Matt's Damon's petty, tasteless, and insipid knock of President Obama as gutless again got plenty of press mention. He used the more street, colloquial term to symbolize the president's supposed cowardice but we'll leave it at "gutless." The almost irresistible temptation is to chalk this up to the star actors need to get a little extra ink at the president's expense for his new movie. But Damon doesn't need to slam Obama for that. He's bankable no matter if he just read a page from the telephone book.
And this is hardly Damon's first hit on Obama. He's been carping at him incessantly for the last couple of years. But what makes this different are two things. Obama is poised for the fight of his political life to keep his Oval Office address. Despite the zaniness, ineptness, back stabbing and seeming disjointedness of the GOP at this stage of the political game, the party will eventually find its legs and will spend the bank to fulfill its relentless obsessive drool to make him a one-term president.
The second thing wrong with Damon's hit is that it comes at a time when the president has gingerly turned the negative wash against him in the polls. He got a big boost from the Tea Party cajoled House that tossed total political sanity to the wind and sabotaged the wildly popular and beneficial to the middle class payroll tax cut extension. Now enter Damon. The star actor certainly knows that his well-honed credentials as a progressive and a one-time staunch Obama backer can do damage. It feeds hungrily into the three year mantra rant of many progressive's against Obama that he has proven to be no different than any other deal-making, corporate, beltway politician, who shamelessly makes nice with the GOP and has betrayed his hope and change pledge. Damon and the other Obama bashers reject any criticism that their hit on the president as being a sell-out and no different than his predecessor, George W. Bush will further fracture, alienate and demoralize an already nervous, shaky, and uneasy Democratic base. Such a prospect is a virtual symphony to the GOP's ears.
Damon's criticism of Obama won't cause a single one among Obama's core supporters, and that's African Americans, Hispanics, gays, the young, and moderate to liberal independents to rush pell-mell on Election Day to vote for whoever emerges from the GOP presidential contenders pack to challenge Obama. But it could hurt in causing more than a few to throw up their hands, say pox on both houses, and stay home on Election Day. This would be the same as a vote for the GOP contender. Obama's strength in 2008, and it will be the same again in 2012, was not getting an off the chart percentage of the Democrat's traditional backers to vote for him, but to excite, inspire and ultimately drive them to the polls in huge numbers. This did not escape the GOP and since GOP governors have won the state houses in several key battleground states and now dominate the state legislatures in those states, they have stepped up their efforts to do everything legal and borderline legal to suppress the vote. They've rammed through or stumped for a slew of voter ID laws, narrowed the poll hours, eliminated weekend voting, made it more costly for the NAACP and other voter watch dog groups to challenge election law changes, remapped districts to create GOP friendly districts, and rolled back or toughened felon voting bans.
When the GOP big smear machine kicks into high gear during the campaign, expect quotes from a few of the more prominent defecting Obama supporters to be liberally cited in the GOP's hit pieces and spots on Obama. Expect Damon to be at the top of the GOP quote list against the president. Beyond the president's ability to rev up the troops and get them to the polls, the election will hinge on the economy. Even on this Damon may have even provided some grist for the GOP mill when he took another back hand slap at the president by railing that the Democrats missed the boat by not fully backing the Occupy Wall St movement and the fight against the greedy rich. He dumped the blame for that on "their lack of a leader" he meant of course, Obama.
This criticism also plays directly into the GOP's hands since challengers don't get blamed for the real or imagined shortcomings of an incumbent president in dealing with the economy; the incumbent president does. Obama will have little margin for error to ward off the indifference or worse, hostility, from Democrats if they really see him as a lackluster leader.
That's not a matter of Obama having no "cajones" as Damon loudly claims. It's a matter of aiding and abetting the GOP. That possibility is music to the GOP's ears.
Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. He is a weekly co-host of the Al Sharpton Show on American Urban Radio Network. He is an associate editor of New America Media. He is host of the weekly Hutchinson Report Newsmaker Hour on KTYM Radio Los Angeles streamed on ktym.com podcast on blogtalkradio.com and internet TV broadcast on thehutchinsonreportnews.com
Follow Earl Ofari Hutchinson on Twitter: www.twitter.com/earlhutchinson
You pretty much summed up Obama in my mind Earl, and some of us feel validated to be understood .
Much better than being called druugies , whiners and ,ahem ,"developmentally disabled ", as the White House has gone out of their way to label us,while treating the GOP and Tea Hatters as rational people.
I guess it is pretty irrational to think someone would actually run for the presidency intending to deliver fairness and justice to the American people who have just been assaulted, robbed and waylaid by Wall St and a financial system rigged for only 1% of the people to prosper and the other 99% to tithe them.
Sure, he hasn't done everything the way everyone wanted him to but that isn't his job, to satisfy your every wish and desire. President Obama is a good President, as presidents go, and we should all be fighting, as though our lives depended on it, to get him elected a second term. Do not allow the Koch Bros and big money to select someone for us.
That's about the dumbest political comment I have read in a long time. Rhetorically speaking it is the logical fallacy of the straw man argument where the opponant is claimedd to be making an arguement that is not really being made. To be an "effective leader".has nothing to do with being a "dictator." Obama could do a great many things in the realm of leadership such as effective veto and executive orders that would show leadership that has nothing to do with being a dictator.
Obama should worry about people like Damon. People who feel betrayed. People who look out and see NADA, and SOPA, and Geithner, and Summers, and the propaganda machine spit out another tale of war in Iran and think, where is my change. We don't need to be informed how tough it is to work through financial crises and economic collapse, two wars. We wanted change, and change is never easy. Obama trampled on that however.
His financial advisors consist of the same old folks who got us into this mess. His foreign policy advisors proponents of quicker wars of deposition and intervention. More money funneled through to corporate interests in lucrative government contracts than ever before. More civil liberties violations.
It's time to stop drinking the KoolAide and accepting more of the same. 3rd party candidate maybe - who knows? What I do know is this president has lost the vote and respect of my peers and the anger standing on the streets, talking to folks where I live is palpable.
After the first movie, I knew I was in trouble. How could I stand to watch Damon in another one? (thank God these movies weren't filmed in IMAX 3d! I'm still behind by several payments on my Avatar movie tix). Finally, I figured it out. If I just went to the theater wearing a patch over each eye, the insignificant matter of "suspension of disbelief) just took care of itself!
Don't force me to wear ear plugs, too, Matt!!
Yeah but Obama had the Depression to learn from , unfortunately he prefers to model himself on Reagan, his hero .
George Clooney is correct that if the GOP had President Obama they would be espousing his successes over and over again. They would not allow any GOP officials to say one word against him. I believe that some of these 'disappointed' people need to go back and listen to the speeches from the POTUS. They obviously did not hear what I heard!
We will not allow those like Damon to do what was done in 2010, period. We are paying quite a price for that.