[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: “The difference between us and them, between you and success, is not that you never fail, but it’s how you recover from those failures – is that you keep getting up time and time again. You figure out what did wrong and you make it right. I say that to kids every day.” Michelle Obama.
Rick Rosner: All right. So Michelle Obama is both typical and atypical of presidents’ wives. I don’t know all the president’s wives but some presidents wives were probably squarely behind the efforts to make their husband president. Nancy Reagan, I don’t think had any misgivings about her husband becoming president. Pat Nixon kind of hated it. Betty Ford definitely hated it. Jackie Kennedy, I’m not sure that she hated her husband being president; I think she hated him fucking all those other women. Hillary Clinton was squarely behind Bill. Jill Biden is probably completely behind her husband. But Michelle Obama, as far as I know completely supportive of her husband, hated the White House, hated being first lady, just kind of famously didn’t like the whole thing but in her eight years in the White House she kind of eventually grew comfortable with using her media power to speak out especially for minority kids.
People look longingly towards the Obamas because Obama was the last authentically charismatic president that we had. And shit goes better at least for the party that President belongs to when you have a charismatic president. Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump were kind of anti-charismatic. Some people like them but they’re not naturally likeable. They don’t sway anybody. Biden was not successful running for president 20 years ago and really the reason he got elected this time around is because so many people hated Trump and because he seemed like an experienced and reasonable person. He’s got 47 years experience in government on a national level. He became a senator nearly 50 years ago; that’s 15 more years of experience than any other president. So, he’s the right president for now even though circumstances plus the republicans are doing their best to fuck him up. He comes across, unless you’re an asshole, as a kind man and a sincere man but he’s 79 and he looks like shit. He looks like he’s definitely had a bunch of hair plugs and he’s probably had some kind of a facelift or tightening of some sort and his face looks stretched, his eyes look tiny, and he looks like a nice man but he also looks creepily old.
But anyway, the Obamas were authentically charismatic; youngish, attractive, and that carries power, and well spoken. Biden has a stutter, Biden pauses a lot he makes weird pauses because of the stutter while Obama was smooth. People look to the Obamas wishing that we could get a third term out of them or that Michelle Obama would do something but she hates national politics plus she has zero experience in national politics but she could certainly get elected Senator if she picked a state to run in. But she doesn’t want to do that shit. And the Obamas are pretty comfortable mostly staying out of the limelight and comfortable like not wanting to rock the boat, not wanting to be the angry black guy president which Key and Peele made fun of. Contributed to Trump getting elected, Obama knew that Trump was being investigated by the FBI for ties to Russia and wanted to let the country know but Mitch McConnell said no. He wanted to make it a bipartisan announcement Mitch McConnell or something like that, said no that he wasn’t going to get behind that and if Obama announced anything he would make it seem like illegitimate partisan trying to influence the election.
Obamas are still pretty persuasive and glamorous but they’re way too cool. That’s a weakness of the Democrats in general; that Democrats don’t play as dirty as the Republicans thinking that just the goodness and reasonableness of their positions will convince voters.
[Recording End]
Authors
Rick Rosner
American Television Writer
Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Founder, In-Sight Publishing
In-Sight Publishing
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at http://www.rickrosner.org.
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Rick Rosner 