In the beginning with Obama (LIB "COLUMNIST" SUCKS UP TO JON ALTER SUCKING UP TO 0BAMA)

When this writer was a young boy, he overheard a woman of considerable age and learning remark, only half in jest, “I have to read Walter Lippmann every morning so I know what I think.”

It isn’t that we are Dittoheads. It isn’t that we are chumps. But we typically have favorite pundits we like to look to. Some news happens, a White House leak or a gulf oil spill, and even as we consider it, we say to ourselves, “I wonder what [fill in the blank] thinks of that.”

He is a diligent political reporter with more sources than the Mississippi. He resides in neither the Birther or Truther loon fringe. He has dabbled studiously as a historian with a fine book on FDR (and how this “socialist” managed to help save capitalism in the 1930s). He is a good columnist to turn to, a worthwhile TV talking head to hear out, a thoughtful man who tends to know what he is talking about and shuts up when he doesn’t.

Which brings us to where we are. President Obama’s first year in office is done. We are hearing what many think about that.

It is not a bad time to wonder what Alter thinks of it. And he obliges us with The Promise (Simon & Schuster, $28).

Journalism has been called “literature in a hurry.” Alter’s book is history in a hurry, as he freely admits, but is a good first step for putting events in order and figuring things out.

He finds the task daunting. He edges into it with not only an Author’s Note but then a Preface, which is followed by a Prologue.

In fact, he pretty much throws up his hands in defeat in the book’s second sentence, noting, “It’s too early to draw definitive conclusions ...”

But he is resolute in pursuit of a more modest task, the only one really open in 2010, which is to offer a calm, solid narrative of the people and events of the first Obama year, away from the continuous clang of partisan sound bites that the year seemed to be.

This Alter does well. The book offers a cascade of detail to please any follower of politics as a spectator sport. Do you wonder where Obama sneaks his smokes? In a grove by the White House tennis court. Or what nickname he gave to Chief Economic Adviser Larry Summers? Dr. Kevorkian. And there is always Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel’s gift for lighthearted quips, such as that regarding the distractions posed by president’s new dog, Bo: “I’m going to kill that ----ing dog.”

The narrative is meanwhile written with sufficient style to hold the interest of those even casually interested in events that will change the nation and the world for generations to come.

There are no huge surprises about Obama the man. We already know that he is intelligent and cautious. We know that he takes the long view, strategic over tactical, in American politics, while many around him concern themselves mostly with what will happen in the next news cycle. We know that he is tough and sees things through, sometimes to a fault.

Alter lays all this out and takes us through the successes and the mistakes of a work in progress. And in skillfully doing so, he helps us rethink a few tenets of the current conventional wisdom.

Try this one: “Obama hasn’t accomplished all that much, when you come right down to it.”

Spin matters. Think of Obama’s first year. Think only of his administration’s first legislative package, the stimulus bill:

“In fact, it was five landmark pieces of legislation in one. If the bill had been split into the biggest tax cuts for the middle class since Reagan, the biggest infrastructure bill since the Interstate Highway Act in the 1950s, the biggest education bill since Lyndon Johnson’s first federal aid to education, the biggest scientific and medical research investment in forty years, and the biggest clean energy bill ever, then Obama would have looked like Superman, or at least more like FDR.”

The bill was signed 28 days into the Obama presidency. The book goes on to recount the ups and downs and sideways of the next 337 days.

“There are no huge surprises about Obama the man.”

I’ve never big on the birth certificate issue, but what we don’t know about this president (and what the MSM has avoided like leprosy) is starting to pile up. Issues about school records and attendance, Social Security numbers and the like, are getting more and more prevalent and credible. Notice that the bammer is shying away from too many outright denials, possibly to avoid attracting undue attention. The last thing he needs is some enthusiastic supporter setting out to defend him and uncovering too many inconvenient facts. Eventually, too much coverup may blow things wide open.

He resides in neither the Birther or Truther loon fringe.
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These numerous attempts to ridicule the birthers will fail.

It's like telling someone to not think of a pink elephant. Well...Of course the first thing that comes to mind is pink elephant!

Obama must be getting nervous about the eligibility question otherwise we wouldn't be hearing anything at all about it ( jokingly or otherwise).

One more thing: Obama’s intelligence.

How do we “already” know about Obama’s intelligence? Huh? What has he ever accomplished? Really? When? What? Even his biographies have Ayer’s fingerprints all over it. Where are his college transcripts? His SAT, LSAT, or GRE scores? Thesis? Law Review articles?

The author of this article was likely wearing a blue dress when he/she wrote this article.

I understand that Alter is the author of the ‘up/down’ arrows in Newsweak.

Jonathan Alter wrote a column in August 1995 in which he bluntly told the GOP, as they contemplated the possibilities for the 1996 campaign after having been savaged by the MSM for nine months for daring to elect a majority of Congress (that was when TIME's venomous "Man of the Year" cover depicted Newt Gingrich with a 5 o'clock shadow and lime-green/ruby-red highlights .... pure graphical hatred in all its essences), that they were not "Serious" enough. There were questions among the mandarin class whether the GOP would ever be a Serious party again, and produce sober leaders that could garner Respect from the Keepers of Respect.

This was all a snow job. Theodore White had written 30 years before how the Wall Street attorneys and their Old Money clients, educated and cultivated (and don't forget well-dressed, from Brooks Brothers, with Connecticut accents and good diction that bespoke Good Things), were "the best of their kind" (White's words) ..... unlike, say, those people. The ones who wanted an end to "Me-Too" Republicanism, who wanted Bob Taft in 1952 and Barry Goldwater in 1960 and 1964, the ones who should have been grateful to accept and vote for the "Me Too"/Yacht Club candidate every four years and then go home and pay the taxes the Democrats had thought up for them as a kind of jiziya for the Unbelievers.

So Alter spake to them ..... appealing to their own sense of the Serious .... and told them they had to nominate a Serious candidate for 1996 or be done for all time with Seriousness and the regard of Real People. The GOP, Alter murmured in their ears, needed to nominate a mature candidate, a tested and leaderly man who knew how to "reach across the aisle" to Get Things Done, a man with tons of DC wisdom and gravitas. The Republicans needed, for the sake of their credibility, Bob Dole.

Of course, Bill Clinton and Dick Morris had completed, a few weeks before, a marketing and research campaign (using Chinese money from Clinton's treason) in below-the-radar "C" markets like Jackson, Mississippi, and Gadsden, Alabama -- smaller-than-most markets that didn't have Hungry Eye roving reporters to sniff out the presence of a major presidential campaign effort in their town.

The test-marketing campaign had shown Morris and Clinton that their best matchup, their easiest chump to roll, was the ancient, creaky, irascible, low-voter-recognition (outside the Beltway and Kansas), personality-less Bob Dole.

And that was why, seven months before the primaries, the DNC and its NGO allies had begun segueing into their Hate-Newt campaign ads, shots of Newt together with Bob Dole .... the propaganda term of art is "bracketing". This was more than six months before New Hampshire.

And of course Alter Seriously, Seriously enjoined the Republicans, that they had better retrieve their good name by nominating Bob Dole.

Just in case anyone was wondering how Jonathan Alter rolls.

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