I meant to write this piece last week – when I first read Dean Barnett’s column in The Weekly Standard – and now, as I’m writing the piece, I find that Media Matters already covered the controversy – because Rush Limbaugh picked up the storyline Mr. Barnett was trying to create.
So I’ll just briefly point out one fact and let you read an excerpt from Mr. Barnett’s piece. The single fact that makes the whole column Mr. Barnett wrote a joke: the jeremiad he refers to as “a marked departure from the kind of successful campaign that Obama has run” has in fact been part of Mr. Obama’s stump speech since September 2007 when I heard Mr. Obama speak at Washington Square Park. An excerpt from Mr. Barnett’s column is after the jump.
What was especially noteworthy about his Virginia speech were the diversions Obama took from the prepared text. Because of Obama’s improvised moments, this speech was different than the usual fare he offers. We didn’t get the normal dosages of post-partisanship or even “elevation.” Virtually every time Obama deviated from the text, he expressed the partisan anger that has so poisoned the Democratic party. His spontaneous comments eschewed the conciliatory and optimistic tone that has made the Obama campaign such a phenomenon. It looked like the spirit of John Edwards or Howard Dean had possessed Obama every time he vamped. While Paul Krugman probably loved it, this different Obama was a far less attractive one.
At one point, Obama launched an improvised jeremiad against the current administration that took special note of the recent revelation that he and Dick Cheney are distant relations:
“Now I understand some of the excitement doesn’t have to do with me. I know that whatever else happens whatever twists and turns this campaign may take, when you go into that polling place next November, the name George Bush won’t be on the ballot and that makes everybody pretty cheerful. Everyone’s happy about that. The name of my cousin Dick Cheney won’t be on the ballot. That was embarrassing when that news came out. When they do these genealogical surveys, you want to be related to somebody cool. So, but, his name went be on the ballot.
“Each of us running for the Democratic nomination agrees on one thing that the other party does not-that the next president must end the disastrous policies of George W. Bush. No more Scooter Libby Justice! No more Brownie incompetence! No more Karl Rove politics.”
None of this was in the prepared text. And all of it was a marked departure from the kind of successful campaign that Obama has run. One can imagine Obama, if he thought things through more fully, using the revelation regarding Cheney as an occasion to note something vapidly uplifting like how in America, we’re all part of the same family.