Jim/Joe/Bob/Jimmy Joe Bob couldn’t believe it! Obama/Mitt/Newt/Attila the Hun wasn’t backing off! He was doubling down!
Yes, people double down a lot in Double Down, the not so hot off the presses tome du jour from Mark Halperin and John Heilmann rehashing the 2012 presidential election. The book received mixed reviews when it was published back in 2013—mixed, that is, with envy over the humongous advance the boys collected for basically rewriting back issues of Politico. Still, if you like stale scuttlebutt as much as I do, it’s not a bad read.
First of all, the book recaptures quite well the mood of the Obama White House in the wake of the seemingly disastrous first round of negotiations with the Tea Party Congress, during which Obama repeatedly tried to give away the store to the Republicans, who refused to take it, because anything Obama would accept must be evil. For his pains, Obama was widely ridiculed for not being a schmoozer/leader in the grand tradition of Bill “Didn’t pass health care” Clinton and Lyndon “Led us into the Vietnam War” Johnson, not to mention Ronald “Doubled the national debt in eight years” Reagan.
Halperin/Heilmann gives us a pretty good picture of why the Billionaires’ Boys’ Club on Wall Street turned on the president. Not only did he say mean things about them, while defending the supersized bonuses, “earned” by clearing away the wreckage their egos made, but he wouldn’t appoint one of them to major government post. Tim Geithner for Secretary of Treasury? The guy’s a flunkey! Appoint a player!
Of course, appointing a “real” billionaire to cabinet post, or any other, would be a recipe for disaster, a guaranteed loose cannon sure to contradict the president at every turn while moaning about the impossibility of getting anything done with a bunch of assistants who only made $125,000 a year and weren’t worth half that.
Though I am and always will be disgusted by Obama’s monstrous abuse of our civil liberties, in my opinion his record on the economy is well into the B/B+ territory. Obama led us through the worst financial collapse since the Great Depression with so much finesse that he’ll never get the credit he deserves, because no one will know how close the entire world economy came to plunging off the edge of a cliff. The impact, while brutal on the poor, is nothing compared to what it could have been. Through it all, of course, the Republicans maintained the composure of a herd of scalded cats, as eager to damage the economy as they were to damage the president.
Halperin and Heilmann give us a fairly even-handed picture of the Republican opposition, allowing them to be hoist on their own retards, as the saying goes, though they don’t quite acknowledge just how bad a candidate Romney was. Only a seriously weak candidate would have had any trouble defeating the pack of over-fed nincompoops that bedeviled Mighty Mitt during his year-long quest for the nomination. In 2012 the Republican Party was the junk party, when total schmucks like Donald Trump and Newt Gingrich loomed like giants.
Mitt topped them all, of course, with his 47/47 rant. Only a willfully ignorant not to say malignant man could seriously believe that 47 percent of the people “don’t pay taxes”—in fact, most of these “nobodies” pay a greater percentage of their income than Mitt does—and that anyone who does receive government assistance is a leach and a bum.*
The icing on the cake is that Mitt and his gang actually thought they were going to win the big one. Learn to lose, suckers! The sprinkles on the icing is the near hysterical despair of dressage diva Ann Romney, who really believed all that shit about four more years of Obama meaning the end of “America.” Yes, Republicans really believed that Obama was the worst president in American history, that he would do irrevocable and fatal damage to the Republic if given a second term. And now, only a year or so later, we’re almost back to “normal.”
