Invisible Man

h/t to Tennessee Guerrilla Women for the link. When Joe Scarborough can't process what a non-entity you are, you're a non-entity.

The multiple meanings of the title of this post are intentional.

Categorically speaking

I have an observation on Corrente's ongoing argument re "Category Error" -- and its repeated use as a club with which to beat Paul Krugman.

Lambert and Vastleft are arguing that it's a major mistake for progressive commenters to attribute either good intentions or weak leadership to The Precious -- because, in Vastleft's words, "Obama operates like a conservative because he is a conservative." They argue that he's not a weak leader but a strong, effective one -- because he's accomplishing very thoroughly what (they say) he always intended to accomplish.

There is some merit and utility in this argument -- insofar as it underlines how deluded the Obots, the Netroots and the misogynist fanboy punditocracy on MSNBC and what Anglachel calls the Stevensonian wing of the Democratic Party were about him. They gave this tablua rasa a free pass to the nomination because he served as their mirror, without regard to most of what he was actually proposing. For that act of protracted irresponsibility and fecklessness, the judgment of history is already in on them, and it is not kind. To paraphrase Somerby's trope on Iraq, the working class and the middle class of America look up from their places in the soon-to-be-closed-down unemployment lines at the likes of Dowd, Marcos, Booman, Avarosis, Olbermann, Rich, Donna and their ilk in devastating accusation.

However, it's another thing entirely to propose that the whole thing was some vast and extraordinarily effective kabuki in which The Precious was actually Sauron and was skillfully orchestrating all of these conspirators -- from Wall St. to Ms. magazine to MoveOn to the insurance companies, etc., etc. One really has to believe in the power of theater to think that entire sectors of the economy are expressing batshit-crazy outrage at him in public while chortling together with him in private -- because he is, after all, so skillfully carrying their water.

And even if you believe that, how does this account for the patent lack of political success of this strategy? Are we really supposed to believe that Obama, Axelrod et al. wanted collapsing poll numbers? That they wanted to be seen universally as wearing 'kick me' signs? If this guy is supposed to be such a clever, successful, right-wing political leader, how come he's already a lame duck? Are we supposed to believe that this, too, is part of the clever, "successful" plan?

This, to me, reveals the vulnerability of strictly ideological arguments. They ignore the kinds of institutional, cultural and political dimensions that, say, Anglachel describes so well (and that I find in Krugman, for all his self-proclaimed wonkiness). Pure ideology isn't psychologically acute, and that lack of acuity creates errors that are, well, a bit categorical.

To me, the facts certainly demonstrate that Barack Obama was never a liberal. To the degree he has anything that could remotely be called an ideology or world view, it is, as Anglachel has been arguing of late, the ideology of a "Herbert Hoover progressive" (nice). But the overwhelming preponderance of the facts also show that he is a total non-leader, a cipher, a man whose entire life has been a journey not of self-knowledge but of self-obliteration, an odyssey of opacity. He is Chauncey Gardner, Jimmy Carter II, Zelig. He has always wanted to be President, but he's never actually wanted to do anything specific -- which is tantamount to saying that he never wanted to do anything. All be, no do.

And one more observation: As disappointed as all of us white, feminist, Hillary-admiring types are in this turn of events, I expect it's not a patch on the kind of disappointment that's infecting black America right now. It's not just that the United States needed an FDR and wound up with Calvin Coolidge (or, fine, Herbert Hoover)... but after our country's tragic racial history, for all that agony to have achieved its putative culmination in this, dare I say, black hole... well, that's beyond cruel.

Obit for the Obama Presidency

Krugman has written it. A definitive indictment it is, and will remain. For all the rigid carping against His Nobel Shrillness among some Lefties, including some I admire -- grounded in a kind of context-deafness to where he is publishing and what is required to get maximum impact and longevity from that megaphone -- the awareness of the meaning and importance of today's column is pretty widespread and instantaneous.

How much does Nature abhor a vacuum? How fast does it fill? And who fills it -- i.e., does the Democratic Party still possess any Force of Nature-ness? Will he be primaried? Or do only the wingnuts have the energy to rush in where better angels now fear to tread?

Risible CDS

Oh, that David Corn! Funny, funny man.

So, this is what the scattered, abandoned zombies formerly known as Obamanation are down to now? Couldn't they at least dial up the oldies station? You know, play back some of those great tunes from the past -- like "I Shot the Precious" or "Under My Thumb"?

We don't need no educators

I can't wait to taste the couscous Somerby will make of today's NYT column by Joe Nocera on departing NYC Schools chancellor Joel Klein. Bob has, of course, been chronicling the ongoing novel of "school reform" and the War on Teachers for years now -- with plenty of attention (e.g., this past Wednesday) to the Times' role in writing it. While the catastrophe in Iraq served to discredit the Paper of Record's resident novelist of Islamofascism, Judith Miller, it seems that no infusion of facts can shake the Grey Lady's dedication to our educational picaresque, America's own Dumb Quixote.

While we await Somerby's rant, a few choice bits from Nocera:

"Mr. Klein transformed both himself and New York’s $23 billion school system. He will leave his post with a reputation as the country’s pre-eminent education reformer."

This despite the well-publicized fact that the city's rise in test scores has proved to be bogus. An ordinary, headline-browsing resident of said city would have been permitted to conclude that Klein was skedaddling out of town with his C.V. between his legs -- received by the welcoming arms of Rupert Murdoch, no less -- as everything he claimed to have accomplished over the past eight years goes up in smoke. But the Times' love for the dominant educational novel of our times is so strong that it scurries to chant the magic phrases of "reform" and "accountability" on its front pages over and over again, drowning out the inconvenient truths.

On choosing Klein in the first place: "'Joel had all the qualifications,' the mayor told me a few days ago, adding: 'He knows how to attract good people, motivate them and make them accountable. You can always find someone to do the technical stuff.' The fact that Mr. Klein did not have preset ideas about how to fix public education was, in the mayor’s view, a plus."

Just let Mayor Mike's quote roll around in your mind. "You can always find someone to do the technical stuff." Don't mistake this for the view of a typical CEO. It isn't. No CEO of any company based on expertise thinks like that. "The technical stuff" is the core stuff, the bread and butter, the meal ticket. Whether you're running a media company or a movie studio or an IT innovator or a pharma -- or a university -- the experts, the talent, are what puts bread on your table, what differentiates you in the market. You recruit them, coddle them, nurture them. You pay obsessive attention to what they know, how they learn it, how they use it and how to leverage and spread it. You may not be able to open a picture or decode a genome or write a Pulitzer Prize article yourself, but you damn well build everything in your company around those who can. "You can always find someone to do the technical stuff." Right.

This is not the view of a typical CEO. It's the view, first of all, of somebody whose business succeeded not because of its journalists, but because of its desktop terminal, its platform. The Bloomberg terminal got in early in the game of digitizing and speeding up financial data, and he built an empire on that. Second, he's not just a CEO, he's a founder. Founders get to do whatever the fuck they want. Ordinary CEOs have fiduciary responsibilities. Boards of directors, even lax boards, can't let them run wild -- at least, not indefinitely. What Bloomberg brought to Gracie Mansion wasn't unique business savvy, it was the mindset and skills of a suave, socially liberal dictator. Sometimes, those impulses have been salutary -- e.g., his campaigns against smoking and trans-fats. But in his signature effort to transform an actual, complex, fraught system -- education -- that leadership model has been flunko.

Quoting the ever-quotable Steve Brill, a loud voice in the anti-teacher chorus: "'At Bloomberg, nobody has a contract,' said Mr. Brill, who is writing a book about school reform. 'He built a multibillion media empire in part on the idea that you can quit and he can fire you.'"

Huh? Bloomberg's empire was built on employment-at-will? It's astonishing that the once-rigorous founder (N.B.) of American Lawyer and CourtTV -- legendary for his excoriating marginal notes to writers on their copy -- could say this. To claim that Bloomberg Inc. is founded on such a generic fact of business is like saying that the Roman Empire was based on the fact that humans breathe in oxygen and breathe out carbon dioxide.

But what this quote does reveal, again, is the founder mentality. In this narcissistic mindset, an enterprise or institution isn't just Emerson's "lengthened shadow of a single man," it's nothing more than he.

Anyway, enough Howler-channeling. Let me just close by raising the question of why the Times is so dedicatedly pimping this novel, over many years and in the face of massive contrary evidence. It suggests that they're laying the pipe for a third-party run by Mike for President, no? The Precious has proven to be a flop, and the GOP crazies are abroad in the land, and what are we Manhattanites to do?

NYC's educational reform revealed as horseshit? Quick, sweetie, get me rewrite.

Aw, too bad - updated

Keith, we knew ye all too well. Richly deserved -- but for rather different reasons. This is like getting Capone on tax evasion.

Update: He's baaaaaack. Just to remind ourselves of the record of this noble defender of left-wing reason, cast your mind back to this ditty from his rap sheet. It started me blogging.

Say What?

From Ross Douhat's column today: "The central premise of the White House’s policy-making, the assumption that an economic crisis is a terrible thing to waste (as Rahm Emanuel famously put it), turned out to be a grave tactical mistake. It drew exactly the wrong lesson from earlier liberal eras, when the most enduring expansions of government — Social Security in the 1930s, Medicare in the 1960s — were achieved amid strong economic growth, rather than at the bottom of a recession."

Yep, you read that right. Social Security was passed amid strong economic growth, rather than at the bottom of a recession. This is appearing on the op-ed page of the Paper of Record.