The illogical need to believe Obama
Afew years ago, I broke up a fight among some editorial writers. Yes, I find every word of that sentence weird, too. But I did. Me. Of all people. It was during an online “listserv” discussion among members of a national association of editorial writers.
Normally, this was a pretty collegial group, but this was fall 2008, and a certain Illinois senator had come out of nowhere to win the Democratic nomination. A couple of the editorialists were pointing out that Barack Obama was a protege of Saul Alinsky, the late, leftist Chicago political organizer and author of the grassroots organizing best-seller “Rules for Radicals.” If I remember right, one of them may even have referred to Obama as an “Alinsky-ite.”
This enflamed Obama’s defenders — who, it is worth pointing out, greatly outnumbered the detractors. With these “Alinsky” connections, the critics were just engaging in name-calling, the candidate’s defenders said. Guilt by association. No proof Obama
even knew that Alinsky guy.
The rhetoric got real testy, real fast. They didn’t contend that drawing “Alinsky” associations with Obama constituted “hate,” for the candidate. But by editorial-writer standards, they were seriously enflamed.
I waded in. I have no dog in this hunt, I wrote. But the
did publish a pretty lengthy feature piece in 2007 about not only Obama’s deep, direct ties to Alinsky’s “disciples” (to use the word), but about Hillary Clinton’s links to the hard-core organizer, too.
The heat immediately ebbed. The eh? As long as the candidate’s ties to a notorious leftist provocateur were not first noted by people perceived to be Obama critics, it was OK. What mattered was the messenger, not the message.
Nearly five years later, not much has changed. Unless a criticism of President Obama issues forth from a source deemed otherwise sympathetic to the president, it doesn’t register.
More to the point, though, is this astonishing in anything critical of the nowpresident. These were people whose jobs involved making informed commentary on the news. But these editorialists — passionate defenders of the candidate, every one — did not have a clue about a fundamental part of his background.
Would the administration have been as crazy-bold about manipulating its preferred version of events and silencing political enemies as it has been lately if it didn’t believe the national press would passively sit by? I don’t think so.
In early May, almost exactly eight months after the attacks on the U.S. Consulate at Benghazi, Libya, a portion of that willful disinterest seemed to have started crumbling.
The testimony of State Department whistle-blowers and the discovery that the White House and the State Department had rewritten the CIA’s Benghazi “talking points” seemed to have flipped a switch.
“Scandal” has a way of generating its own energy. The IRS abuses of conservative non-profits were, at last, out in the open. But the secret appropriation by the Justice Department of Associated Press phone records had not yet come to light. Neither had the story of a Fox News reporter being investigated as a coconspirator in espionage — on the direct order of Eric Holder, no less.
In an odd way, the slow unraveling of scandals unrelated to Benghazi gave that story a strength it wouldn’t have had otherwise.
Suddenly, arguments that had been given little credence in the months following the Sept. 11, 2012, Benghazi attack were being treated seriously. People like Maureen Dowd of the were wondering out loud why the administration’s demeanor on a night that saw four Americans killed by terrorists seemed so … passive.
“All the factions,” wrote Dowd, “wove their own mythologies at the expense of our deepest national mythology: that if there is anything, no matter how unlikely or difficult, that we can do to try to save the lives of Americans who have volunteered for dangerous assignments, we must do it.”
I got into a row of my own recently on Facebook over the Benghazi thing. It was with a former opinion editor for a paper back East, a guy I had known in that editorial-writers group. He said he was “disappointed” seeing me writing on the subject, as though criticizing Obama about Benghazi was beneath respectable discourse. What struck me most about our exchange, however, was this fellow’s enthusiasm for accepting the White House line. The president had uttered the word “terror” early on, he said. So, obviously, there was no attempt to change the story to pretend it was about an anti-Muslim video.
Like the lack of interest in Obama’s Alinsky links, this belief — that the president acknowledged Benghazi was a terrorist attack — requires a level of passive acceptance that is new to presidential news coverage.
When Obama spoke of “acts of terror” after Sept. 11, he carefully, precisely declined to identify Benghazi as an attack perpetrated by terrorists. Twice in one day he was asked questions that would have allowed him to accurately portray the attacks as organized terrorist attacks, and he declined. Two weeks after the attacks, he was still mentioning the anti-Muslim video in reference to Benghazi while saying nothing about terrorists.
That desire to believe really has not changed. It’s still there.