Sunday, November 9, 2014

The Uppity Stranger ~ Chuck Todd's Book Slams President Obama

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Previous Related Posts:
Chuck Todd Admits That Truth Isn't Part of His Job Description
Chuck Todd Shills for Mitch McConnell after Slamming Alison Grimes
Jealous Clown Todd Wonders Why Obama Isn't an Alpha Dog

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Chuckles the Todd, who was recently chosen as the new host of NBC's flagship "Meet the Press," has written a poison-pen screed against President Obama. The so-called journalist who famously said it "wasn't his job" to truth-check the GOP on Obamacare now thinks it IS his job to 'splain all of the Obama-fail.

It's enough to make a Tea Partier weep with joy. And those are Chuck Todd's people. He has done them proud.

Let him tell you something about The Negro, just like Cliven Bundy.

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. . . if The Stranger is revelatory, it’s not in the way Todd intended. For all his strengths (and they are myriad), Todd has written a disappointing book, a slab of pedestrian punditry marbled with occasional insight. The Stranger purports to tell the story of a president who couldn’t transcend his environment. The story it ultimately—and unwittingly—tells is of the perceptive political geek who couldn’t escape Beltway groupthink.
~ Elbert Ventura, Columbia Journalism Review

Six years in, our 44th president remains a cipher, someone “everyone is still trying to get to know,” as Mr. Todd writes. Particularly vexing is a basic irony that this book seeks to address: “How does one of the most successful politicians in American history . . . appear to be so bad at practicing the basics of politics in the backrooms of Washington, whether on Capitol Hill, on K Street, or at the Pentagon?”
. . . To that nagging question about how someone so intellectually advanced could be so politically stunted, the author’s final answer is that Barack Obama’s “arrogance got the better of him.” As a novel twist on this familiar theme, Mr. Todd theorizes that Mr. Obama’s happy experience as editor of the Harvard Law Review “gave him a false self-confidence that burns in him—and burns him—to this day.”
~ via Wall Street Journal Book Review

Todd’s attempts to peer deep inside Obama as an individual don’t take us far. “As is the case for many Americans, the president’s unusual upbringing shaped him to be the person he is today,” is not an encouraging start. Todd makes much of the fact that Obama’s mother was an anthropologist, which somehow transmitted to her only son “instinctive observational skills that allowed him to read and understand folks better than most politicians.” At the same time, being biracial “infused in him the temperament and patience that have marked his presidency both positively and negatively.” As a politician, Obama is described as “passive and arrogant,” and at times he is “all telescope and zero microscope.”
. . . As befitting a political junkie chronicle, the book is generous with political cliches. Throughout “The Stranger,” field days are had, rocky shoals are navigated, skies pose limits, writing appears on walls, fuel is added to fires, dies are cast, and collective sighs of relief are breathed. And there are sentences like this one: “Early on, there were signs the Republicans wouldn’t follow the presidential Pied Piper to postpartisanship.”
~ Washington Post Review of The Stranger
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