Party of Nobodies

Evelyn De Morgan, Cassandra (1898)

Digby’s response to Obama’s state secrets (h/t bostonboomer):

Back when everyone naively thought that electing a Democrat would end these obscene royalist decrees, it was argued by a few of us that once given, these powers are rarely given back. But I don’t think anyone expected the Democratic constitutional scholar would actually double down on the dictatorial powers. I confess, I’m fairly gobsmacked.

I often start my frontpage rants in a comment section reacting to the latest buzz in the moment, so you may have seen me post the following bit before. Please bear with another repeat, because it’s the first thing that came to mind when I read about Digby digging up that sorry old excuse that “nobody could have predicted.”

Party of Nobodies…

Nobody could have predicted Bush-Cheney would be a massive failure.

Nobody could have predicted the Iraq war would be an unfounded war and a diversion.

Nobody could have predicted Obama would make Bush-Cheney’s policies the new normal.

I’m nobody, and I endorse this message.

Remember FISA, progressives? Remember criticizing Hillary for “making Obama look bad” ?

The Obama Left reassured themselves that the FISA betrayal in the summer of 2008 was something they could live with and then pep-talked themselves into supporting Obama all over again. Obama was not Bush, Palin, McCain, Clinton, or any other icky pol. They touted Obama as a “different kind of politician,” even though the writing was on the wall that he would make a very indifferent kind of president.

Had progressives not been so cluelessly and arrogantly preoccupied with demanding party unity and demonizing anyone who wouldn’t bow to it, they might have realized that the opportunity to put pressure on the next president of the United States was staring them in the face throughout the entire 2008 primary season and general election cycle.

Shoulda, woulda, coulda. “But nobody could have known.”

Unfortunately, there were many progressives and Democrats who did know better in 2008 but “didn’t care.”

From Matt Taibbi, September 2008, in a piece entitled “Obama on the Trail: He’s delivering the same message Dems always rely on. So why does it sound like a clarion call this time?” :

But all in all, you never get a sense that there’s a more interesting side of Obama lurking underneath somewhere. Oddly enough, the guy only really lights up when he starts delivering those same ham-handed lines about the American Dream that fell out of the mouths of Dean and Kerry like dead bullfrogs.

And maybe that’s the difference. When those other guys took this act on the campaign trail, it was obvious they were just reading lines in a bad script. But maybe it sounds different coming from Obama because he actually means what he says, as weird as that would be. The American Dream, after all, is dying. We do need something new. That much is painfully obvious.

What’s confusing about Obama is that he’s so successful at projecting an air of genuineness and honesty, even as he navigates the veritable Mount Everest of fakery and onerous bullshit that is our modern electoral system. And the reason it’s confusing is that we’ve grown so used to presidential candidates who fall short of the images they present in public, we don’t even know anymore what a man worth the office would look like. Is this him? Or is this just a guy with a gift for concealing the ugliness of the system he represents? As I watch Obama on the campaign trail, I know I’m listening to the Same Old Shit, delivered by a candidate who could cross the Atlantic on a bridge constructed entirely from Wall Street cash culled for him by party hacks and insiders. But I suddenly don’t care. It’s not just that the alternative is four years of the madman John McCain. It’s that, if Obama wins, it will be interesting to find out, at long last, if there really can be something truly different about someone who sounds so much the same.

The Hollywood sheep chanting O-baaa-ma in those black and white PSAs were easier to take than Taibbi’s kid glove coverage of Obama in ’08.

Taibbi had made misanthropy his signature, but suddenly he didn’t care. Suddenly, he wanted to find out if a happy ending really was possible.

Where have I heard this plot before? Oh, right. The first season of Grey’s Anatomy, among other places.

The politically worn and torn journalist had finally found his I-Can’t-Believe-It’s-Not-Political soulmate in Obeautiful… alas, Obeautiful turned out to be married to the same old special interests, not ready to divorce.

Nobody could have known! Nobody could have predicted!

Just like nobody could have known that the “best campaigner” and “media darling” would be a governing disaster. (That goes for 2000 and double for 2008.)

Just like nobody could have predicted that no matter who won in 2008–Obama, Clinton, or McCain–we wouldn’t be getting out of Iraq or Afghanistan.

All of the important somebodies in left blogistan could not see what the nobodies that they exiled from their pro-Obama blogs could see.

It is well past time for left blogistan to take an inventory of themselves and realize that they’ve turned into their own Village. Many of the things that today leave them gobsmacked about Obama were red flags that they pushed aside in 2008.

And, where the Digbys profess being gobsmacked, the Taibbis act as if they had been on the cutting edge all along. But, they all sold the sellout. Not unlike the MSM that sold us the Iraq war and then force-fed the electorate “anti-war” Obama five years later.

Of course, “nobody” knows better than to expect left blogistan to ever take any such inventory. The progressive blogosphere has become the insular bubble that they railed against in the early days when they were the nobodies trying to break through the hegemony of the mainstream media.