I’ve posted on this a couple of times before – arguing that the populism of the left has gone missing and wondering why. This argues the same point in a different – shall we say ‘genre’. I agree with most of the first half of it, but thought it got a little complacent about its case towards the end. At least on the left I think you need balance. I’m hoping that with the tea party rampant up there in the US, the Republicans will run into that little law of politics.

WHAT OBAMA CAN LEARN FROM LADY GAGA (AND PROGRESSIVES FROM THE TEA PARTY), by Evert Cilliers aka Adam Ash

My name is Obama. But call me Icarus.

I soared on the wings of an angel. I was the biggest star the planet had ever seen, without having to go near a guitar. I was dancing on the moon, when suddenly, the moon gathered its bowels and dropped me like a turd back on earth.

Plop!

And here I sit, in my redecorated Oval Office, surrounded by all these clever Ph.D people, and by my pointillist-picture-perfect family, and I’m gobsmacked and paddywhacked and privately pissed and publicly petulant.

People scorn me. Left and right. They treat me like a dog.

After all I’ve done. What a record of legislation! How did I legislate? Let me count the bills.

On my 24th day in office, I whelped a $787 billion Recovery Act that included $78.61 billion of green energy stimulus, and cut the taxes of 95% of our taxpayers.

But I didn’t rest.

I squeezed out Healthcare Reform. That took a little longer. It was an almost stillborn breech baby, but today it is incubating and will start kicking about four years from now if the Republicans don’t starve it to death before then. Wonder of wonders, in its placenta can be found the detritus of the “pre-existing condition” scam. Unfortunately the baby is missing its genitals — the public option — but some industry deal snipped that one out of its genetic code.

Still, I didn’t rest.

Soon I begat Financial Reform that included a Consumer Financial Protection Agency birthed by Elizabeth Warren and now being midwifed by her.

And then, lest you forget, as most Americans have, I saved Detroit. Plus I shook down BP for $20 billion.

Those were my five biggies. Stimulus, health, finance, Detroit, BP shakedown. There’s a lot of little stuff too numerous to mention: my ban on torture, the student loan overhaul, our foreign rep restored, two okay Supreme Court ladies, etc.

But what happened? Where have all the voters gone? I feel like Sartre locked out of De Beauvoir’s bedroom because she’s banging the husband of the wife I banged, or their daughter, all because of some combination of nausea and misplaced ressentiment because our final philosophy agregationexam jury quibbled about whether they should give first place to me or to her, and then naturally confirmed her second-sex status.

Me, young and virile Barack Obama, locked out of the American bedroom? Can you imagine? Can you imagine that happening to the smartest guy in the room?

I can. Look at my approval ratings. Under 50%, to sleep with the fishes in the Seventh Circle of Consequences Unintended and Hopes Dashed on Pointy Rocks.

WTF? What happened?

Simple, Mr President. What happened was you.

You did it, Barack Hussein Obama. You baked the crap on which you gag. You ate the banana on whose peel you’re slipping.

Here’s what you did, you Hope Pope Dope, which I will describe to you in words of wackedoo woe with my balls on fire and my hair smoking Medusa snakes. In fact, I’m going to be stooping to the atavistic non-Latinate rhetoric of Henry Miller, Rabelais and Judd Apatow cock-joke movies … so you might mind-grip with feral clarity the global geography of your idiocy and my fury about same. Here’s what you wrought, in straight-up Anglo-Saxon:

After giving your base a great fuck as a candidate, you pulled out.

You entered the White House and slammed the door on your base. You handed over your personal stash of 13 million email addresses — your direct line to your fans — to the Democratic Party. As if you couldn’t be bothered with them anymore.

Your fans didn’t vote for the Democratic Party, pal. Independents didn’t vote for the Democratic Party, sonny. They voted for you, asshole. That coalition of youths Hispanics labor-union African-American progressives: the stars in their eyes blinked Obama-Obama-Obama.

You had a fan base inside-outside your Party, like the Tea Party stands inside-outside the GOP, which you could have used again and again — against Congress, against the GOP, even against your own party. An organized community all your own.

Between you and your fans there was a much stronger bond than a mere party-political bond. A mystical, sacred bond.

But you went all secular on them and pulled out. You acted as though your base never existed. You committed the greatest act of political coitus interruptus since JFK got himself shot.

Then you pointed your wind-dry erection at a rainbow. It was actually a shitstorm, but you saw opportunity where others saw an iceberg. You happen to be a donkey, but you thought you could get it on with an elephant. It was species overreach, dumbo. You insisted on looking for a hole somewhere in the GOP — your avowed and self-declared enemies — to stick your putz in.

They blocked your cock solid. You got nowhere. That hole was closed tighter than the jars in which they store the last smallpox viruses on earth in the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta, Georgia, and the Vector Research Center in Koltsovo, Siberia.

Then, instead of going back to your fans, you stuck your nose in your briefing books and acted like a monk and never looked up until you felt an uncomfortable feeling deep inside you, which turned out to be a huge GOP cock rammed up your butt powered by phalanxes of crazed Tea Party people.

Now you’re stuck between a cock and a hard place. You’re trapped in what the TV Puking Packs of Pundit Poseurs call an enthusiasm gap. That gap is a hole, the hole in which you cast your base like the dungeons in which Henry VIII cast wife after wife so he could go and ding-dong some other highborn floozy.

In your case, a whore called Washington.

Where does your enthusiasm come from? From your base, dummy. Nowhere else. You dumped your base and you dumped all enthusiasm for you. It’s that simple, idiot.

Now you’re complaining. Petulant phrases like “buck up” and “stop whining” and “inexcusable to stand on the side lines” are flowing like platelets from Caesar’s wounds.

The pity of it all is, it could have been so easy — if you were a little smarter, or maybe just a bit of a hypocrite.

Look how Karl Rove milked the Bush base, like twenty piglets sucking a fat sow dry. Came the 2004 election, what did Rove do? He and Bush raised a mighty hue and cry about gay marriage. And that old stand-by, the court-sanctioned whacking of human fetuses.

Now listen. Legal abortion will be with us forevermore, and gay marriage will spread from state to state like Sherman’s march across the South.

In short, these base-stroking moves by Herr Rove and Meister Bush were the shit of the bull. Totally. They’re like applying a phantom tongue made of chicken liver to a blind man’s wang and calling it fellatio.

But they worked. They made the base believe that Bush cared about them. It actually happens that Bush could give two shits in a rusty bucket about either gay marriage or abortion. But that’s not the point. The point was to bond with his base via hoops of steel. Ergo, in order to play patty-cake on that bond like a rhapsody singing heavenly choirs in the bosoms of his base, Bush strummed those two strings of anti-gay and anti-abortion BS harder than Kurt Cobain plucked his ax before he sucked a bullet.

That’s all it takes. Just a few pointless promises and a few empty gestures.

All you had to do, Mister President, was say this:

“Listen, folks, we got healthcare reform done. Thank you for sticking with me through the long ordeal of death panels and socialism. But we didn’t get the public option. Damn. Double damn. You’re disappointed. I’m disappointed. Never mind, next time. Don’t think for one moment I’m giving up. We didn’t have the votes for it, but if you keep voting for me, we’ll get there. The battle has just begun. When I’m re-elected, that’s my first priority. Let’s all pull together — the public option or bust!”

Firedoglake’s Jane Hamsher would’ve grown bangs for you over that. And it wouldn’t have cost you a dime or a vote; maybe a scowl from Liebermann.

(Of course, in the privacy of your handy backroom, you were free to share a wink and a nod with the healthcare industry and the hospital lobby.)

About jobs, jobs, jobs … well, you should’ve done this: started building out our infrastructure with government work programs, like FDR used the government to hire people. No one would’ve complained about big government if big government were giving them a goddam job.

But you didn’t do this, El Jerko, so you could’ve done the next best thing: coaxed a rhetorical lily from your mud, as follows:

“This is my monthly jobs report. We lost XX number of jobs and gained XX number of jobs, for an overall gain of XX. That’s XX times better than the GOP did under the previous administration. It’s also XX fewer jobs than we need to add to be out of this mess in three years time. That’s my goal. Three years. They actually dug us an eight-year-deep hole, but I’m aiming to get us out in three. So stick with me and my party. We’re climbing out of the Republican hole slowly but surely, and I won’t rest until every American who wants a job has one.”

And then, after Financial Reform got passed, you should have ladled on this base-kissing sauce:

“We got that through. Thank you for your support. But we couldn’t break up the banks and stop too-big-to-fail for all time. Didn’t have the votes for it. Damn. Double damn. Never mind, next time. When I’m re-elected, I’ll be watching Goldman Sachs and Citicorp like a hawk watching a momma rat giving birth to a feisty tasty squad of baby rats. If those banks start repeating their shitty moves, I’ll be on to them like that hawk, and I’ll launch peck-’em-into-pieces legislation that’ll separate their lending from their gambling and their bonuses from their pockets so far you’d need an intergalactic umbilical cord to connect them.”

(Of course, in the privacy of your handy backroom, you were free to share a wink and a nod with the banks.)

Throwing red meat to your base is the easiest thing on earth. Say it loud, say it all the time, and make sure it’s empty. They’ll lap it up. All they want is the emotional connection. That secret feeling between you and them that hey, you may whore like a tomcat all over town, but when push comes to shove, there’s only one place where true love rules your libido, and that’s in their little beating bleeding hearts. You’ve got to keep titivating your base, baby. What’s the skin off your nose, for chrissake? A little hypocrisy goes a long way. It’s the number one tool in any politician’s kit.

Just one crude example. (Sorry, we’re not doing subtle today.)

Say, what do candles and flowers have to do with fucking? Absolutely nothing. But chicks dig them, so guys who want to get laid, put up with having perfumed candles lit in the bedroom, and the place smelling like a geisha’s crotch, and your most surly pleb of a horny rube thinks nothing of thrusting a bunch of roses he bought at the Korean deli at the groin of his anointed, and cannily pre-tickling his beloved’s amoreuse-sodden fun button with earrings or some such trinket from Target.

A few trinkets, and your base would’ve followed you over a cliff like rodents mesmerized by the wily Pied Piper. Now you’re looking at your hand instead of a sugar ditch, because you scrimped on the blandishments. Your base got nary a rose nor a glass of white wine at a corner table. So no candles are being lit for you.

How could you be so dumb?

Instead of studying Bill Clinton’s history for clues about what to do if you get stuck with a Republican House, you should be studying Lady Gaga.

There’s a lady who knows the first thing about staying popular.

It’s not jobs, jobs, jobs.

It’s base, base, base. Continue reading →