Whether Obama's viewed with "contempt" or "resentment" depends on the definition of the audience that the accuser wishes to reach. If McC's people are jealous of Obama's popularity with the media, then resentment rules. If OTOH McC's people have their eye on the real prize-- ie the ordinary working families whose core needs are not addressed at all by Obama's vapid rhetoric-- then contempt is more appropriate.

Whether McC's people can forget the media groupies and start focusing like the proverbial laser on working families in the swing states will determine whether their candidate has any chance in the fall. That such a weak opponent has gone unscathed by McC speaks to the incompetence of Davis et al.

"while everyone is irritated by the overpopular kid, an awful lot of people want to be him, or failing that, be close to him"

Giggle.

Callow young post-Ivy grads in TNR land, sure. Mature adults who've seen bullshit artists come and go, not so much.

"If OTOH McC's people have their eye on the real prize-- ie the ordinary working families whose core needs are not addressed at all by Obama's vapid rhetoric-- then contempt is more appropriate. "

Addressing the core needs of working families would require McCain to reject his entire platform, and that of his party.  It's not exactly a winning strategy.

Funny, I would have thought that serially selling out one's core beliefs (eg. Bush's tax cuts, torturing detainees, Jerry Falwell, immigration reform) for political gain would more than qualify one to be considered a "bullshit artist," no matter how much one hawks one's "Straight Talk" cred.

A propos of nothing - well, the fact that this resentment/contempt exchange is just silly - should there not have been at least a minor post, on The Plank, regarding the arrest of Radovan Karadzic, one of three most authentic genocidiers this side of 1945?  The appropriately named Ratko Mladic is still on the run, but time is running out for him.

For all the EU-bashers out there, here is an object lesson on the value, and force, of "soft power".  Note that the EU has not no less interventionist or brutal in its demands than the US is, and sometimes even more so, about domestic arrangement of politics.  All applicants for Membership had to abolish the death penalty and extent equal rights to gays and linguistic minorities (plus a host of other changes) before they could even start negotiations with the EU - and that includes Muslim Turkey.  99 days of bombardment by Nato delivered Slobodan Milosevic, but not Karadzic, to the ICTY.  It is now the prospect of seeing Croatia in the European fold and being left out of the club that has persuaded the Serbs to play ball.  Not bad, that.

Any way, here is an important chapter in European/Western history being closed, and we are fixated on McCain's possible resentment ...

Fair point, icarus.

Chris,

I agree with you that I sense more of a resentment vibe from McCain - and curiously, from my friend Tep who really seems to be in a tizzy about Obama...weird - mixed with a bit of contempt.

The problem is that despite everyone's civil protestations, McCain really is too old to run against such a dazzling, confident stripling like Obama. The man looks old and sounds old and crochety, and  when he has to think about Obama, I swear that I can hear him grinding his dentures.

Face facts: Look at the recent photos of McCain, riding around with GHWBush, standing next to that old mean pigf------r Phil Gramm, sitting next to an irrelevant Rudy looking like everyone's grouchy grandpa at the ballgame...and compare the visual aesthetic contrast to Obama. Makes even the President of AARP wince. McCain came of age in the Eisenhower administration and he, like Bob Dole, may still think the Dodgers are in Brooklyn. You know that the best poor Cindy can expect is a quarterly missionary...not much to keep a good lookin' gal happy.

Yep, eveyone is just being too nice. John McCain is too damn old to be President and the inevitable slips prone to every 72 year old are hurting him more and more on the campaign trail and his acute sense denture grinding resentment at being upstaged by a Young Bull is becoming more and more evident.

The comment by Christopher Orr that McCain should try Hillary Clinton's tactics to succeed has one great flaw. Hillary lost. I wish McCain all of Hillary clinton's 'success'.

Obama is the hollywood equivalent of Brad Pitt and McCain is Wilford Brimley (an old guy with folksy charm, been around forever, seems trustworthy) Brad Pitt will always get the paparazzi and the attention but that doesn't mean he will always get the part. At this point Wilford Brimley would make a more convincing President than would Pitt. Now if Brimley started to complain "where is my paparazzi" he would be laughed out of Hollywood.

Someone should smack McCain upside the head and say the days when you had if not Brad Pitt, then maybe Burt Reynolds type stardom are gone forever, don't be an idiot and fight against it.

icarusr, yeah I am pretty happy they got the bastard too, it has to make Bashir wonder in the Sudan, he is one overly ambitious Lt. Colonel away from the Hague.

oh and Chris...

you looked pretty young to me laddie...and be grateful for it...

eugenedv:

I don't think it was Hillary's mining of resentment that caused her to lose. When she adopted the populist persona, she began to do very well. She lost the race BEFORE her politics of resentment took hold, when she failed to compete in all those caucus states after Super Tuesday. That said, Orr has a point: McCain does not have the policy profile (at least not yet) to capture Hillary voters and maybe Huckabee voters too. I find it hard to believe that there are a bunch of people in Central PA, WV, and OH who are deeply inspired by his promise to cut pork barrel spending, veto a bunch of bills, and drill for oil offshore somewhere. WIth respect to the working class, his campaign is nowhere on domestic policy; moreover, he is increasingly reliant of his biography with respect to foreign policy. He does not appear to be for much of anything except holding the line in Iraq. He needs to be about more than that.

Chris, you are being too kind to Tep, from what he wrote it is like he never lived in the US. The fact that he wrote the term "mature adults" implying that they are somehow the majority in the US and determine the outcome of elections make me believe that Tep is a refugee from the planet Vulcan.

And you are an old guy? but don't you have a toddler at home? and aren't you married to a woman young enough to have a toddler at home? well then you sly dog you.

I just finished reading "Nixonland".  One of the premises of that book was that part of Nixon's success was his ability to mobilize the resentful, disenchanted and unpopular (referred to in the book as "Orthogonians" after a club for nerds Nixon founded in college).  

Maybe McCain is going after the Orthogonian vote.

prop joe, I disagree that her doing well was because of her populist persona, she did well on super tuesday in the places she was expected to, and did only as well in places like Pa. In fact, she did worse in Pa. than in New Jersey, even though Pa. was more favorable to her than Jersey. You are right that she blew it with the caucus states, but I think if she had that same persona throughout the race the results would have been the same (provided she also ignored the caucus states as well). I also want to add this is just my own half assed opinion.

Give it up Chris, Tep's Unified Theory of every subject, every post automatically pointing To Obama's awfulness is nuclear bunker like in its totality.  Obama gets more objective analysis from FOX News.

McCain and Salter are great men, but the resentment vibe as a strategy is risky business. Yes, they may whip up enough of it to incite herds of haters ala Hillary, but just don't call it leadership or a respectable use of his resources and time, especially in conjunction with the endless Last Honorable Man shtick they are selling along with it.  And in the end, he would lose anyway.  I don't think you can peel off enough Independents this election by selling negativity.  He should use his strengths - immediately start being as funny as possible, this is his secret weapon.  

Either you have a good agenda and a good candidate to sell it - and luck -  or you do not. No one knows that more than someone who has been in DC as long as McCain has, unless the beltway hubris that millions of Americans are so sick of has finally gotten to McCain.  He deserves a good fight though, and he doesn't have much to work with.  Resentment may be all he has.

I deeply admire John McCain, even when he is being a total jackass. But his candidacy has been shaky at best and his agenda is remarkably awful. That is not Obama's fault.  

It's adorable how tep thinks all McCain has to do is run a substantive campaign aimed at working families' core needs to beat the allegedly empty-rhetoric Obama. As if McCain's policy proposals had any real substance to them at all - this is Mr. Gas Tax Holiday, who plans to balance budgets by 'winning' wars -  and as if McCain will run on substance instead of smears and slime.

And then he'll turn right around and call someone else naive without even thinking twice.

Jaunty - high five on the Phil Gramm take down, I have never seen a more succinct description of the man.  I'm angry that I'm the same species he is.

tep, the glaring problem with your strategy for McCain is that McCain's agenda does not merely fail to address the actual problems facing working-class families. The policies McCain is campaigning on would actively worsen the problems facing working-class families. You can't very well run a laser-like campaign focusing on how the other guy won't help key voters when your own platform is based on shafting those very same key voters.

And you deeply misunderestimate the American voter's desire to get on the side of the popular crowd and/or the jock. In 2000, wanting to be like the popular guy was the only conceivable reason anyone could possibly have had for voting for George W. Bush. (Assuming, that is, a relative dearth of people who prefer Republicans generally but favor specific policies to underfund the military, grant citizenship to outlaw migrants, expand big-government welfare spending, and transform the tax code to favor unearned wealth, which was the sum total of Dubya's actual policy platform that year. Well, that and a specific promise to spend $5 trillion of a $4 trillion surplus and still have $1 trillion left over. I have yet to find a single person who will admit to favoring all of Bush's declared policies from the 2000 campaign. Which leaves personality. People really do vote aspirationally -- people want to act as though they're richer, or more popular, or better informed, than they actually are.)

Blackton,

Pitt vs. Brimley does not work as an anology, any role that both would be considered for, Pitt would win hands down.  

Clearly, with this new web ad whining about the press coverage of Obama, the McCain campaign is eager

I second icarusr's request to post something re the arrest of Radovan Karadzic.

The arrest has fallen from the bounteous cornucopia of events that I know little about, and about which I always appreciate a few edifying crumbs.

Something on the Plank would be best, IMHO. icarusr is only one of many Plankton I can learn from, unlike the majority of landing page commenters from whom I learn little.

Chris - thanks for your reply. I disagree with your assertion that contempt is "[not ] an admirable sentiment."

Contempt is TNR's mother's milk. As TNR's pages make very clear every day, contempt is a fine and noble reaction to public figures who attempt to swindle or BS their way to personal gain. In fact, the vast majority of TNR content includes finely or less finely-grained contemptuous jabs at the subject of the article, be it Wieseltier's contemptuous barbs against Damien Hirst and Hitchens, Chait's acid take on just about every Republican (except that Republican progressive hero from Nebraska), and various TNR scribes' contempt-laden smirks 'n' sneers against OtherSide.

Rhube -  actually we've seen such an example of a GOP domestic agenda that focused on such needs: Nixon's. IIRC he offered an income support program as well as expanded domestic programs in housing, the environment, regulation and other areas. Nixon's admin was for all intents and purposes a liberal one in the domestic realm.

In 2008, the issue of issues in the domestic realm is of course working families' vulnerability to financial ruin should they fall catastrophically ill and not have generous health insurance coverage thanks to their employer. Given the pressure on US employers to weasel out of even their own contractual obligations, and the intense competitive pressures on other employers not to obligate themselves in the first place, plus the volatility of the jobs market, the real number of Americans who are vulnerable at any given moment to this risk of ruin is probably over 100 million, not 42 million.

This single issue accounts for perhaps half of the economic insecurity facing US families. UHC would knock this source of insecurity off the table. Finished, gone, adios. And now, for the first time in my adult lifetime. we have a golden opportunity to get the damned thing done.

And yet the party of the working man has decided to nominate a man who refuses to embrace UHC, and whose own character and political style suggest that he would not fight for UHC even if he were to rhetorically support it, which he does not.

On top of which, this pseudo-liberal pseudo-pseudo isn't even going after Wall Street's scam artists-- which of course would be a perfect target for a TR admirer like his opponent.

I agree that McCain doing a Nixon in the domestic realm is a stretch, but remember that Nixon hired Pat Moynihan to help design his domestic agenda. It's not that strange. Certainly stranger things have occurred, like our party's nominating such a weak and timid BS artist this year.

danny - yes, there's plenty o' BS on OtherSide as well. I take that as a given, which is why I continue to cling to our pathetic party.

I'd like to see a YouTube spot along the lines of that old SNL skit, "Dueling Brandos", featuring outtakes of Maverick and the wonder boy trading some of their more outrageous BS lines. da-da-da DAAA da...

Tep: Having seen my father go through a catastrophic illness - and be taken care of by the Canadian Health Care system (our biggest expense in this period has been the cost of the parking at the hospital every second week) - I can only agree with your comments re UHC.

You are right about the economics - and, frankly, the morality - of UHC.  Canadian branches of US automakers are in slightly better shape than the US counterparts, despite the higher taxes, in part because they do not have to worry about health care costs.

But let's be real.  UHC is political poison in the US.  I remember how, back in the days of Hillarycare, the NYT - that great paragon of liberlism in the US - ran scurrilous and borderline libellous propangda pieces against the Canadian health care system, all but comparing Canada to Uzbekistan and Somalia.  I boycotted the Gray Lady for ten years, only to be hit with Judith Miller's coverage of Iraq ... in any event, there is so much misinformation about UHC that it is a wonder any politician even goes near the subject.

UHC is not, as it happens, the only way to manage health care.  Neither the Swiss nor the Germans have state-run UHC - though they have mandated universal coverage by the private sector (this is not what you mean by UHC, is it?).  It is possible that Obama's heart and soul and mind and rhetoric and policies are not where you want them to be; but they are a hell of a lot closer to where you are than McCain or the Republicans would be.  I also don't like his position on the death penalty; I don't like his position on gay marriage either.  But I don't think he will smirk while putting a woman to death and I don't think he will push a constitutional amendment to stop states from exercising their right to permit gay marriage.  In political terms, the perfect is the enemy of the good, and here, your insistence on political purity is the mortal enemy of whatever good one might expect from an Obama presidency.

icarus - as one who grew up surrounded by midwestern Republican and Republican-leaning doctors, the fact that nearly all of them, and my other doctor friends, now supports some version of UHC tells me that UHC is far from "political poison" in the US of 2008.

The wheel has turned. Major GOP consituencies, including doctors, small businessmen, younger evangelicals with children, are now sympathetic to the case for UHC.

It's simply unbelievable to me that we would in 2008 elect a newbie who has zero record of or interest this pivotal issue for working America.

Just saw that ad and found it very effective. I think it will resonate with people and if it makes them even marginally more sceptical every time they watch TV, then it will have worked.

Come on Chris, even you have to admit that some of the coverage of Obama is over-the-top?

I mean he's New Labour, a big improvement for sure, but after three New Labour administrations: child poverty in the UK is actually rising and Joe Soap is still getting screwed in one of the most polarized countries in the industrial world.

Can't really see a "centrist", careful, moderate, image obsessed (And I think you'd have to say he is now: Berlingate, WTF was that all about? He hasn't won it yet; a huge stadium speech, why the need? And the Obama presidential seal? Come on if McCain did that you would call him unhinged.) legacy driven politician. His speech about absent black fathers, his faith...god it's like watching one of those British TV franchises being exported to the US, except this time it's Blair as a black man.

No, I can see into the future and after 8 years of Obama landslides, you will be calling him one of the greatest politicians of our age, but the States will still be one of the most polarized countries on earth and you will still have huge poverty problems, and your "wealthy" Middle Class will still be working 60 hour weeks, unable to recognise their children.

Obama will take his foot off people's heads but he isn't going to help them up.  

Let's not get carried away with the guy. A big improvement, but hardly worth the cult like following.

If nothing else, people interested in a fair and balanced media would agree that some of the coverage in the States is not at all healthy.

tep, you're not on about UHC again are you? Geez. Please remind us all: You referred to Hillary as a BS artist for her own refusal to embrace UHC in the primaries, right? Because Hillary's "universal" plan deliberately excluded about 15 million of the most vulnerable, poorest Americans.

Anyway, your logic is completely screwy. Obama isn't perfect on the issue that matters most to you; his policy would merely deliver 90 percent of what you want. Meanwhile, 40 years ago a Republican president was pretty good on the issue that matters most to you. John McCain is also a Republican. Therefore McCain is more to be trusted than Obama, even though McCain's stated goal is to deliver zero percent of what you want delivered on this issue.

It's one thing to let the perfect be the enemy of the good. But preferring the bad to the good because the good isn't perfect, and because it's possible to imagine some fantasy scenario in which the bad experiences a brain transplant with a dead man? That's, well, disappointing.

I'd say McCain has both equal measures of contempt and resentment towards Obama. Neither of which has anything at all to do with older voters but with McCain's capacity to hold personally any slight to his constructed persona as a 'maverick' and to his own sense of earnestness and gravitas. McCain sees Obama as an upstart lawmaker that has not worked his way up the system as McCain feels he has. Despite his divorcing and subsequently marrying into money to catapult his political career and foster his ambitions. It's taken McCain decades to achieve the point to where he felt comfortable to run for President. Having been the media darling a decade ago on his run for 2000, his slow decline into Republican party hack has only achieved one thing and that has been the final decline of a politically savvy person who was willing to buck the party line for common sense issues. McCain was far more "maverick" as a senator than as a presidential candidate that happens to be a senator. He finds that maneuvering to appease the GOP takes more from him everyday. McCain has never been one for subtlety nor for compromise which feeds his resentment.

He finds himself now facing Obama, who having worked his way up to where he is without having to have married into money to do it. Obama has managed to play the political game as well if not better than McCain. That Obama shows the same ambition that McCain did or does is also what causes McCain to be resentful towards Obama. McCain has contempt for what Obama has done and resentment towards Obama for what has taken McCain decades to do...become his party's nomination for POTUS.

I have had respect for McCain the senator but it's been qualified throughout the last 15+ years that I've been aware of him. His capacity to remake himself after learning from his mistakes, a capacity to do what he thinks is right for the country regardless of party politics, his service to country. But I find his pettiness towards anyone that slights him politically to be reflective of a greater sign of continuing self-doubt and uncertainty of who or what he is versus what he thinks he should be. I thought he would have been a great POTUS 8+ years ago but today I find him lacking.

"It's simply unbelievable to me that we would in 2008 elect a newbie who has zero record of or interest this pivotal issue for working America."

It seems to me that:

1)  Unless I am having exceptionally vivid hallucinations, Obama has talked about UHC in numerous debates, and has a whole bunch of information on his website about it, and

2)  Even accepting your depiction of him (which I don't), it still beats electing a hypocrite on a whole mess of issues whose interested in UHC is also diddly-squat.

I don't think the resentment card works for anyone. It really really did not work for Bill. That was transparent and embarassing. Resentment is never attractive.

Thanks, Iggy, I thought it was only me.  I have never seen the crush on any politician as the MSM have for Obama.  Over th top doesn't begin to sum it.

Change we can believe in?  You bet - change on public financing, on the surge, change on renegotiation of NAFTA, the list goes on.

I know McCain is not a great politician, and he gives a mediocre speech.  But BHO is so green, so inexperienced.  Just wait until the committee chairmen start rolling him in 09.  Wait until the media turns on him - and they will, as sure as Gordon Brown is described as "dour."  And wait until his impulses about foreign policy get us into a crack. What will he fall back on?

Well, if he's elected, I'll support him when possible, and criticize him when necessary.

tep just cares so badly about universal health care he cannot stand or abide by an attempt to cover 90% of the population. And if that doesn't make it clear that some Hillary supporters are delusional and loved her with messianic deovtion, I don't know what would.

McCain resents Obama and holds his supporters (and the press) in contempt. He's a mixture of both qualities that are completely inappropriate in a president. Nixon anyone?

You're welcome Butchie. (why do I feel uncomfortable?) I'll post more about Obama's cult if you give us a shot of your gun?

"I have never seen the crush on any politician as the MSM have for Obama."

You know, as much as it occurs to me that y'all are right about this unbalanced coverage (and I'm well aware that there is a company out there who makes it their job to count the minutes of exposure each candidate receives by the media), it also occurs to me that perhaps McCain should not be quite so selective in exposing McCain to the press.

This thought arose today when I read something somewhere about how apparently McCain gave CBS the exclusive on his last Middle East FP trip. I wish I could remember where I heard or read it, but it didn't stick out enough at first. Anyway, I can't help but think that if the putz hadn't made the coverage exclusive, he might have gotten a lot more coverage over the affair as different media outlets would have been able to bring their own perspectives to it.

This, of course, brings to mind an even more vague snippit from memory regarding the tight controls placed on which members of the press get to ride on The Straight Talk Express.

Given these snippits of vague recollection, with several vague recollections of Billow whining like a brat about "Liberal Bias", it seems to me that the undocumented GOP strategy of "whining like a bunch of spoiled brats until they get their way" bears further investigation.

The other thing that occurs to me is that perhaps Obama is better at working the press than even McCain, who has been repeatedly been heralded as the Media's golden boy or some such, and refers to the Press as "his constituency" while "straight talking" about his policies.

I love the "90 percent" canard. Given that rght now, there are some 42 million Americans who lack coverage altogether, a defender of our current kloodge of a non-system could argue that we already cover 260m/300m = 86% of the population, which implies that Obama's timid little plan would increase coverage by a few %.

Another point: to the counterargument that "it's on his website", there is nothing in the man's actual _record_ that indicates a history of actually fighting for this issue-- ie, spending political capital, persuading people, building coalitions, incurring battle scars in political combat on behalf of this cause. I didn't vote for Hillary because she and her husband's smears turned me off, also I was worried about Bill's loose cannon role in a potential HRC admin, but I will grant to the Hillaristas that the woman has real battle scars. She made plenty of mistakes in '93-94, but she was on the front lines in the fight. Obama has not been on the front lines of any bruising, let alone bloodying, battle that I've seen. The man's too concerned about his carefully cultivated image to really fight for anything that might cost him anything.

Re the Obama-McCain comparison for media fandom, Obama in 2008 is the beneficiary of our journalistic class's intense Bush hatred and equally intense white guilt. If Bush were not in the White House and/or Obama had not cultivated an image as the authentic afr-amer candidate, he would not be seen as anything special. Another smooth-talking backbencher Jack Kennedy ca 1952 type.

Tep, you keep pointing out how Obama's platform fails to achieve the goal you (and I) prefer on UHC, but keep skipping over the obvious point altogether that McCain's platform is much, much worse. So how's that an argument *against* voting for Obama?

jobeek - I voted for Obama in the primaries and will almost certainly vote for Obama in the general. I simply want the adulation, the lack of any critical distance from this man, to cease, and be replaced by the usual standard of skeptical, shrewd, rational analysis that I expect from TNR. I don't expect that from lesser publications, but TNR to me has always stood for opposition to BS in all its forms. The Obama phenom carries with it more BS than any campaign I've seen in my lifetime, except perhaps Reagan 1984.

Stop giving this guy a pass, 's all. He hasn't earned it.

"Obama in 2008 is the beneficiary of our journalistic class's intense Bush hatred and equally intense white guilt"

Geraldine, is that you?  

White guilt?  So let me understand this.  We are still being asked to believe that Obama owes his popularity  to a psychological phenomenon which compels whites to support black candidates as a way of dealing with the guilt feelings they personally harbor over the historical plight of blacks at the hands of white people.    Really?

I can understand a certain bewilderment, concern and even "resentment" over Obama's rock star popularity.  But attributing this to the canard of "white guilt" is more than insulting.  It's deeply misguided.  

"I simply want the adulation, the lack of any critical distance from this man, to cease, and be replaced by the usual standard of skeptical, shrewd, rational analysis that I expect from TNR."

...and yet your analysis these last many months has been anything but shrewd or rational

"Stop giving this guy a pass, 's all. He hasn't earned it."

is it your shrewd and rational analysis that we've been giving him a pass? On what, pray tell?

oh yeah

WHITE GUILT MY ASS

:]

John McCain started off the week with a yawning imagery gap , lurching toward a strategy based on either