Why Obama Can't Reach the Tea Party

Obama has been forced to essentially forfeit any outreach to middle America, as long as the face of middle America remains Glenn Beck's or Michelle Bachmann's.

In the late "Point/Counterpoint" godmother Shana Alexander's 1983 bestseller Very Much A Lady (based on the Jean Harris/Herman Tarnower case, inspiring Annette Bening's great turn as Harris for an HBO movie in 2006), there is an anecdotal scene where Alexander interviews an unnamed member of the Eastern Establishment on the background to the case.  The old, WASP dowager (who made no secret of Her Crowd's distaste for gaucheries such as Jews, Irish Catholics, vacuuming one's own house or doing one's own laundry, or expressing any more feelings than Mary Tyler Moore's character in Ordinary People) gave Ms. Alexander a crash course in "The Rules" of old-money Mainline society.  Everyone wanted to help her, poor thing, and felt so terribly sorry for the predicament she was in, don't you know.  But when Mrs. Harris refused to play by The Rules -- The Rules made it "impossible" for them to lift a finger.

If you prefer a reference from my line of work, the late book and film critic Pauline Kael often spoke of the "grammar of Cinema" and of literary storytelling as an art.  In honor of these two legendary literary ladies, I think it's time we looked at the "grammar" of politics that cost Obama the lower-middle and working class, that cost David Frum his position at AEI, and that cost the Republican Party its greatest defeat since Watergate.

In the "race speech" that delivered Obama the Democratic nomination (following the Rev. Wright catastrophe), candidate Barack Obama offered the first honest address of both minorities' legitimate grievances and those of downscale whites left behind by the New Economy and today's multi-culti, post-everything lifestyle. The last two Democratic nominees before Obama, Al Gore and John Kerry, were so privileged and removed from the "average American", they might just as well have been raised in a Bret Easton Ellis novel.  Obama was raised upper-middle-class -- but unlike Gore and Kerry, he wasn't born ruling class -- and because of his race and broken-home background, he had a sensitivity to those "less fortunate" of all races and classes that would have been almost impossible for Gore or Kerry to credibly carry off.   Unlike Gore and Kerry, Barack Obama "got it".

And yet, because of the Grammar of Politics -- he lost it.

While his race speech was a masterstroke, as John Heilemann and Mark Halperin reveal in their bestselling Game Change, when Hillary and Bill closed in on Obama outside of his ascendant base of college activists, Hollywood figures, and educated coastal businesspeople, Obama's people began to write off the "bitter" voters during the 2008 campaign.  As John Judis pointed out in one of the best articles on President Obama, it's "Because He's a Yuppie" as much as because he's black.  Unlike Michael Moore's Michigan or Michelle Bachmann's prairies and farms, the world in which Obama was raised and had lived in ever since giving up his community-service work (where most of the poverty and discrimination was in fact race-based and specifically corresponded to black and Latino issues) wasn't necessarily the Dynasty opulence of Gore and Kerry.  But it WAS a world where "everything worked", as David Frum himself once noted.  The Lexuses clicked effortlessly shut, the lawns were always manicured, the FedExes arrived early.  Obama didn't have the personal experiences to be cynical and bitter that a downsized secretary or factory worker (who might well have also come from a considerably less advantaged broken home) did.  And he was too young to have faced the overt, dogs-and-fire-hoses discrimination of his parents' and grandparents' generations of African-Americans.

Obama was also a prisoner of his racial background -- but not just in the sense that most people mean.  If I were African-American or Latino, I would be incensed if I saw the First Black President lowering his prestige and authority to do anything that even remotely smacked of pandering "ooftah" shtick to Tea Partying voters, so as to seem less "threatening."  Obama knew that he could address downscale whites' concerns, but trying to "pal around" with them (as Ms. Palin would say), like Slick Willie or Texas Dubya, was a definite no-no

There are many reasons to have serious questions about many of Obama's policies and plans.  There are many more reasons for lower-middle-class whites to be angry, cynical, and yes, "bitter" about their lot in life -- which hasn't gotten better in any lasting or meaningful way since the days of LBJ and Nixon, and has in many ways gotten significantly worse.  But just as the flag-burning hippies and bomb-throwing radicals discredited the antiwar movement in the eyes of the Silent Majority, the anger that the talkers and demagogues like Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin channeled was so poisonously close to being racially tinged, and so disproportionate, it defined the "narrative".

Just as before, the "liberal" -- and profit and sensation-seeking media -- played their part to the hilt.  No TV news camera or headline-minded newspaper editor wanted to see a small businessman soberly worrying about the individual mandate or a bank loan officer powerless to assist her foreclosing customers.  They wanted to see crying and tantrums at "town hall" meetings, protesters calling congressmen the n-word and gay slurs, and unacceptable comparisons to true incomparables like the Holocaust and slavery ("death panels", retroactively aborting Sarah Palin's baby, etc.)

Obama has been forced, by the grammar of politics, to become the self-fulfilling prophecy that his opponents tried to make him into, and have now evidently succeeded in doing so.  Because of the race card -- and because of the grotesquerie of the level of debate -- reaching out to lower-middle-class white voters on their terms is now No Longer An Option.  Even if he wants to.

And THIS is the real problem and tragedy of the first two years of the Obama administration, one that goes way beyond the individual mandate, 16,000 IRS agents, or Geithner and Bernanke's smackdowns of Main Street in favor of Wall Street.  By claiming to represent the issues and concerns of working and middle class whites, the ultra-right-wing media machine has discredited them and sent their issues and concerns, temporarily at least, to the ash heap of history. And Obama has been forced by the grammar of politics to essentially forfeit middle America on his end, as long as the face of middle America remains Glenn Beck's or Michelle Bachmann's.  He'd like to talk to them (or at least send "the help" – i.e., working-class, Irish Catholic, high-school athlete Joe Biden -- to do it), poor things.

But The Rules have now made it impossible.