Dan

Calabrese

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January 22, 2009

Obama’s Problem: The Immature Jerks Who Love Him

I’m glad you’re all so happy. I really am. I like to see people happy. But there’s happy-and-content-with-life happy and there’s I’m-so-trashed-I-can’t-stop-giggling happy. The adoring throngs all across the nation today seem a bit more of the latter to me.

The peaceful transfer of power to President Obama is something to celebrate, no doubt. Too many Americans probably don’t appreciate what an achievement it is that we do this every four years without bloodshed. But we also tend to do it without the sort of juvenile taunting we saw on Tuesday, when Obama’s fans jeered the departing George W. Bush – not once but twice – with that stupid nah-nah-nah-goodbye song.

Have you ever seen that sort of behavior at an inaugural before? Neither have I. It’s never happened. And it makes you think about a lot of things. Recall Election Night, when a massive crowd assembled outside the White House moments after Obama’s victory became assured. They knew, of course, that Obama wasn’t there. Their purpose was to take out their hostilities on the man who was.

These are the same people who taunted Bush on Tuesday. These are the same people who turned that shoe-throwing idiot in Iraq into a folk hero. These are the same people who showed their colors during the CNN/Facebook simulcast of the inauguration – intermittently declaring their glee and spewing vile invective at the departing president.

OK. Forget about Bush, his record or even the notion that a departing president deserves our thanks for his service, even if he was terrible. That’s not really the point. The point is that we’re finding out something about Obama’s base, and about the attitudes of those who have not only made him president but have also made him so popular in the early going.

To cut to the chase, an unusually large number of them are immature jerks.

They have no respect for the office of the presidency. They have no respect for the difficulty of a job that comes with burdens they couldn’t possibly understand, let alone handle. They have no respect for the institutions of our nation. They have no respect for much of anything.

That doesn’t mean Obama is like this. He shows no signs that he is. But this is surely one of the results of working so hard to turn out the youth vote. You end up bringing people into the process who are still at the point where they have spent the vast majority of their lives being taken care of, and only a tiny minority of it – if any at all – working for a living and taking responsibility for themselves.

It’s understandable that Obama’s supporters are happy today. But what’s really behind the happiness? Do they really have a clear idea what Obama is likely to achieve as president? Do they really know all that much about the nation’s challenges, and their connection to the policy choices not only of the past eight years, but really of the past generation?

Or are far too many of them simply MTV-watching, bar-hopping party types who identify with the cool, popular new guy and jeered the unpopular old guy – since that’s what all their friends were doing? That’s certainly how a lot of them acted on Tuesday.

Perhaps there is something positive about this for President Obama. Many of his campaign promises cannot possibly be kept responsibly, and if his supporters want nothing more than for him to be cool, and to be the guy who put George W. Bush out with the trash, it gives him some room to maneuver.

But the president had better realize that popularity with a crowd like this is awfully fleeting, and if they ultimately turn on him, they will quite possibly act like every bit the immature bunch of jerks they showed themselves to be on Tuesday.

Obama will need political capital to achieve his goals. What is the value of political capital that comes in the form of popularity with jeering, drunken, bar-hopping morons? You can’t redeem it for gold – that’s for damn sure.

© 2009 North Star Writers Group. May not be republished without permission.

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