Dear Reader (and the dancers! Don’t let me forget about the dancers!),
The president was asked what his biggest mistake was in his first term. He responded, “The mistake of my first term – couple of years – was thinking that this job was just about getting the policy right. And that’s important. But the nature of this office is also to tell a story to the American people that gives them a sense of unity and purpose and optimism, especially during tough times.”
It’s hard to know whether to laugh or cry – or drive a three-penny nail into my frontal lobe using only this stapler as the hammer (you can’t see the stapler, but trust me).
Because if I did lobotomize myself with the penny-nail-and-stapler combo or even if I plunked down the three easy payments of 39.95 for the Norelco home-lobotomy kit, I might actually take this pernicious lunacy seriously.
Take my word for it as someone who grew up a text-book under-achiever, I am very familiar with the technique of trying to protect your ego or your reputation with claims that you didn’t even try.
But here’s the thing: Barack Obama’s not an under-achiever. He’s Mr. Harvard Law, wunderkind, super-intellectual, creased pants, did the extra-credit-reading guy. Oh yeah, he’s also the frick’n president of the United States of America.
Which is what makes his claim that his biggest mistake was failing to use his Jedi-like communication skills to give the American people a “sense of unity and purpose and optimism” so incredibly lame.
What makes it infuriating, however, is the simple fact that it is a monumental lie. Does he think no one has been paying attention? He’s been prattling on in speeches, presidential addresses, interviews, and – if he’d followed Elizabeth Warren’s advice – smoke signals, about hope and unity and “we’re all in it together” for his entire presidency. By claiming that he was too distracted by the imperative “to get the policy right” even to try to inspire the American people, he’s letting himself off the hook for something he most emphatically did try, over and over and over again.
But Wait, It Gets More Asinine.
Since when did Obama get all of the policies right? Every economic assumption has been wrong. He talked about “shovel-ready jobs” as if only ignorant Huns – like members of the tea parties – didn’t understand that he had it all figured out. He’d said the right spells, turned the right knobs, borrowed just enough money from the Chinese; all that was left was to watch the jobs pour out of the stimulus like walking broomsticks in The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. But wait, what happened?
Well, not much. The whole White House stood around like toddlers who’re convinced any second now the bunny will emerge from the magician’s hat. Alas, no bunny:
Energy was a particular obsession of the president-elect’s, and therefore a particular source of frustration. Week after week, [White House economic adviser Christina] Romer would march in with an estimate of the jobs all the investments in clean energy would produce; week after week, Obama would send her back to check the numbers. “I don’t get it,” he’d say. “We make these large-scale investments in infrastructure. What do you mean, there are no jobs?” But the numbers rarely budged.
Way to focus like a laser on getting the policies right.
Oh. One last point. In the interview Obama makes it seem like he’s pulling this argument out from some deep, buried place. He’s dredging up an uncomfortable truth, a painful admission. This is raw, emotional, off the cuff TV-moment stuff.
The only problem? The White House has been spinning this nonsense for almost a year now. Here’s a bit from a post I did in October, when this spin was already in full flower.
The White House spent the first two years of this administration working from a slew of false assumptions not just about the economy, but about the political skills of the president. As Noemie Emery recently laid out, this president isn’t nearly as good at politics as he and his advisors thought he was. Now their explanation is that while he may not be great at politics, it’s only because his true gift is for “getting the policies right.”
Home Cooking and Civilization
Marion Cunningham has passed away. No, not the lady from Happy Days. The home-cooking evangelist. I heard a little obit on NPR yesterday and it included this sound bite from an interview with her:
Eating food that strangers cook is vastly different than eating what’s cooked at home. The real key is sharing food at that table and, believe me, we know we’re not born civilized. We’re small savages, so you have to be taught the table is the place where you learn who you are and where you’re from, understanding that a lot of people just do nothing but fight at the table. Nonetheless, you come to know one another. The result is you know who you are.
Now, I’m not completely behind Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin’s famous statement “Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are.” While this is almost entirely true for vampires and cannibals, it’s not entirely true for the rest of us. I think we get closer to the truth when we say “tell me how you eat, and I will tell you what you are.”
Longtime readers can probably guess one of the reasons why I dig this so much. For starters, as Jenna Maroney might say on 30 Rock, “Me want food.”
More important, this little insight of Cunningham’s “we’re all born savages,” is a point I’ve been making here and elsewhere for years. Hannah Arendt’s famous observation that every generation Western civilization is invaded by barbarians – we call them children; Hayek’s spontaneous order; the importance of trial and error; the importance of intangible capital; the Burkean undercurrents in Animal House: These are some of the benchmark references of my oeuvre (“Um, I think you’re leaving out the women’s prison movies, French-bashing, cheese-cinderblock-eating, begging Lowry for a raise, oh and me and that shedding-machine you call a dog, just to name a few” – the Couch).
And while I agree entirely with Cunningham about the importance of home-eating (that’s eating at home, not actually eating homes) and home-cooking, particularly for civilizing kids, this gives me a chance to discuss a point that fell on the cutting-room floor from Tyranny of Clichés. Food is one of the most amazing storehouses of embedded knowledge.
It is hard to fathom all of the trial-and-error that has gone into any great cuisine. Imagine how long it must have taken to come up with the idea that food should be cooked in the first place. How many deaths or vomiting sessions stemming from eating spoiled raw meat led to that discovery? How many mistakes were made – and learned from – in the process of aging and curing meats and fish? How many corpses are long since buried and decomposed thanks to someone working out the technical details of food storage? And then there’s the whole wonderful universe of flavor and technique that defines any truly distinctive cuisine. This much salt, that much paprika. Age the cheese this long for this taste, this much longer for that taste. Cuisines are the manifest product of wars, invasions, famines, revolution, religious awakenings, boom times, and scientific breakthroughs. The culinary lessons learned from these momentous times are humbly recorded, without much commentary, in cookbooks. Put it all together and Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking is not merely akin to a time capsule, it’s a memory back-up, an auto-save of a document still being written. At least 99 percent of the things we know are things other people figured out first. Our manners, morals, technology, language, culture come to us on an assembly line that stretches off into prehistory with laborers in animal skins at the front and lab coats at the end.
Even rugged-individualist survivalists living completely alone in the woods somewhere are plugged into a support network of millions of human beings who came before him. Nearly every single thing he does alone in the woods was figured out for him by someone else. He didn’t discover how to start a fire. He probably didn’t forge his own gun or knife, and even if he did, he didn’t learn the techniques for doing so all by himself.
One of the ways we plug into all of this knowledge, how we transfer the data banks of civilization onto the empty barbarian hard drive of humanity, is at the dinner table. We teach our children not to be savages by eating with them and including them in the process of cooking. Food is primal, and by diluting and harnessing the primal urge to eat we start turning barbarians into less-than-barbarians.
Sorkin’s Hot Mess
I’ve wanted to write about HBO’s Newsroom for a while, but I’ve been traveling so much I haven’t had a chance to actually watch more than a few minutes of it. Last night I watched the third episode. Oh my stars and garters, it is so much worse than I thought it would be. Indeed, it is a fundamentally dishonorable show because while it sanctimoniously preaches the importance of delivering honest news and information to the public, it in fact distorts, deceives, and denies the truth in such profound bad faith, I would think it was a parody if I didn’t know better.
Anyway, if I can manage I will watch more and maybe offer a more sustained argument. But sweet fancy Moses, it is awful.
Thanks!
Thanks so much to Michael Graham and his band of degenerates for putting on such a fun event for me in Boston. Great turnout, great people, great fun.
The same goes for the wonderful folks at the Mackinac Center for a great time in Traverse City.
Indeed, thanks to everyone who’s been so gracious and supportive on the otherwise Hellish book tour I’ve been on.
Various & Sundry
The Ricochet podcast is out and I’m on it – with John Podhoretz to boot!
I’ll be in LA next week (no public appearances, alas) with my daughter. It’s mostly Daddy-Daughter time, but I will be recording the Adam Carolla podcast. Any guidance on that front welcome.
But enough about me, shark attack! (And reactions.)
How slipping on a banana peel became a comedy staple.
Delicious fashion: dress made out of 50,000 Gummy Bears!
Drunk Hulk’s best pick-up lines [BROKEN LINK].
How all 50 states got their names.
One-year-old baby in crib gets bitten by escaped python.
Albuquerque woman tries to sell her soul on eBay.
Church vs. beer on Twitter, geographically.
Eleven product names that mean something unfortunate in other languages.