Psyche, Science, and Society

Playing the Blame Game: Obama to Democratic voters, “it’s all your fault!”

The Obama administration has been scolding left critics left, right, and center for criticizing them. It is hard to believe that the Obama folks actually think that this talk will motivate disgruntled Democratic base voters. If so, they would have to be among the stupidest politicians ever to enter Washington.

Jane Hamsher has an alternative explanation. The attacks have nothing to do with increasing voter turnout. Rather, they are a cynical ploy to create a scapegoat other than the administration for the electoral losses expected this November. Hamsher demonstrates a long-standing pattern of the administration screwing the candidates they support with leaks designed to deflect blame away from Obama. Here is one of many examples:

January 17, 2009:  Martha Coakley — Two days before the Massachusetts election, from Ed Henry, CNN:

Sources: Obama advisers believe Coakley will lose

Multiple advisers to President Obama have privately told party officials that they believe Democrat Martha Coakley is going to lose Tuesday’s special election to fill the Massachusetts Senate seat held by the late Ted Kennedy for more than 40 years, several Democratic sources told CNN Sunday.

The sources added that the advisers are still hopeful that Obama’s visit to Massachusetts on Sunday – coupled with a late push by Democratic activists – could help Coakley pull out a narrow victory in an increasingly tight race against Republican state Sen. Scott Brown.

However, the presidential advisers have grown increasingly pessimistic in the last three days about Coakley’s chances after a series of missteps by the candidate, sources said.

So here’s how this theory applies to the current drivel out of the White House:

But this is a clear pattern with the Obama White House.  Insulating the President from blame for electoral losses is paramount, even at the risk of triggering the loss.  Setting up the narrative, pre-election, that the campaign was doomed anyway and there was nothing Obama could do to save it was considered more important.

So when people scratch their heads and wonder how a campaign based on hectoring the “professional left” expects to turn out voters, the answer is, it doesn’t.  And you don’t see anyone who’s actually running for office this November engaging in it.  They well know that your job is to inspire and energize voters in advance of the election.  Obama did too — when he was running for office himself.

But now that he’s not running, and it’s someone else’s butt on the line, he’s turning the Democratic base into Martha Coakley and setting them up for the blame for any electoral failure in fall.  The people who showed up to vote for him in 2008 “just weren’t serious” if they “now want to take their ball and go home.”

There is no internal consistency to the narrative that the “professional left” is suppressing turnout by criticizing Obama, but Obama is not suppressing turnout when he scolds the voters who aren’t clapping loudly enough for his achievements.  But few in the professional punditocracy find their way to that obvious conclusion.

This isn’t about GOTV. It’s about setting up a fall guy for November. The headline should really read:

Obama Distances Himself From Democratic Voters

Democratic voters are all Martha Coakley now.  And if shielding Obama from blame makes matters worse for those who are actually running in November?  Well, that’s the price of protecting the President.

This explanation makes sense. Oddly, it also helps understand Obama’s horrific about faces on human rights. Nothing matters, but Obama. Everything and everyone else is disposeable.

At this stage, it’s only a hypothesis. But it is a hypothesis that makes sense of a lot of confusing data from the last 18 months.

September 28th, 2010

Economy strikes: Marriage rate at lowest level in over 100 years

In a sign of the times, both economic and social, marriage rates are at their lowest rate in over 100 years:

The new figures show, among other things, that the number of people getting married fell to a record low level in 2009, with just 52 percent of adults 18 and over saying they were joined in wedlock, compared to 57 percent in 2000.

Marriage rates have been declining for years due to rising divorce and an increase in unmarried couples living together. Demographers say the current downturn may now be causing more younger adults to postpone marriage as many struggle to find work and resist making long-term commitments.

“Given the scope of the recent recession, many more couples are likely to choose cohabitation over marriage in the coming years,” said Mark Mather, associate vice president of the Population Reference Bureau.

September 28th, 2010

New view of sexuality in the Middle East

John R. Bradley has a new book, Behind the Veil of Vice: The Business and Culture of Sex in the Middle East, that sounds interesting. Salon has an interview with him that outlines his argument that the West and the Middle East are more alike in regards actual sexual mores than we imagine. Here are his beginning comments, summarizing his argument:

The supposed licentiousness of the West is forever being contrasted, to my mind, in wholly spurious ways, with a sexually barren Middle East. “Behind the Veil of Vice” undermines stereotypes about Arab sexualities that have become entrenched in the English-speaking world, partly by reminding readers that we still have plenty of sexual hang-ups in the West, too. In particular, it debunks the notion, promoted by the likes of Martin Amis, that terrorism carried out by Islamists can be explained away with reference to the repressed, envious Arab male who can only find release by flying airliners into phallic-shaped skyscrapers.

I’ve been based in the region for a decade, and the sexuality in the Middle East I know is every bit as capricious as its Western counterpart, as unruly and multifarious, and occasionally as becalmed. By exploring the diverse sex cultures in countries like Morocco, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, Bahrain, Egypt, Yemen and Iran, I try to show that, as in the West, illicit sex continues to thrive in the Middle East, often in the open and despite the increasingly shrill public discourse.

And here is his ending:

Habib Bourguiba, Tunisia’s first independence leader, is known as “the liberator of women,” and for me he is the great unsung hero of 20th-century Arab politics. He was an avowed secularist, and a tireless promoter of women’s equality. The feminism he championed was not the Salvationist kind that took root in Egypt, but that which encourages women’s true autonomy and equality in light of progressive Islamic thinking that sought to marry Islam with modernity. He launched a sexual revolution unprecedented in the Arab world, outlawing polygamy, banning the veil, legalizing abortion and advocating birth control.

And he left the red light districts to function, as they had done for decades. Today, prostitution remains legal in Tunisia, and all of the country’s major cities have a red light district. More generally, Tunisian women are by far the most liberated in the Middle East, and can walk the streets unveiled and free of sexual harassment. The point here is that state regulation of prostitution, legal protection of prostitutes, social tolerance of the profession and official monitoring of sex workers’ health and well-being is in no way in contradiction with the advancement of women’s rights.

September 28th, 2010