Last Tuesday, Obama gave his “farewell” address, which prompted all sorts of ridiculous, weepy posts from Obama supporters about how “classy” he was and how much they would miss him, and how his administration was “scandal-free.” Needless to say, these folks will remain clueless as to why Trump won in November as long as they put Obama on a pedestal. Most of us don’t remember the last eight years with any fondness at all. Instead, we remember a thin-skinned, spiteful, petty man who always had his mind set on one thing, and that was advancing his own power and his party’s grip on power.
Back in October 2013, I wrote a post where I called Obama’s administration the Dawn Davenport Presidency, and it has remained as true in the intervening years as it was then. At the time, I used the website meme creator to create a meme which I considered using to illustrate that post, but I didn’t post it at the time. Now that there are only five days remaining in Obama’s second term, I am bringing it back, because it provides one explanation for what happened with the voters in 2016.
Of course, this election was also about Hillary Clinton.
In the past week, there has been a lot of buzz about Meryl Streep’s harangue at the Golden Globe Awards. Over the summer, though, Streep also attracted attention for two things, her film about Florence Foster Jenkins, and her deranged appearance during her speech at the Democrat National Convention in August. The Jenkins film was what interested me, though, because it seemed to offer a perfect metaphor for Clinton’s political career. Florence Foster Jenkins was famous for having a tin ear and little talent in her chosen field. She benefited largely from her husband’s connections.
Last February at ZeroHedge, I saw a great post outlining Hillary Clinton’s Six Foreign Policy Catastrophes where a commenter named Elliott Eldrich memorably declared: “Hillary’s greatest ability is her uncanny talent for producing the most wretched results imaginable, and then loudly claiming how amazing her accomplishments are. I believe it’s because she somehow manages to convince herself of this first, which makes selling it to others all the easier. She’s the Florence Foster Jenkins of statecraft.”
A few months later, around the time of the Streep film’s release, even a writer at the Huffington Post–evidently a disaffected Bernie supporter–picked up on the idea and wrote an article comparing the two:
A) Both were wealthy, idolized in their adopted hometown, New York City, and intensely determined to succeed.
B) Each aspired to perform on the big stage of their selected vocations, Clinton as President in the White House, Jenkins as coloratura at Carnegie Hall.
C) Each was indulged and promoted by a philandering husband. (In the Jenkins movie, it is Hugh Grant, a charming choice).
D) Associates and critics praised both, seemingly without regard to reality: Hillary for being a “progressive” though she changes her position every so often to show she is not beholden to Goldman Sachs or a war monger; and Florence for being a “singer” though she displayed little understanding of, well, singing.
E) Neither could hit high notes, often sounded flat and were accused of shrieking.
In the wake of the election, the similarity between the two should be all the more obvious. Jenkins is famous for the disastrous performance at Carnegie Hall, just as Hillary Clinton will now be famous for the disaster at the Javits Center, which left her supporters in tears and where Hillary didn’t even put in an appearance. Consequently, this Hillary meme pretty much wrote itself.
And finally, we have President-Elect Donald Trump.
Last December, when I spoke with people who said they couldn’t understand the Trump phenomenon, I often referred them to this article by Ben Domenech at The Federalist, which memorably declared in its sub-head “Barack Obama’s political legacy is the rise of Donald Trump.” Obama’s divide-and-conquer style of governance naturally inspired a great amount of distrust, resentment and anger. As Domenech memorably characterized the Obama administration:
It is no accident that President Obama’s America has given rise to Donald Trump. It is an America that is more tribalist, where people feel more racially and religiously divided; more politically correct, where people feel less free to speak their minds; and it is an America where trust in the nation’s elites, whose skills are credentialed but unproven, are at historic lows.
These are the wages of progressivism at the end of the day. Big government inevitably leads to government incompetence. That incompetence leads to growing and now dominant distrust – both in government’s basic competence, and in the values of the people who still insist upon it. Our modern elites respond to that rational distrust by smearing it as vile hatred, which further divides and toxifies our politics. And Trump is a perfect personality to exploit these divides, offering the promise of an authoritarian who represents the people in place of an authoritarian who represented the elites.
Back in July 2015, Victor Davis Hanson declared Trump and Obama “Two of a Kind,” a theme that animated some of his other writing during the election. In an article written just over a year ago, Hanson furthered the idea that Obama’s many failures in office became remarkable opportunities for Trump:
Barack Obama is the Dr. Frankenstein of the supposed Trump monster.
If a charismatic, Ivy League-educated, landmark president who entered office with unprecedented goodwill and both houses of Congress on his side could manage to wreck the Democratic Party while turning off 52 percent of the country, then many voters feel that a billionaire New York dealmaker could hardly do worse.
If Obama had ruled from the center, dealt with the debt, addressed radical Islamic terrorism, dropped the politically correct euphemisms and pushed tax and entitlement reform rather than Obamacare, Trump might have little traction. A boring Hillary Clinton and a staid Jeb Bush would most likely be replaying the 1992 election between Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush — with Trump as a watered-down version of third-party outsider Ross Perot.
Hence, a few weeks after the election, Hanson made clear that the election of Trump was a prime example of the “unintended consequences” of the Obama presidency. And so we have our final meme in this 2016 election trilogy.
I will always remember Obama giving the middle finger to John McCain and the crowd loving it!
Some pundit (Judge something?) tweeted about lefties losing and needing to accept it and get in line.
Johah Goldberg tut-tutted that as un-American. There was a time I would have agreed with Jonah but the left is responsible for weaponizing government. To many on the left, we are enemies, not fellow citizens with different policy views and philosophies.
Whether or not one is at war depends on your enemy: it’s his call. When people like Andrea Bocelli have to back out of an appearance at an inauguration because of death threats, &c; when an appearance by Milo causes violent protests, there’s a problem with few peaceful solutions unless an epidemic of common sense breaks out.
Speaking of policy catastrophes with… figures, at scale:
Q1: how long does it take for any averagely able-bodied idiot to flip the bird to his/her fellow men?
A1: certainly not much more (or much less) than a second.
Q2: how many members critters in US Congress?
A2: 535.
Q3: for how long the whole of US Congress has been flipping the bird to the american tax payers for each and every $1 of the new “public debt” it has forced them into, since no earlier than 2008?
A3: $10 trillion / 535 idiots / 365 days / 24 hours / 60 minutes / 60 seconds …
… roughly 593 years.
Socialist gangsters and their lies:
so freaking retarded that only checking their math is already a time travel experience.
People are not necessarily looking for truth when they apply their “reasoning” powers to an issue. Often, they are looking for a reasonable enough “meaning” for what they strive to believe. Truth and meaning are not the same. But too many people are perfectly content for meaning to be their reality and as a result, of course, their “reality” becomes their truth.
We, the deplorables have listened enough to the Meryl Streeps and The Donald has emboldened us to stand up and give them the horse laugh.
I can remember, in the months leading up to the election, white people saying in approving tones that this election would mark “the end of the political relevancy of white people.” Which made me want to say, “Really? You want to effectively disenfranchise yourself? You want to render your voice irrelevant in the political system?” This, I think, was the essence of the Trump vote: a last-ditch attempt to assert that white, working-class Christians still had a voice in the political system.
Jenkins also benefited from a gay audience that appreciated the campiness of her performance, even though no one was openly gay at the time and “campy” had not been coined yet.
(I remember reading a contemporary newspaper review of FFJ’s Carnegie Hall show in which the writer dryly noted all the “slender young men waving their handkerchiefs” in rapturous admiration of Florence’s unique take on The Magic Flute.)
Thanks for the additional background information, Throbert McGee! That is quite interesting, and it makes a lot of sense, too, in helping to explain who was in FFJ’s audience and why.
2016 Election in Three Memes : good post.
And 140 Years of Monetary History in 10 Minutes :
https://youtu.be/wD3KYlpE2lk
the sort of pearl you’d be a masochist to only try throwing at our economically illiterate leftist swine whining and begging for a $15/hour minimum wage, completely clueless as to:
1) why they’ve come to doing it, in the first place
2) why they’d still be doing it at $50/hour under Moochelle V2 in 2028 (God forbid)
Thank you for the beautifully written and insightful article.
Meryl Streep also went on a trip with Michelle Obama on our taxes.
http://www.breitbart.com/big-hollywood/2016/06/29/meryl-streep-joins-michelle-obama-moroccan-princess-iftar-ramadan-dinner/
” we remember a thin-skinned, spiteful, petty man who always had his mind set on one thing, and that was advancing his own power”
Laugh Out Loud
If these projected concerns about Obama really bothered conservatives, why do we have Trump as president? Trump beats just about everyone in America with these qualities.
Maybe its something else that bothers you about Obama?
“We, the deplorables have listened enough to the Meryl Streeps and The Donald has emboldened us to stand up and give them the horse laugh”
It takes a reality TV star to embolden you? Why are you so weak that you need a proven blowhard to give you the courage to abandon all of your principals and your intellectual honesty?
This election brought out the lowest of the low on both sides.
Score a half a point for littlelettermikey, the fascist. He is beginning to grow.
The 1/2 point is for “thin skinned.” The Donald is thin skinned enough to hit back. Not like “if you bring a knife, we bring a gun” hitting back. Just a good old smack upside the head, hit back.
Actually, The Donald is extremely thick skinned. He has learned to work his way with crooks, bureaucrats, contractors, unions, little old ladies sent to smear him, shysters, government bullies, lawsuits and the like. He has learned how to walk all over community organizers, grifters, crony crooks and peacocks.
The Donald is not spiteful. He is of the Pavlov school where you keep getting the power “hint” until you get the message. He doesn’t do it silently and in the back, he does it face to face. Mano a mano. Not like Obama and his vendetta carried out by wise guys.
A man who knows his target is not a petty man. That is confusing to someone who has worshipped Obama whose targets kept shifting and whose lines were elastic.
What is there about The Donald that qualifies as “advancing his own power?” He grew his company. The top ten richest guys in the world are according to the Forbes list, Microsoft founder Gates is the richest individual with a net worth of $75 billion. The others, in order of ranking, are Amancio Ortega, the Spanish founder of fashion house Inditex, financier Warren Buffett, Mexican business magnate Carlos Slim Helu, Amazon boss Jeff Bezos, Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg, Oracle’s Larry Ellison and Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York. Funny how many are Democrat liberals.
So, now we all get to watch The Donald put his brand of leadership into action. Like Carnegie, Ford, Morgan, Hilton, Heinz, Chrysler and so many others, Trump has put his name on what he accomplishes.
Obama can now slink away and snipe from the sidelines.
Typical little-letter-libtard-mikey presumption – he’s thinking there’s “something else” (read: RACE) that bothers us about SnObama.
To most of us conservatives, the fact that he’s (half) black doesn’t bother us. We don’t view things through the prism of identity politics the way your side does, mikey.
What bothers us is the fact that he’s a narcissistic Marxist with daddy issues. Period.
Now go way in the back of the room and sit down, mikey.
Regards,
Peter H.
White House Press Corp(se) has fallen for Trump’s trap again. They are DEMANDING that they stay in the West Wing’s basement press room rather than relocating to the adjacent Exec. Office Bldg.
Obviously thay haven’t been reading their own filed stories, otherwise they would have read that the Secret Service and the Architect of the White House intend to massively renovate the Oval Office and the Presidential Executive Suite for numerous structural, telecommunications and security measure that will leave most of the West Wing uninhabitable. This will necessitate that the Trump Senior Staff and the President decamp to suites set-aside for the West Wing staff in the Exec. Office Bldg. for at-least 12-months. Bwahhahhah….
This is not without precedent, Pres. Nixon actually did most of his work and held staff and Cabinet meetings in the old Sec’y of the Navy office suite in the Navy Wing of the Exec. Office Bldg. that faced the White House when it was the War, Navy and State Dept. Bldg. The Oval Office was reserved for ceremonial meetings and photo ops.
Thanks for the ID on that, Helio…he was the only picture in the gallery I couldn’t identify (and haven’t had time this morning to track down the text of the story).
Exactly right.
He could be green-skinned with a tail, 11 fingers, 13 toes, and (still) a thing for manly women bigger than himself, I couldn’t care.
That this silver spoon-fed engineered commie got propped up as POTUS by powers that be working in the darkness since the late 60s : that’s what p*ssed me off.
And I’m only that nobody-immigrant. Hello.
*couldn’t care less