First, he argues that the forty-fourth President of the United States is not so much a prophet leading his people to the Promised Land as a boy-man who campaigns like a mortal god but turns out to be a wife-dominated (not to mention Valerie Jarrett-dominated) poseur. Klein builds his case for designating Obama as an amateur on two fronts. Alas, Hillary did not bargain on the Obama’s Yes-we-can Express appearing out of nowhere and derailing her I-think-I-can-I-know-I-can climb towards the summit of glory. If Hillary Clinton had been the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate, doubtless she would have won the election by virtue of being something better than a Republican maverick-that is, a Democrat. John McCain, the Republican nominee, might have been seventy-two years old but the age issue was waived in deference to his long-time status as a “maverick”, codeword for an anti-Bush man. Back in 2008 the predominant mood in GFC-affected America was anti-Bush. In contrast, America’s “liberal establishment”, controlling the media, academia, Hollywood, the music industry, and even mainstream Protestant denominations, not only jumped aboard the Obama peace train with alacrity, they also convinced independents and swinging voters to join them on the ride. The One had come to rescue the many from their sins.įor conservatives, Axelrod’s fantasy narrative contained all the weightiness of a Michael Jackson song. The ascendancy of Obama-“a conciliator who had tried to bring together his white mother and black father, who strove to integrate the racial and cultural conflicts in his own life”-signified the moment in history when the United States of America (not to mention the whole planet) would begin to reconcile with its divided self. Axelrod sold Obama to a significant swath of the electorate as an American Messiah. He devised a narrative for Obama in which the candidate was presented as a black man who would heal America, not divide it, a moderate non-partisan who would rescue America, not threaten it. He turned Obama’s negatives into positives. To sell Obama to voters, Axelrod performed a brilliant piece of political legerdemain. The wily Chicago journalist and political consultant David Axelrod found a way to present the fellow with the most radical voting record in the United States Senate as the ideal agent for bringing the nation together. America, caught up in Red–Blue acrimony, craved a non-divisive political figure who would reconcile a polarised country. Klein is very good on the commandeering of the 2008 election campaign. Edward Klein’s tome, as it happens, is the cry of resentment from a Democrat who fears his party, not to mention his country, has been hijacked. She is not entirely wrong, in the sense that a touch of the tabloids pervades numerous passages in The Amateur, and yet she ignores the possibility that it amounts to something more than a series of salacious anecdotes. Maslin has nothing positive to say about The Amateur, dismissing it as a “skimpy, bitter book” with “no capacity for explaining specifics”. Oh, and President Obama is in this book too. The Amateur by Edward Klein is a book about an inept, arrogant ideologue who maintains an absurdly high opinion of his own talents even as he blatantly fails to achieve his goals. Janet Maslin, writing in the New York Times, at least managed to be somewhat amusing in her opening gambit: Anti-Obama polemic apparently has no place in the public domain during an election year.Įdward Klein might have been a long-standing Democrat and a former editor at the New York Times and Newsweek but the mainstream media, whenever it deigned to mention his book, went for the jugular. Drudge Report had even given prominence to Edward Klein’s “virulently” anti-Obama tome, The Amateur, just when Klein was being “barred from major TV appearances and mostly ignored by the mainstream media”. Two Time magazine writers, Mark Halperin and Elizabeth Dias, lashed out at Matt Drudge’s “media freak show” website Drudge Report, accusing it of being a “circus” posting items scornful of “Obama and Vice President Joe Biden and their wives”. This is not how the fairy tale was supposed to end. Not until the first week of June did it dawn on America’s liberal-leftist mainstream media, which constitutes the virtual entirety of America’s mainstream media with the exception of Fox News and various populist radio stations, that The One might only serve the one term. The Amateur: Barack Obama in the White House
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