Idiot of the Day: Richard Cohen

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Why do I make the mistake of clicking to, and then reading, a Richard Cohen WaPo column? Surely it can do me no good whatsoever.

Have I not learned my lesson? Despite all the evidence that has piled up over the years, do I not realize that there is usually nothing there but a barren wasteland of self-important navel gazing mixed with embarrassingly shallow and utterly ill-formed political observations?

Alas.

But okay. This once. Just this once.

Behold the genius at work:

Barack Obama has lost the Hamptons.

That sentence is a fat target for ridicule, I know, since the Hamptons are often reviled as the playground of the ridiculously rich and the promiscuously silly — hardly the working-class Democratic base. As is usually the case, there's some truth to the stereotype, but enough exceptions to that rule to make the White House pay attention. The Hamptons is where the Democratic energy, money and intellectual firepower of Manhattan goes for R&R. It’s just not another beach.

Over the Labor Day weekend, I went to a number of events in the Hamptons. At all of them, Obama was discussed. At none of them — that's none — was he defended. That was remarkable. After all, sitting around various lunch and dinner tables were mostly Democrats. Not only that, some of them had been vociferous Obama supporters, giving time and money to his election effort. They were all disillusioned.

Boo-hoo. Boo-fucking-hoo.

Yes, Cohen is right -- how could he not be, making such an obvious point? -- that "the Hamptons are not America" and that "some of these people will scurry back to the Democratic fold when they have to choose between Obama and, say, Rick Perry," but, no, the early returns are not in.

Obama hasn't lost the Hamptons. What he's lost, if anything, is the vote of a handful of wealthy, ignorant fools who have far less influence on the general electorate than Cohen suggests.

You may not like Obama, you may be "disillusioned" (which is really just another way of saying "gratuitously self-absorbed"), but if you can't defend him at all for anything he has done (health-care reform? the stimulus? his SCOTUS appointments? the troubling but necessary bailouts of Wall Street and the auto industry?) you're just an ignoramus without any sense of perspective or political understanding or appreciation for reality.

Look, it's a difficult time. And Obama has had an extraordinarily difficult time ever since he took office. Not to excuse everything he has done -- I've been harshly critical at times and remain deeply disappointed with his Republican-friendly centrism and occasional anti-progressivism -- but what else was he to do?

Okay, let's see...

-- He hasn't used the bully pulpit effectively enough, hasn't tried to sway public opinion towards a Democratic agenda that for the most part enjoys broad popular support.

-- He should have pushed for more progressive health-care reform, including a public option -- assuming he actually wanted such progressive reform.

-- He shouldn't have embraced so much of the Bush-Cheney national security state.

-- He should have put an end to the failed Afghan War. And perhaps shouldn't have supported NATO intervention in Libya, though the world is certainly better off with out Qaddafi in power.

-- He should have been more aggressively partisan in response to a Republican Party that is out to destroy him. He should call the GOP out for its extremism and obstructionism.

-- He should have built on his magnificent '08 campaign and been more of a transformational leader -- assuming he isn't just an establishment centrist Democrat. The opportunity was there for meaningful change, change we supposedly could believe in, but such change hasn't come.

Yes, fine. That's a lot.

But for a bunch of rich New Yorkers to abandon him entirely? Seriously, are they that fucked up, are they such Cohen-esque navel gazers, that they've lost even a shred of a clue? Sure, I get that some of them are "disappointed." But in their pitiful self-pitying, which is what so much of this is, they show themselves not to be "politically sophisticated" but, well, quite the opposite. Can they name nothing Obama has done that they like? Do they understand at all how he couldn't just show up in Washington and get his way? It would seem not, on both counts.

As if drive home his idiocy, Cohen cites as an example of Obama's weakness the whole flap over when he would give his jobs speech to Congress. To any reasonable person, it made sense for Obama to postpone the speech, given that it would have interfered with a Republican debate. But no -- to Cohen it was "an epochal moment in weakness, confusion and brain-dead politics." Really? Epochal? That's just fucking stupid.

Alright, enough. I now need to get back to not reading anything Cohen writes. Why impose such idiocy on yourself? You might as well go wallow in the 24/7 batshittery over at Fox News. At least those right-wing clowns are stupendous in their shameless partisan shenanigans.