You know, Obama was my fourth choice for president, and I still have some real policy disagreements with the man, but from a politics/campaigning standpoint? The third time I was positive I knew what he should do or say and he did or said something else and it was way smarter and better than what I thought he should do or say, I decided I would stop bloviating about what he needs to do and say.

I didn’t realize that being President was the same as being Bela Karolyi, sorry?

This is one of those double binds that Dems always face.  If you’re animated and play to people’s emotions, you’re Mussolini.  If you’re sober and logical, you’re a dead fish.

Only Republicans have the right combination of charisma and gravitas to lead, I guess.

Incertus, I think you’re on to something there…but really, if the god of lightning was going to disguise himself as a human, couldn’t he have at least picked a name that didn’t rhyme with his real one?

Shoehorned…and marginalized.

Thanks for the concise, on-target observation.

he’ll be called out for acting like a preacher, and channeling Jesse and Al

I could swear I’ve seen more than a few people already accusing him of that this election season.  Because any black man who’s at a podium’s trying to act like a preacher, don’t you know.

Joe is a total fuckwad. He puts all his indignant angry pieces online but when it comes to print, he falls back to questioning Dems on everything. He wont put the indignant pieces calling the sky blue because doing so might mark him as a dirty fucking hippe and he just cant have that now, can he?

Total fuckwad.

Sexism and racism aren’t ideologies, they’re contradictory grab-bags of stereotypes. For every bigoted stereotype, there’s an equal and opposite stereotype. As long as a culture shares a stereotype library, it’s possible to switch back and forth between mutually contradictory stereotypes without anyone noticing the logical absurdity: Hillary’s tough, and Hillary’s a cry baby. Hillary rode her husband’s coattails, and she cynically engineered the Clinton dynasty. Obama’s a rock star, Obama’s tepid, Obama’s a celebrity…

Lindsay’s right. And the power to name is the power to define.

Jokeline does what, as you point out, he has always done, damned if you damned if you don’t.  No one is good enough.  And, like Howard Dean, if the man ever showed any authentic passion, in the manner of that millions of us, it would be recorded, edited down, enhanced and played back millions of times in demonstration that he just wasn’t presidential enough.

Jokeline, and the rest of the village, if karma means anything, will suffer some cruel days at some point.  And that doesn’t even begin to address their negligence, just their hubris and hypocrisy.

The more outspoken and outraged Obama acts, the closer he gets to a preexisting model into which he can be shoehorned.

I thought that was the idea.

If he can be squeezed into a mockable pre-existing stereotype, the info-refractors of the media get to play that up instead of the actual Obama.  They’ve been trying to—part of the ‘elitism’ accusation is “We can’t get him to play Stepin Fetchit.”

I always figured Obama was angry in the way Jon Stewart was angry: furious about what’s being done to his country, but staying in control nevertheless. Stewart and Obama don’t rant and rave (well, Stewart does, but comically), but they stay on point, they stay focused, and there’s no doubt anger helps keep them that way.

This is one of the biggest upsides of the Biden pick - he can be a vicious attack dog for Obama, so Obama doesn’t have to play the “angry black man”.

I could swear I’ve seen more than a few people already accusing him of that this election season.  Because any black man who’s at a podium’s trying to act like a preacher, don’t you know.

And the irony of that is that for roughly 30 years, the Republicans have incorporated “national motivational preacher” into the job description of president. Now that the Democrat is better at it than the Republican, suddenly not so much.

Funny how that works.