In the days after the 2012 election the Democrats bragged about their technological genius and how it turned the election. They told the world about what they'd done—the data mining, the social networking, that allowed them to zero in on Mrs. Humperdink in Ward 5 and get her to the polls. It was quite impressive and changed national politics forever. But I suspect their bragging hurt their president. In 2008 Mr. Obama won by 9.5 million votes. Four years later, with all the whizbang and money, he won by less than five million. When people talk about 2012 they don't say the president won because the American people endorsed his wonderful leadership, they say he won because his team outcomputerized the laggard Republicans.
This has left him and his people looking more like cold technocrats who know how to campaign than leaders who know how to govern. And it has diminished claims of a popular mandate. The president's position would be stronger now if more people believed he had one.They try all sorts of things to deny that they got beat in an election by a sitting President with a 7.8% unemployment rate, but this is the first time I've seen one of them try and tell me that Joe Blow of Middletown has been retroactively demoralized by the cold technocracy of the 2012 Democratic campaign. Wait till someone tells him about Karl Rove!
Noonan's other weakening point -- about how Obama thinks he can't make deals with Republicans just because they keep saying they don't want to make them but he should know better -- is merely the sort of bald-faced denial of reality that we've learned to expect from her. But the one about how Obama doesn't have a mandate because he's too good at politics is something special; it's so self-refuting it's almost a Zen riddle.
First!
ReplyDeleteIf Democrats efforts' to get people to vote makes them "cold technocrats", what does Republicans' effort to suppress the vote make THEM?
ReplyDeleteWarm Klansmen.
ReplyDelete~
No you're not.
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This has left him and his people looking more like cold technocrats who know how to campaign than leaders who know how to govern.
ReplyDeleteUnfortunately for her, Romney and his people looked more like people incompetent at technology, campaigning, and governing.
"When people talk about 2012 they don't say the president won because the American people endorsed his wonderful leadership..."
ReplyDeleteSO true, Pegs. When "people" talk about 2012, they talk about what an intellectually dishonest, deluded, brain-damaged fantasizing nitwit you are. Just listen to them! Right here! Am I right, "people"?
Dame Peggington Noonington of the Brooklynshire Nooningtons needs none of your sympathy, peasant woman!
ReplyDeletehttp://www.mockpaperscissors.com/tag/peggington-noonington/
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Good God, is she awful. That video is the distilled essence of WHAT THE FUCKING FUCK.
ReplyDeleteGod, I love that almost-audible scoff. Won by only 5 million. Pfft. Just a five and then six zeros after that. No big deal.
ReplyDeleteI thought in Obama's second term that the Repubs would be willing to work with him since he'd be in his last term as President. I had forgotten that they hate blahs and Democracy more than they love their Country.
ReplyDelete-- about how Obama thinks he can't make deals with Republicans just because they keep saying they don't want to make them but he should know better
ReplyDeleteIn the Republican universe, no means yes.
Obama assembled a team of really great campaigners - the latest breaking story from Lady Peggy's Chronicle of Obvious Things that have Finally Penetrated my Drunken Haze.
ReplyDeleteYou know what people don't mention when they talk about the 2012? How Romney stole in like a thief with good tools. Because of the whole failure thing.
ReplyDeleteFun fact when I was trying to find that column I got flummoxed for a minute because I forgot Noonington isn't actually her last name.
ReplyDeleteHell, I'm just happy this supercilious sot has finally admitted that Obama knows how to campaign. Let's never let this bloody gem, written one day before the 2012 election, be erased from the public memory. http://blogs.wsj.com/peggynoonan/2012/11/05/monday-morning/
ReplyDeleteEven funnier if you think it's "Nooners."
ReplyDeletenext you'll be telling me she doesn't actually have a peerage.
ReplyDeleteShorter Nooners: "I think we're all agreed" it's all over; can't we just declare victory and go hometo happy hour?
ReplyDeleteObama's mandate is not as strong as W's was in 2000, because W won by a whole NINTH of the electorate.
ReplyDeleteJesus, does that ever explain a lot.
ReplyDeleteWinners?
ReplyDeleteDYAC.
ReplyDeleteIn the days after the 2012 election the Democrats bragged about their
ReplyDeletetechnological genius and how it turned the election. They told the world
about what they'd done—the data mining, the social networking, that
allowed them to zero in on Mrs. Humperdink in Ward 5 and get her to the
polls
Does she give any examples of this alleged post-election gloating that somehow deterred voters before the election? I remember a fair amount of complaining from the Republican direction about the database disasters of the Romney campaign; and Republican assertions that Obama's win was only due to his unfair tactics of motivating people to vote, i.e. was not evidence that he had a mandate or anything.
They can't take it. They lost! That was not supposed to happen!!!!!!!! And now they have to write all this crap for a living!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
ReplyDeleteWhen people talk about 2012 they don't say the president won because the
ReplyDeleteAmerican people endorsed his wonderful leadership, they say he won
because his team outcomputerized the laggard Republicans
It is almost as if Noonan only talks with Republicans; as if it is her job to inflate Republican perspectives into the popular consensus.
Oh lord, I hadn't read that unctuous bit of mythologizing at the time and I was a person happier for it. I know I should feel some schadenfreude at what a walloping this propaganda "prediction" of hers took, but it is just so nakedly presumptive in its implicit claims to cultural superiority that after suffering through it, little bits of my soul just broke off and floated away into the ether, having despaired of ever feeling happy again. [desperately tries to catch floating pieces of darkened soul ejecta and stuff them back into astral body]
ReplyDeleteFor a nice palate cleanser, click on to the next column, and showcases a Peggy so shell-shocked and broken she approvingly quotes the head of the fucking Wobblies for inspiration.
ReplyDeleteNoonan's signature style of creating mawkish depictions of Americana and pressing them into the service of aristocracy and knee-jerk conservatism is perturbing, and points to the very real possibility that she is the product of a perverse tryst between Walt Whitman, Phyllis Schlafly, and a barman in a private gentleman's club.
ReplyDeleteWith that in mind, here's my attempt at a Nooners column:
"Frost on the window pane. A farmer rising before dawn. A freckled boy's forelocks tousled by the wind. A widow staining her kitchen table with tears of relief that her recent gambling win will free her from the humiliation of accepting of a government-issued social-security check. A newborn calf struggling to rise for the first time. A self-made casino owner reluctantly rigging his machines to lower their payouts, as after Democratic tax increases he can no longer afford to help struggling widows. Valiant struggle. Breezes. Newly-mown lawns. Cheerless bureaucrats shuttering neighborhood businesses. Humble American pride, strangled. Obama. Darkness. Dread settling over a city after a Democratic landslide. Good people shutting themselves inside in fear. Roving bands of Black Panthers fisting their huge, obsidian nightsticks under the cover of law.
Hope! A recount! Good men with rifles intimidating precinct managers. Somewhere a voter ID law passes and the suburbs erupt in cheers! Determined developers gentrify a neighborhood. Applebee's! Starbucks! A statute of a smiling Reagan erected and towering over the square, decent families taking shelter in its protective shadow. A farmer exits a glowing barn and shuts it up for the night. Children kneeling on a wooden floor saying their prayers. Dinner parties on the Potomac. America."
The president's position would be stronger now if more people believed he had [a mandate]
ReplyDeleteNoonan comes perilously close here to stating explicitly why she's wants her readers to believe that Obama does not have a mandate.
their president
ReplyDeleteTelling choice of words there.
By every measure, Obama's re-election margin of victory was higher than Bush's in 2004.
ReplyDelete2012
Obama 65,910,437, 51.1%, 332 Electoral,
Romney 60,932,795, 57.2%, 206 Electoral
2004
Bush 62,040,610, 50.7%, 286 Electoral
Kerry 59,028,444, 48.3%, 251 Electoral
Do we even need to wonder how Noonan characterized Bush's vast 2004 victory? Like this: The president won re-election by a relatively healthy margin because the American people judged him to be the better man.
And if you can stomach the rest (just one column of a zillion like it).
Republican dictionary:
ReplyDeleteMandate = our guy won, even if he stole it, so now we get to have everything our way.
"Mandate" does not have a definition outside of "the Republican won."
Well, at least she's stopped churlishly calling him "Mr" Obama. like some of her fellow travellers are still wont to do.
ReplyDeleteThey just weren't as good at doctoring electronic voting machines as that nice Mr Rove.
ReplyDeleteExamples. You mean like, you know, evidence? Whyever would she have to stoop to that level when it's so easy just to say so? You should write your own column if you're concerned about, oh, fairness and balance and stuff.
ReplyDeleteMath's a little off in the 2012 numbers. 57.2% for Romney? Maybe 47.2% - don't actually have a source but makes more sense. ;-)
ReplyDeleteAnd the one after that, where she says in effect Republicans are doin' it rong. Identifies the problems, suggests solutions.
ReplyDeleteAnd then proceeds to spend the next six months pretending she did no such thing.
Not exactly "Nooners" but close. . .
ReplyDeleteNeeds more Reagan loafer.
ReplyDeleteFunny, what I heard was the REPUBLICANS crowing about how they were going to sweep the asshole millionaire into the White House because the their fabulous grasp of technology and social networking.
ReplyDeleteSo, when that was an abysmal failure, they have decided to pretend it was the Dems all along who "took advantage" of the poor old technophobes of the rightwing, and isn't that just like all those scary young people with their facetweets and dingleberry phones and their mysterious electronic hiveminds.
Not to mention, if folks supposedly were "disillusioned" by the use of technology in the Obama overwhelming victory, ummmmm...how did they know that ahead of the fact and turn out in lower numbers? Was it something Apple sent from the future through the new iOS?
Brilliant images and spot-on descriptors. A bit impressionistic, though. Peggy's writing is "honest" (stop laughing), don't ye know--she's merely putting down, in good workmanlike American prose, what thinking types are intuiting. But your first sentence up there, about "Noonan's signature style," is perfect.
ReplyDeleteYeah, I guess I wandered off into a more Whitman-type thing. Thanks, I'll keep working on it. [pours himself third gin martini before noon to get into character]
ReplyDeleteThe Democrats cheated! They had a more popular platform AND they did a better job of selling it to the voters! You call that a fair election?
ReplyDeleteIt's only a Mandate if the Supreme Court orders the result. Or if you're a Republican.
ReplyDeleteAh, but W won millions of small towns and rural areas where real Americans live and Gore only captured the hearts of immigrants and foreigners and decadent liberals who live in big cities! So W really won the mandate!
ReplyDeleteI actually read that argument more than once back in 2000/early 2001. It's when I realized "mandate" was another word for "Republicans voted for him."
Romney's people managed to do that AND appear cold.
ReplyDeleteShorter Nooners: "Democrats act like people who know how to campaign but not how to govern, so people should vote for GOPers who know how to do NEITHER instead!"
ReplyDeleteYes. Typo and bad eyesight. Thanks.
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