn't important or worth teaching to kids. So....yeah.
Don't bring an English teacher to a political campaign. The vapid, pretentious language hides the hard truth that what you want the federal government to accomplish is perceived by others to harm their interests and what they want it to do (or not do) is perceived by you to harm your interests. It is battle or, to paraphrase the Georgia Peach, politics is no pink tea, and mollycoddles had better stay out. It's a struggle for supremacy, a survival of the fittest. Here's an example of that vapid BS: That's why he's running — to end the war in Iraq responsibly, to build an economy that lifts every family, to make health care available for every American, and to make sure every child in this nation gets a world class education all the way from preschool to college. That's what Barack Obama will do as President of the United States of America. He'll achieve these goals the same way he always has — by bringing us together and reminding us how much we share and how alike we really are. He'll fix the economy by bringing us together? That fails English, Philosophy, Rhetoric, Economics and Latin. Man up and just say we'll help the poor by transferring money from the rich. At least its honest, direct and plausible. Like Mr. Coates says, its lame to When you're too weak to just out and say what you really mean or plan to do.
...Oops, bad pervious post... If my company pays me $100,000 and charges clients $200,000 for my services, some posters believe that (a) I stole money from the poor and/or (b) some of that $100,000 belongs to the poor. Fortunately, no responsible person and no person in power believes that. Anyone who said it would fail to be elected. So it needn't be seriously addressed. And to the responder who believes "bringing us together" means marshalling support for policies, that's makes no sense: its the policies that fix the economy, so, rhetorically, you should mention the compelling policy that will fix the economy. The point was this: if the quoted speaker meant what the posters are saying she meant, why didn't she just say it? That was Mr. Coate's point and I was just illustrating how such pabulum is the lingua franca of the political class and its chroniclers. Bad speeches and writing abound.
commenters have noted that sports statistics and polling data can serve as evidence for aforementioned sports/political journalists - to keep them honest. The problem is that in both cases there is a fair amount of statistical noise and in the end its both easy and common for journalists to cherry pick data to support their claims.
Sid: More importantly, in news coverage at least, a lot of the audience cares more about whether the speakers/writers are entertaining and rooting for their preferred team than whether they're getting the facts straight or are coherent.
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Oh great, now Cohen's going to call you a Communist.
Posted by Darius | August 27, 2008 6:45 PM