...this is not the Civil War, Obama is not Lincoln -- and even if he were and all circumstances were identical in every way, out of simple self-respect you'd think people would get embarrassed about using the catch phrase they'd heard a million times for the million-and-first. To me, listening to this unvaried refrain is like hearing "bitchin' !" among my fellow teenagers in the late 1960s or "groovy! " after that. And I'm in China!Slang goes out of style for a very good reason--at some point the words or terms of the day fail to properly describe a new day, a new situation, a new time. The reason why people who aren't a part of group sound stupid using slang, is because they often don't understand the words they're using on any deep level--they're just parroting what sounds cool. Ditto for all these cats running with this team of rivals notion. When you repeat that line--something which Obama is more than happy to see reporters do--what you're basically saying is "I quit. I refuse to respect my subject enough to think about what he specifically represents."
The best thing about the human brain is that it's original. None of us think the same. When thinkers amd writers refuse to employ that originality, when they opt against telling us what is particular, what is specific, what is unique about this moment in time, when they decide to go with the easiest received wisdom at hand, as opposed to deliberating, as opposed to banging their heads on the wall until they arrive at something new, than they are not writers or thinkers any more, but henchmen in the employ of propagandists. I say that as an Obama fan. Stop fucking pushing the cliches this dude is feeding you. Wake the fuck up and think for yourself. This is exactly how we got into Iraq. This isn't a damn game.
The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood 
If American workers were as lazy as the vast majority of the mainstream press, our economy would be in just as bad a shape as the MSM.
Wait...
wow...i could feel that all the way from my house...hopefully the cracks in the earth are just cosmetic....
I'll spot you one "Michelle Obama is this generation's Jackie Kennedy" if you need it next year.
I still think a lot of this is the lack of news--all they have is appointments and rumored appointments. None of these people, including Obama, has done anything involving acting governance yet, and they won't for 2 months--they're preparing to sweep in with a huge number of people in place and programs ready to launch on Day One, which I applaud, but it's way too soon to talk about how Geither's doing at Treasury--or when such commentary exists, it's just as mockable. So even if they moved away from repeating "Team of Rivals" at every opportunity, it would be to analyze what everyone might be planning to do based on what they did 10 years ago, even though the circumstances have changed.
Shorter: There is no news on the "what will happen" front, so the media will toss the standard cliches about what all the appointments mean until such time as the Obamas adopt a puppy, or something financial happens that we understand. (AIG is still supporting sports teams!)
You are right on this one! Every time I see the headline "Team of Rivals" I turn the television. Honestly, he isn't even building a team of rivals. He seems to be nominating thoughtful, pragmatic, and qualified ppl to fill the positions; which is what EVERY president should do. He admirers Lincoln, read the book "Team of Rivals", has somewhat nominated Hillary Clinton as Sec'y of State and now all of a sudden, he has a team of rivals! I voted for Obama, and I believe in him and I trust his judgement so far. The media has to think critically and dig deep. That means, stop with the team of rivals talk, and start discussing the resumes of the these nominations so the American ppl know who will be running the gov't.
Isn't some of this "team of rivals" nonsense coming from within the Obama camp?
So what if it is, carpoollooper? No reason to encourage it.
carpoollooper, that's what T-NC just said. The point is it's the media's job to challenge the narratives of the powerful
I'm down with you, homie. Fo rizzo.
You know, it's just as lazy to throw around terms like "MSM." Who's included in that bunch? Or are you all referring to, like, four or five newspapers with large circulations on the East Coast?
I mean, the financial problems experienced by newspapers are being experienced in a number of industries. It's not specific solely to the "MSM" or "the media."
Sure, "Team of Rivals" is played. But don't feed into the hype by acting like every talking head on CNN or in the NY Times is parroting the same talking points. Because they're not.
Jeez, not that I disagree it's an annoying term, but can let's move from whining meta-criticism to actual.
You don't like Team of Rivals, propose an alternative:
- Bullpen of the Vanquished?
- Engine Room of Egos?
The point, I take it, is not simply that Obama is not actually Lincoln, but that his former rivals are different in nature than Lincoln's. But if that is the point, it's lost beneath all the swaggering. "That shit is played out" is not, itself, an original thought.
Like Kwame, and them fuckin polka dots.
Bah! Should be:
"Jeez, not that I disagree it's an annoying term, but let's move from whining meta-criticism to actual analysis."
Apologies to all.
black,
Come on man, argue with what I wrote, not the strawmen. The term "MSM" or "the media" doesn't appear in that entire post. Nor do I make a general blanket indictment of CNN or the NY Times. If your criticizing because there aren't specific examples, than that's fair enough. If I had nexis, I'd give you specific count, but let's do this:
From CNN:
http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0811/17/ldt.01.html
From MSNBC:
http://firstread.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2008/11/14/1674674.aspx
From ABC News:
http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalpunch/2008/11/will-obamas-tea.html
From Newsweek:
http://blog.newsweek.com/blogs/stumper/archive/2008/05/22/Obama-Hints-at-Naming-Clinton-to-his-_2700_Team-of-Rivals_2700_.aspx
From TIME:
http://www.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,1815849,00.html
I hope that helps. Seriously, if you're going to accuse me of being lazy, at least accuse me of being lazy about what I actually wrote.
How 'bout:
brain trust;
cream of the crop;
Obama All Stars;
Obamatents;
Our new government, a team of people secure enough in their own thoughts that and not threatened by folks with alternative ideas. They're proving they don't need to be distracted from sloving our nations problems by the media's restless and lazy search for narrative and labels. Hopefully, the media can begun real coverage of those problems instead of wasting time on looking for transition narrative and labels soon.
Fallow, and you, hit this spot on.
Using the word "cats" when referring to people strikes me as a VERY old-fashioned slang usage.
Nah TNC. I wasn't accusing you of being lazy. I was referring mostly to DBCooper.
But your point is noted. I know that some folks are out there lazily using the term "Team of Rivals." I get that.
I was mostly defending a general criticism of a few media outlets. That's all.
Tsg,
Meh, I'm an old guy. Cut me some slack.
Black,
Got it. Sorry I missed DB's comment.
How about:
Barack Hussein Obama and the Infidels
Barack Obama and the Clintonistas
Barack Obama and the Neoliberals
If Obama is pushing the "Team of Rivals" conceit, then it just makes it all the easier for many journalists to accept the narrative they are told and run with it. These are the same people who have accepted the narratives of the "War On Drugs" and the "War On Terror" after all. If half of them are too lazy to challenge the narratives of a president they purportedly dislike, then what are they going to do with the narratives of one that they are supposed to adore?
It just confirms to me that it's foolish to ever look at the American media's production as a whole and accept it; I read those people who make me think, who do attempt analysis, and who challenge the narrative sent to them from on high. You're a good example.
What's interesting is to start thinking about why Obama wants the media using this particular narrative. What does it gain him? Is he attempting to appear bipartisan so that when he tries to push through "radical" legislation he gets covered by the existing story? Or is he just trying to steal the best parts of the Republican party away and leave them utterly in the dust? Also, how much of the "Team of Rivals" meme is purely a function of Clinton? We may expect him to nominate one or more moderate Republicans to leadership positions, but he hasn't yet, has he?
Agreed. Also, let's stop calling George Bush this generation's Herbert Hoover. Bush is way worse. Hoover didn't drive us into two endless wars.
Is it the reporters, or the editors?
News rooms are for-profit these days. That means the competition between them is not for respect, accolades, or intellectual bragging rights, but for ratings and page-views. Seems to me that by encouraging lazy, by-the-numbers "reporting", these news outfits can maximize the attractiveness of the anchors, graphics, and marketing without worrying about the content.
Thus over the past 40 years the key concern of these editors was not whether the talent they were hiring could analyze and report on current events, but whether they could present any old drivel in a way that would attract the largest number of viewers. Is it any surprise then that the quality of journalism has declined?
This is where crap like CNN's holographic technology comes from. It contributes absolutely nothing to the quality of CNN's information and analysis, but is flashy and cool and a novelty. And while the technowizards and marketing hacks are busy fiddling with that, a rushed intern puts together Wolf's "team of rivals" narrative 15 minutes before air. Plus the kid probably got the job because he's somebody's nephew.
Uh... you have a problem with historical analogies?
I mean, I get flogging lazy journalists for recycling lazy clichés. But you seem to be going way past that, knocking people who use historical signifiers as catch phrases for making sense of the present. I don't get it. Our past is a vocabulary. It's a very rich vocabulary. Why vacate it? "Lincoln," "Roosevelt," "Gandhi," "King," -- even "McGovern" and "Stevenson" -- these are great words. Why leave them in the museum?
Maybe I'm missing something. You use your own past so brilliantly to make sense of your present perspectives, so I can't imagine you want to drive historical references out of the common discourse. Maybe just the lazy historical references. But then the problem is the laziness. Not the history.
There really should have been more comments on this post by now. Where are the cliché bots?
I have no idea what's going on, here.
We're going to wind up in another war because of a phrase some people are using to describe a cabinet that technically doesn't exist, yet?
WTF? I was sort of hoping that Obama could actually be inaugurated before otherwise-intelligent people took up arms for the circular firing squad. Well, there we go, I guess. Another 8 years of recriminations and manufactured outrages instead of actually enacting an agenda. Grats on stupid, TNC.
When people don't have enough facts to work with, we tend to reason by analogy. So Obama is another JFK or FDR or Clinton or Bush.
I've been fretting about Obama repeating the early Clinton years just because there are some obvious parallels: transition from Republican to Democratic rule in a bad economic time; involvement of Hillary Clinton; relatively young president in what's perceived as a generational election. Even the electoral margins are similar.
But Obama isn't Bill Clinton, and the Democrats are actually in a better position now than in '92, and, furthermore, I'm pretty sure he's already personally run through all the historical analogies that I can come up with and is trying as hard as he can not to replicate the bad bits.
People are going to be talking about "our generation's Obama" sometime in the future, and if we're lucky they won't mean it in a bad way.
Mr Fallows is, I am certain, mistaken in this commentary. "Bitchin'" was preceded by "groovy."
Psychologists have actually named this phenomenon of individuals blocking out the specifics of the present situation and creating analogies with ideas or events they feel they have already grasped. They call it a 'cognitive shortcut'.
I just love that name because it so perfectly describes the type of shoddy reporting (and shoddy thinking in general) by people too lazy or too incompetent to approach issues from a new perspective.
This column is moot. What it does is prove that you have not yet developed confidence in your own thoughts and putting them writing. It is most prominent w/ your references to sci-fi, D&D, rap and other references to your life I suggest you update your bio to eliminate this problem. Ohterwise everyone is going to think your frakking shallow(:>).
How about this: the team of rivals didn't work.
"Out of the four leading vote-getters for the 1860 Republican presidential nomination whom Lincoln placed on his original team, three left during his first term —one in disgrace, one in defiance and one in disgust."
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-pinsker18-2008nov18,0,1360359.story
TNC criticizing the Obama team's narrative is a lot like Frederick Douglass going af...ter...Lincoln...um... never mind.
This post really hit home for me, and I think some of the criticism in the comments above misses the mark. For me, it's not that "Team of Rivals" is even wrong necessarily, it's the stenographic tendencies of those who are paid to give their opinions on the goings-on in Washington. It's their job to take the narrative Obama , or Bush, or whomever, is putting out there, and hold it up to see if it actually fits the facts. Then you do the same for the other side, and act as referee when the two inevitably don't match. That's their job, just like it's Obama's job to make sure his story (meme, what-have-you) is getting out there.
I think one of the real problems is the pressure placed on folks to come up with something to say on the 24-hour news channels, well, 24 hours a day. Shorthands like "Team of Rivals" take the place of deep thinking. And to be honest, I don't think alot of those folks are what you'd call deep thinkers to begin with.
The 24-hour news channels do recycle a very small amount of content over many, many hours.
Originally, the "team of rivals" idea was remarkable because it came from a book, a history book, a long-ago history book, and it actually got some discussion.
Nate Silver's polling work is remarkable in the same way: the networks grasped the new idea that a guy could actually know how the numbers work and the same guy could explain it and other people would listen.
To me, the real big question is how we could get the MSM to take in, say, two ideas a week.
They won't ever think deeply, but if they'd find something new, toss it on the table, and let all the people they've got at the table respond to that, that would be a step up.
As always, my vote is that they should all subscribe to the Atlantic. The paper edition would give them five ideas a month, and the Atlantic blogs would give them plenty of options to fill out the quota.
As long as someone is being referred to as the next Michael Jordan, he will always be subordinated to Michael Jordan. Why Lincoln and Roosevelt come to mind are obvious, the nation and world profoundly need an American President to be historically great--on the order of a Lincoln, and the financial crisis of course recalls Roosevelt. The real hope is that he will be a good President, while it is important to remain skeptical. If he is as great as his potential indicates, then he will be remembered by his own name.