In the speech I have
wanted to hear for a long time now, a Democratic president
or presidential candidate gets publicly sick of being called weak or wimpy by
Republicans. Just because he has
been acting deliberately and cautiously.
So he calls for national TV time, gets up on his hind legs, acknowledges
that the Republicans are making his people look like egghead, nattering nabob,
no-drama wimps, and spits in their eye.
The classic case is the Republicans crowding Jimmy Carter into the wimp
corner because he isn't doing anything effective about our embassy people taken
hostage by the Iranians. In the event Carter flutters around, his forces
bungle a rescue attempt, and he moves further back into the cartoonist's cage
—with his chicken neck protruding from the presidential collar more thinly
every week.
Here's the alternative spit-in-your-eye
speech, as it would be delivered to his PR people for politic phrasing:
"Of course we're helpless here. All civilized nations are helpless
before barbarians who abuse another country's envoys in their own capitals.
These Iranian barbarians count on our civilization to keep us from picking
up ten Iranians in this country for every American they pick up in theirs.
Which we could do if we had the balls. Barbarian balls. The thing is, we understand
civilization and they don't. We know that it's stronger than barbarism,
and it shows it by its restraint. Just because I'm restrained now doesn't
meant I won't be ready to cream their ass when the time comes. So where
the hell do you get off, Republicans, calling my restraint weakness?"
The spit-in-your-eye genre
includes the speech John Kerry should have made after Republicans faulted him
for having called the Vietnam War a "mistake": "Yeah,
that's what a lot of us thought after we got over there and got into it.
I still think so. I'm proud of being the spokesman for those
thoughtful soldiers and the only thing I regret is that I didn't speak better.
How about you, Dick Cheney? How about you, George Bush? Do
you have anything to regret about your stand on Vietnam? Do you think
that war was not a mistake?
You know damn well we were weaker after that big military action than we
were before because after the first Bush's success you crowed that we had
finally "recovered" from Vietnam. Maybe you need to ask yourself whether we're weaker or
stronger now after the second Bush's big military action. Maybe, now that you've raised the
Vietnam issue, we ought to go into the whole matter of big military actions."
Then his speechwriters smooth out the language and maybe add a few digs
about people who hadn't been anywhere in wars and never gotten into them.
The SIYE speech is an
unequivocal rejection of the downplay, mute, ignore or distance-yourself-from
advice presidents sometimes get from realistic, tuned-to-the-electorate smart
guys on their staffs when their man faces an embarrassment. Apparently that's
the kind of advice Vice President Al Gore got from his consultants when he
separated himself from his president, Bill Clinton, who was handing on the
great gift of peace and prosperity, but also handing on the embarrassing Monica
Lewinsky scandal. "Distance yourself, distance yourself," say
the smart guys.
"The hell I
will," says Al Gore, rolling up a ball of spit. "This is the
guy I spent eight good years with, who trusted me and made me vice president,
and who gave the country peace and prosperity. He gave me credit for
helping with all that. You think I'm going to renounce that
accomplishment? Desert such a friend and benefactor? Just because
at the moment he smells bad? It's when you smell bad, and people know you
smell bad, and you know they know it, that you need friends most. Well, I'm
Bill Clinton's friend and I'm sticking by him, and you give me a speech telling
the country that. Let the
Republicans make what they will of it."
Smart consultants say you
shouldn't respond to negative portrayals of you. You give them publicity
and you let the other side guide the discussion. But if it's a wimp
you're being portrayed as you can't just lie down in front of such pictures.
That's wimpy. So, I think, you go for what Michael Dukakis
should have gone for when the Republicans, pushing his wimpiness, circulated
that picture of his little face peaking out from under a tank-driver's helmet.
"Shit," he says, "you encircle Curtis Lemay’s baby face
with one of those things and you'll get a wuss too. You'll really get it
with Winston Churchill." That's the spit-in-your-eye one-liner, a
compromise between ignoring a petty attack and over-playing it.
You can't spit in a
he-man's eye, though, unless you've got some follow-up words that will keep him
off balance. Carter had the language of civilized diplomacy, all cocked
and ready for those who called him weak. Gore had the language of loyalty
and gratitude, loaded with the tradition of honorable friendship.
But Obama now, what does
he have? He's got more he-men
calling him weak than those two ever had. We who know
how a wimp president can affect a Congressional vote, and long for some spit in
the Republican eye, have to worry about that.
Well, he certainly has the
language of civilized scholarship.
Just what the 33 scholars of international relations had when they
signed the argument against the Vietnam intervention. It's what John F. Cady, Ohio University's specialist in
Southeast Asia studies, had when he tried to explain the force of
anti-colonialist and nationalist sentiment in that area, and how it complicated
the anti-communists' explanation of motives there. It's what most speakers at Vietnam teach-ins had. And a fat lot of good it did them.
There's the problem. How can a president make a rock-em,
sock-em point when the point can't be understood without a lot of teaching? Teachers make concessions. "Yes, the Bush team was smart and
imagined all sorts of things that could go wrong, as on Rumsfeld's list; it's
just that every list was circumscribed by their hormones." Politicians don't have time to be
teachers, and they get none of the concessions — to take time, to be a little
boring, to talk a little down, to be a little elitist, to scold — given to
teachers. They work with what the
schools have given them.
This is a bigger problem
for Obama than for any president I can remember. "To this generation, facing the challenge of militant
Islam, the horrors of terrorism, the slaughter in Syria, the breakdown of order
in Iraq, the resurgence of the Taliban in Afghanistan, the rise of Isis in the
Middle East, the sight of Americans beheaded in the desert, to you I say: stand
around and wait!" Oh man.
If he can't make that
speech, how is he going to make a spit-in-your-eye a speech? He's spent six years reducing drama and
avoiding dumb moves. Showing his
difference from George Bush.
Adopting a different vocabulary, starting with that non-starter,
"war on terrorism." There
is no moderate alternative to Bush's inflammatory terms that won't be satirized. Axis of Veniality? of Propensity to Barbarism? of Doubtful Rationality?
But there are some angles
Obama can play and Nicholas Kristof, in a June 14 NYT Op-Ed ("Obama's
Weakness, or Ours?") suggested one of them: scolding the electorate. Spit in the voter's eye!
The speech, again to his
staff for translation into nice language, would go like this: "Fellow
Americans, I just can't believe you're swallowing all this crap about my
weakness. You've been to school,
you know how to distinguish smart from weak. You know that George Washington was smart to avoid battle
with the British, not risking the army he had to keep in the field till the
French came. You know what Fabius
gained by avoiding battle with Hannibal's Carthaginians. And you know what the Athenians lost by
not holding to Pericles' advice to stay inside their walls until their navy
could degrade the Spartan forces. They lost their ass.
In Sicily. Because they
couldn't stand the sight of Spartans plundering and burning outside their walls. Didn't have the guts. Atrocity-watching guts. So they listened to Big Balls Cleon and
followed Big Alcibiades to Spartan Sicily, where they lost their entire ass,
first the left cheek (5100 men and 134 triremes) and then the right cheek (5000
more men, 73 more triremes). (There were, at the start, only 40,000
men in Athens.) One of the dumbest
moves in history.
"Right
now, though, a U. S. president is going to have a hard time making any kind of
move. After Big Balls Bush got our
ass burned in Iraq the American public isn't going to let him risk a
finger. That's moves. Talk now, that's something else. They still like big talk. It goes, in their mind, with strong
leadership. Do you know that polls
show three quarters of the American public (that's you, friends), a year after
Bush had clearly led us into a quagmire, still giving him credit for 'strong
leadership'?
"You've forgotten what your teachers
taught you about big talk, how to see through it. And I'm reminding you of their teaching. First rule: consider the source. You hear that 'we’ve got a leader who
doesn’t understand U.S. obligations and commitments around the world and is not
prepared to act on them,' and that 'we’ve got a problem with weakness, and it’s
centered right in the White House.'
That's Donald Rumsfeld, whose balls you are familiar with.
"You hear that President Obama (not mentioned by name) is hiding
behind the weariness of the public. 'I fully
understand the sense of weariness. I fully understand that we must think: ‘Us,
again?’ I know that we’ve been through two wars. I know that we’ve been
vigilant against terrorism. I know that it’s hard. But leaders can’t afford to
get tired. Leaders can’t afford to be weary.' Who is this telling us that President Obama is weak and
weary? Condoleezza Rice, whose
president never tired, never weakened, in the cause of liberty in the Middle
East.
"But OK, I'll accept these
Republicans' conception of weakness.
I'm weak. And if I'm weak
then Pericles was weak, and Fabius was weak, and George Washington was weak,
and Nimitz and Spruance were weak (for "timidly" holding back
carriers) and at the present time the American public is weak (for having the
brains to learn by experience).
The only part of the public that isn't weak is the high-testosterone
low-information part, the part that eats up what Cheney is saying on Fox
Network. That's apparently a large
section of the Republican Party. Well,
let me tell you about these Republicans.
They don't know shit about strength and weakness."
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