Obama under the bus

Pundits Chris Matthews and Maureen Dowd, responding to stagnant jobs creation this month, seem inclined to throw President Obama under the bus, in a flavor-of-the-week reporting style. Matthews derides the President’s strategy of highlighting Mitt Romney’s nonexistent Bain jobs creation, characteristic of a private equity firm’s hiring only when absolutely necessary. Dowd fixates on the President’s psycho-sexual/social-cultural profile.  

Matthews, looking askance at the President’s current warrior mode, departs from earlier criticism exhorting the the President to be more like FDR and LBJ in adopting a more pugnacious fighting style. Matthews now insists that innately optimistic Americans respond only to politicians selling their positives, and Obama should act accordingly. By that reasoning, the Super PACs are wasting their billions.

I also question Matthews’ enthusiasm for John Boehner at the beginning of the Speaker’s tenure. It is difficult to ignore the diabolical cast of both Boehner and Romney in advocating reckless and mean-spirited policies imperiling the 99 percent, whether or not engendered by their enslavement to the extreme right. With Boehner, in particular, Matthews would do well to recant some earlier gushing.

Dowd continually links specific behaviors of the President to a lack of dynamism, pinpointing dualities in his youth over racial and class identity. In a recent column, she cites a former white girlfriend’s assuring him he would find a black woman companion down the road, and his doubting that this would happen.

Barack and Michelle are good candidates for the romance of the century, Dowd’s strange projections notwithstanding. Sistahgirl, he’s just not that into you. Let’s move on.

Not singling out Irish Catholics, Bubba and Corey Booker jumped into the cow pie, famously going off base.  =In the fallout, we learn that Bain looms large on Booker’s donor list, as it has on Obama’s. However, I contend that, proportionately, contributions to a campaign budget for a mayor carry more significance in their rarity, compared to a presidential campaign’s broad donor base.

As for Clinton’s comments about Romney’s “sterling” Bain and gubernatorial credentials, I would venture that we rarely defend what we do not identify with. Is this not the same Bill Clinton who co-opted Republican centrism to stay in power? Tax cuts anyone?  

Obama’s persistently solid achievement has been continually in evidence amid economic collapse, opposition from intransigent Republic legislators who, buoyed by racist remnants of the culture, sponsor economic paralysis, attempts at voter suppression and the rescinding of women’s rights, not to mention the staggering ignorance of large chunks of the American public (anyone who for a nanosecond took Herman Cain, Michelle Bachman, Rick Perry or Donald Trump seriously).

The bus approaches. Presidential detractors should tread carefully. The poop seems unavoidable.

Ruth-Miriam Garnett is author of Laelia, Concerning Violence and A Move Further South. Her newest book, Chloe’s Grief will appear in fall 2012.