David Brooks has done yeoman’s work and given us the origin story of dear Blackazoid.
God, Republicans are saps. They think that they’re running against some academic liberal who wouldn’t wear flag pins on his lapel, whose wife isn’t proud of America and who went to some liberationist church where the pastor damned his own country. They think they’re running against some naïve university-town dreamer, the second coming of Adlai Stevenson.
But as recent weeks have made clear, Barack Obama is the most split-personality politician in the country today. On the one hand, there is Dr. Barack, the high-minded, Niebuhr-quoting speechifier who spent this past winter thrilling the Scarlett Johansson set and feeling the fierce urgency of now. But then on the other side, there’s Fast Eddie Obama, the promise-breaking, tough-minded Chicago pol who’d throw you under the truck for votes.
This guy is the whole Chicago package: an idealistic, lakefront liberal fronting a sharp-elbowed machine operator. He’s the only politician of our lifetime who is underestimated because he’s too intelligent. He speaks so calmly and polysyllabically that people fail to appreciate the Machiavellian ambition inside.
That Blackazoid - always foolin’ us by not screaming simple words. It’s the secret to his power, not talking loudly and scaring white people. Damn Brooks’ Luthoresque mind!
But he’s been giving us an education, for anybody who cares to pay attention. Just try to imagine Mister Rogers playing the agent Ari in “Entourage” and it all falls into place.
No. I actually flat out fucking refuse to do that.
Brooks then goes on to talk about all the Hydeian ways that Fast Eddie Obama threw various things “under the truck”, sort of like how Goofus always convinced Gallant to ditch school and go do some chicks on the mat in the back of his El Camino, except without the chicks, the mat or the El Camino and Goofus never convinced Gallant to do any of that.
It’s your laundry list of attacks on Obama, except, you know, put together in a way that makes absolutely no sense whatsoever and uses the same phrases over and over again, much like a five year old reviewing Balto. He then wraps up with this utterly devastating attack:
But Thursday, at the first breath of political inconvenience, Fast Eddie Obama threw public financing under the truck. In so doing, he probably dealt a death-blow to the cause of campaign-finance reform. And the only thing that changed between Thursday and when he lauded the system is that Obama’s got more money now.
And Fast Eddie Obama didn’t just sell out the primary cause of his life. He did it with style. He did it with a video so risibly insincere that somewhere down in the shadow world, Lee Atwater is gaping and applauding. Obama blamed the (so far marginal) Republican 527s. He claimed that private donations are really public financing. He made a cut-throat political calculation seem like Mother Teresa’s final steps to sainthood.
The media and the activists won’t care (they were only interested in campaign-finance reform only when the Republicans had more money). Meanwhile, Obama’s money is forever. He’s got an army of small donors and a phalanx of big money bundlers, including, according to The Washington Post, Kenneth Griffin of the Citadel Investment Group; Kirk Wager, a Florida trial lawyer; James Crown, a director of General Dynamics; and Neil Bluhm, a hotel, office and casino developer.
Sweet Christmas! Is Blackazoid really…a villain? We were wrong about him? Is David Brooks J. Jonah Jameson with a penchant for biscotti over cigars?
All this and more…in the next issue!
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Is David Brooks J. Jonah Jameson with a penchant for biscotti over cigars?
We’ll know for sure when Obama turns into a white guy, and McCain gets a tan and starts talking in the plural.
Of course, this whole election is going to get wiped from existence when Quesada decides that Obama is more relatable as a single 20-something, so his marriage to Michelle gets retconned out in some deal with Rupert Murdock.