“There is this standard where Democrats feel they can say these things and apologize, as long as it comes from one of their own,” the black Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele told the media. “And if it comes from somebody else, it’s racism.”
THE DIARY OF SENATE MAJORITY LEADER HARRY REID
THE UNITED STATES CAPITOL
January 9, 2010
These Game Change reporters have taken my comments totally out of context. They were meant as a compliment to Barack. I thought it was an accurate and true description of why the president won the election. The American people were in fact ready to embrace a light-skinned, darker fellow—that’s all there is to it. His amazing rhetorical gifts, free of that Negro, George Jefferson jive talk made him more appealing to white voters. That is all 100 percent true. Having shared so many hours with Barack, I’ve heard him turn that Negro accent on and off like a light switch. He does it at will, and it’s a great talent—that’s what I was trying to tell those reporters. Honestly, I wish I could sound like a negro when I appear at some of these black churches. It would make them more receptive to my message, and God knows I could use their votes right about now . . .
The staff has been all over me since those Game Change quotes hit. They’re very agitated that I used the word Negro. Truth is: I didn’t realize that the term had fallen out of fashion. There are so few dark-skinned mormons, and I just don’t socialize with those people. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’ve got nothing against the blacks. I promoted them to political office, I listen to Johnny Mathis in the car, and I think Oprah is a much better talk-show host than Mike Douglas. All of that is 100 percent true; I’d repeat it to anyone.
I called Barack to apologize earlier today. He was very strange on the phone. I said, “Mr. President, I want to apologize if I caused any harm . . .” He cut me off. “Brutha Harry,” he said using his Negro nonwhite dialect, “I got cho back. Ain’t no thang!” It was very curious indeed, and at that point we shared an awkward pause. (I didn’t know if he was joking or not, so I just kept quiet.) He then reverted to his preppy, Caucasian dialect: “I’ve already got members of the Congressional Black Caucus drafting letters of support, and Michelle and I are going to make a statement. But Harry, you better get that health-care bill through the Senate. Do you understand me?” I told him I did, and he hung up.
I’ve sure learned my lesson. I’ve got to be more careful with my choice of words. It’s not the analysis, it’s the words that offend. If anyone asks me about the vernacular of the president again, I will say, “He is brilliant at reaching all voters with both his normal and his colored dialects.”
By allowing Harry Reid to escape all responsibility for his comments, the Democrats have lost credibility on this issue and weakened the norms of what is acceptable racial speech in the country. It is either always wrong to use the n-word and antiquated terminology like Negro, or it isn’t. And since it is wrong, let’s condemn it always and everywhere and not just when it falls from the mouths of conservatives.
THE DIARY OF VICE PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN
U.S. NAVAL OBSERVATORY
November 10, 2009
We were at Andrews Air Force Base today, and when that chopper landed, my hair looked like the grasses parting on the Serengeti. Jesus, when I saw the footage on MSNBC, I looked like Mr. Clean! All kidding aside, I should have waited to relocate the hair until after they perfected the procedure.
After getting the teeth caps and the hair plugs, I thought I’d be leading the American people, not playing second fiddle to the Prince Charming of Honolulu. I’ve scheduled another procedure to add some volume to the old crown over the Christmas holiday. The doc says I barely have enough donor hair left on the backside of the noggin. I leaned in—didn’t want Secret Service to hear— and said, “Doc, if there’s not enough on the back of my head, you can always graft some off my tookis.” The doctor stiffened a bit and said, “That’s what we were planning. As I told you, I’m taking the hair right off your head.” On the drive back, I thought maybe that was a crack. I don’t like the way that guy massages my scalp, either. After this surgery, I’m not going back to him again. Maybe I’ll try Tiger Woods’ guy next time.
I’ve got to do something. When you’ve got a wife as hot as mine, and you’re facing a reelection bid in a few years, you want to look as good as you can. Jill thinks maybe it’s time for a wig. I just don’t know. If it all starts to fall out after this operation, I’ll take the remaining strands (which are still pretty thick despite all the scarring) and just swirl ’em forward with a lot of hairspray. Donald Trump does that, and look at all the babes he has around him.
The Obamas and their political comrades have in various ways embodied that clinical definition of narcissism: “an all-pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy or behavior), need for admiration or adulation and lack of empathy.” By turning the spotlight of every topic and public policy issue onto themselves, the Obamas have redefined what it means to lead. Vainglory and haughtiness have become their trademarks. Leadership in the age of Obama is about grabbing all the goodies and glory available, regardless of the fallout. This tells our country—especially our young people—that governing is just another way of living out the celebrity lifestyle. Leadership requires not personal sacrifice, but personal celebration. “I do solemnly swear . . . to the best of my ability to preserve, protect, and defend my celebrity . . .”
THE WINNING WAY
No matter what the Obamas do or say, life is not one endless vacation. We’re not supposed to be here to seek our own pleasure and glory.
One antidote to narcissism (and we’re all succeptible) is personal sacrifice, a willingness to put others before ourselves.
Obama often talks about the common good, but beneath so many of the president’s policies and pronouncements, there is a spirit that is all too common and not so good. He claims to be looking out for the little guy, but more often than not, Obama is only looking out for himself and his own place in history. We must find another way as a people.
America was built on hard work and love of neighbor. Somehow we have to rediscover this spirit and begin to let it lead us again. Hard economic times need not always be a bad thing. They sometimes bring people together and force them to consider new ways to help one another. If that is the result of our present economic woes, we should consider ourselves blessed and thankful for the opportunity. With so much suffering touching the lives of our families and friends, it is our obligation to help when we can, and sacrifice whatever time or resources are available to us.
We also have to begin observing basic etiquette and manners in America again. We are the greatest country on earth—the strongest, the most creative—but if our children are vulgarians who learn their manners from reality TV and from the street, what have we really accomplished? It is up to each of us—myself included—to work against the coarsening of our culture and to resist the crude, classless behavior that we see embodied by some of our most celebrated figures. Basic respect and decorum, what it means to be a gentleman or lady, can really be taught only at home. Over time, if we are diligent, these standards of behavior will spread across the country and become second nature to future generations.
CHAPTER 9
DEMONIZING THE ENEMY
Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.
—SAUL ALINSKY, RULES FOR RADICALS
In a staggering announcement on April 6, 2010, President Obama revamped U.S. nuclear policy and weakened our national security. CBS News reported that, for the first time, the United States had “limited the circumstances under which the U.S. would resort to nuclear weapons.” This meant if a nonnuclear state were to attack America with a biological or chemical weapon, the United States would no longer consider a nuclear response.
Conservatives were incensed. Rudy Giuliani told National Review Online that Obama’s policy was “a left wing dream,” and asserted, “the president doesn’t understand the con
cept of leverage.” On WPIX in New York, Senator John McCain said that the president should make it plain that the United States “will take no option off the table to deter attacks against the American people and our allies.”
Then, the next evening during an appearance on Fox News’s Hannity, Sarah Palin weighed in on the controversy. She compared the Obama nuclear policy changes to a kid facing a bully in a schoolyard who says, “Go ahead, punch me in the face, and I’m not going to retaliate. Go ahead and do what you want to with me.”
The next day in Prague, where Obama was signing a nuclear pact with Russia, George Stephanopoulos asked him to respond to Palin’s criticism. The ever-prickly Obama took the bait—with intent. “I really have no response,” he said, as if he had just smelled something foul. “Because last I checked, Sarah Palin’s not much of an expert on nuclear issues.” Then he added, “If the secretary of defense and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff are comfortable with it, I’m probably going to take my advice from them and not from Sarah Palin.”
It was textbook Obama. Whenever the president is questioned, whenever he encounters even the slightest resistance to his agenda, his hackles go up. He ignores the merit of the argument at hand and focuses on the person making it. Obama reflexively demonizes the opposition, any opposition, which allows him to dismiss even the most rational criticism.
In the case of his nuclear policy adjustments, Obama could have chosen to spar with Rudy Giuliani or John McCain, two Republican critics with knowledge of the issue and legitimate concerns. He could have engaged in an honest public debate on this critical question of American security with someone who had proven expertise in this area. But Obama didn’t do that. No, he selected Sarah Palin as his opponent. There was method to his madness.
By elevating Palin, Obama diminished all his other critics. Palin got the front-page coverage and all the attention, while the other leading conservative figures—some potential future presidential candidates—were relegated to her shadow. This was by design.
Obama is doing all he can to turn Sarah Palin into the sole representative of the conservative cause and the voice of her party. The easiest way to win any battle is to select your own enemy. Clearly, Obama believes that she has been so caricatured by the Left and so savaged by the media that she is no real threat to him. She also remains a huge political star. By choosing Palin as his sparring partner, the president avoids answering the difficult questions about his reckless policy, while engaging in little more than a celebrity grudge match. Notice how he never addresses the substance of Palin’s concerns. Instead he runs to the personal, smearing her as “not much of an expert on nuclear policy.” On April 9, Palin sarcastically responded that her expertise probably paled next to “the vast nuclear experience that he acquired as a community organizer.” But the truth is, as a community organizer, Obama learned to go nuclear—on his critics. It was a skill that he took with him to the White House.
If Obama is accomplished in anything, he is accomplished in community organizing. He can stoke class envy with the best of them and knows the world of professional rabble-rousing. He knows how to play on perceived “inequities” for his own political advantage. On the streets of Chicago, he learned his lessons well; lessons coined by the father of community organizing, Saul Alinsky.
Alinsky was a Marxist-inspired radical who organized the black ghettos of Chicago in 1950. He channeled the discontent of his target audience to agitate for social change and the acquisition of “power.” Alinsky released his landmark work, Rules for Radicals, in 1971. It soon became the gospel of community organizing and the marching orders for all those who wished to amass power for themselves. Though Alinsky died more than a decade before Obama began his career as a community organizer, the future president absorbed the tactics of Alinsky and even his lingo from fellow travelers.
In the opening of Rules for Radicals, Alinsky writes: “What follows is for those who want to change the world from what it is to what they believe it should be [emphasis added]. The Prince was written by Machiavelli for the Haves on how to hold power. Rules for Radicals is written for the Have-Nots on how to take it away . . . my aim here is to suggest how to organize for power: how to get it and how to use it.”
Listen closely to Barack Obama and his surrogates, and the strains of Alinsky are hard to miss. Here is Obama from his Iowa Caucus victory speech on January 3, 2008: “Hope is the bedrock of this nation; the belief that our destiny will not be written for us, but by us; by all those men and women who are not content to settle for the world as it is; who have courage to remake the world as it should be.”
The same echoes of Saul reverberate through the speeches of that other community organizer in the Obama family, Michelle. Here is the future First Lady before a crowd in Orangeburg, South Carolina, on November 19, 2008: “Inequality is not a burden we have to accept, it is a challenge we must overcome. . . . I’m asking you to stop settling for the world as it is, and to help us make the world as it should be.”
There is a consistency to the thought of elites. They are always moving toward some utopia that they alone feel a divine right to impose on the rest of us. It is a monarchy of arrogance that Alinsky and the Obamas propose. Any who stand in the way of their “progress” must be stopped at all costs.
THE DIARY OF PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA
THE WHITE HOUSE
April 9, 2010
I’m dealing with a Supreme Court vacancy, a mining tragedy in West Virginia, and a major nuclear summit this weekend, and I’ve got to listen to Sarah Palin’s griping. I’ll be damned if this woman is going to slow my agenda. No matter where I turn, there she is snipping at my heels. I thought I took care of her during that interview with George the Greek in Prague, but now she’s bad-mouthing me again at some GOP Bund meeting in New Orleans—making light of my community activism!
I just cracked open my nightstand copy of Rules for Radicals. Papa Alinsky always has the perfect counsel just when I need it. Whenever I’m really feeling down, a little meditation on this good book brings me right back to my core—to my essence. It’s like going to church.
Says right here: “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.” That’s exactly what I’m going to do with Palin. She’s in my sights and I’m going to “reload”! We’ve got to stop this idea that she has any normal following—“freeze it”! Plouffe is working to plant some of our activists at silly Sarah’s next big tea-bagger rally. They’re going to throw around racial epithets and carry some brand-new posters of me with the Hitler mustache (we just had them printed up). Gibbs will make sure that CNN and MSNBC know where our guys will be standing, so they get plenty of coverage. To “personalize” and “polarize” her, I just got off the phone with Tina Fey. She’s hosting Saturday Night Live this week. I told her it’s her national duty to keep painting Palin as an unserious, fame-seeking money-grubber— her husband, too. My speechwriter Favreau is on his way to New York to help pen a Palin sketch for Tina. She’s a great woman and definitely the Carol Burnett of our generation.
Michelle is absolutely right. If I keep the focus on Palin, then nobody will pay any attention to what I’m doing. And that’s the way I like it. Hell, doesn’t Palin have anything better to do than criticize me? Shouldn’t she be back home shooting some endangered wolf species from a helicopter?
TEA PARTY POTSHOTS
Keep the pressure on with different tactics and actions, and utilize all events of the period for your purpose.
—SAUL ALINSKY, RULES FOR RADICALS
When thousands of hardworking Americans dared take to the streets to oppose Obama’s $787 billion stimulus plan in February 2009, the Democrats knew they had a problem on their hands. At first, the Obama administration downplayed their significance, but eventually top advisors, and the president himself, fanned out to dismiss and demonize the “Tea Partiers” from multiple angles.
On April 19, 2009, David Axelrod appeared on CBS’s Face the Nation to disparage the
entire movement. Axelrod said, “I think any time that you have severe economic conditions, there is always an element of disaffection that can mutate into something that’s unhealthy.” (Axelrod would know about “unhealthy mutations.”) “The thing that bewilders me is this president just cut taxes for ninety-five percent of the American people. So I think the tea bags should be directed elsewhere, because he certainly understands the burden that people face.” In other words, Axelrod was answering the Tea Par-tiers’ concerns the way Obamaniacs always do—by blaming George W. Bush.
One can always gauge the effectiveness of any conservative group by the volume of media scorn heaped upon it. When it became clear that the Tea Partiers were not a flash-in-the-pan movement, MSNBC and CNN hosts began crudely referring to them as “tea-baggers” (a reference to a sexual act that I will not describe here). On April 14, 2009, Obama’s favorite anchorman, Keith Olbermann, opined on Countdown, “Republican talking heads, like former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, have pushed their own version of teabagging—down the throats of tea-baggers. . . . And the nation’s teabagging, [is] of course, impossible without this man, a Dick Armey at the head of it—the former House majority leader representing right-wing money bags, who have blown lots of cash to make the movement look as if it’s coming from the bottom-up and not the top-down.” Now you know why he is considered the Walt Whitman of political punditry.
Judging from all the filthy commentary, the Tea Party movement, by April 29, 2009, was obviously having an impact. On that day, the president used a rally in Arnold, Missouri, marking his hundredth day in office, to marginalize the activists. The man suddenly had an allergic reaction to his favorite pastime, community organizing.
The Obama Diaries Page 28