{"id":8203,"date":"2015-02-10T07:50:00","date_gmt":"2015-02-10T15:50:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/?p=8203"},"modified":"2015-02-10T07:50:31","modified_gmt":"2015-02-10T15:50:31","slug":"snarker-in-chief","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/snarker-in-chief\/","title":{"rendered":"Snarker-in-Chief"},"content":{"rendered":"

No one \u2014 least of all the American people \u2014 is exempt from our president\u2019s snark.<\/em><\/h3>\n
by Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ National Review Online<\/a><\/p>\n
\n
\"(Chip
(Chip Somodevilla\/Getty)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

S<\/span>nark is a popular word used for a particular sort of off-putting sarcasm. Snarkiness can manifest itself as adolescent cheap shots, snide condescension, or simple ad hominem patronizing \u2014 a sort of \u201cI know you are, but what am I?\u201d schoolyard name-calling. Its incessant use is typically connected with a peevishness born out of juvenile insecurity, and sometimes fed by an embarrassing envy. All politicians are snarky at times; but few obsessively so, given the wages of monotony and insecurity that the snark earns.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

President Obama is well known both for ad hominem dismissals of his supposed enemies \u2014 everyone from Fox News to the Tea Party to Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity \u2014 and for his evocations of nefarious straw men who, he claims, if left unchecked, would uninsure the poor, pollute the environment, hurt the illegal immigrant, and wage perpetual war abroad. But Obama\u2019s snarky putdowns and condescending afterthoughts are a particularly disturbing subset of these rhetorical devices, used by him in the grand world of diplomacy as well as in often petty domestic contexts.<\/p>\n

Vladimir Putin is the dangerous autocrat of a nuclear-armed superstate. He has trampled on the rights of his own people while trying to bully the former Soviet republics back into a czarist Orthodox version of the Soviet Empire. So Putin is many disturbing things, but for Obama he is reduced to some archetypal high-schooler to be snarked at: \u201cMy sense is that\u2019s part of his shtick back home politically as wanting to look like the tough guy.\u201d Putin, in Obama\u2019s putdown, has \u201cgot that kind of slouch, looking like the bored kid at the back of the classroom.\u201d Gratuitously reducing Putin\u2019s aggression to the work of an adolescent rival show-off may be dangerous when combined with the past six years of Obama\u2019s mostly seeming indifferent to that aggression. Snarking loudly while carrying a tiny stick is particularly unwise.<\/p>\n

Mitt Romney was not just wrong in his views, but, to Obama in his snark mode as psychoanalyst, apparently ill: \u201c[Romney is] changing up so much and backtracking and sidestepping we\u2019ve got to name this condition he\u2019s going through. I think it\u2019s called . . . Romnesia. I\u2019m not a medical doctor, but I do want to go over some of the symptoms with you because I want to make sure nobody else catches it.\u201d Note the \u201cI want to go over some of the symptoms.\u201d<\/p>\n

The reason Obama lost the Pennsylvania primary of 2008 was not just that the state\u2019s Democratic voters preferred Hillary Clinton; he was sabotaged by an ignorant subset of the working-class population that lacked his own perspective, good taste, and calm analytical mind. Not appreciating Obama\u2019s talents was analyzed as the equivalent of Neanderthalism: \u201cIt\u2019s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren\u2019t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.\u201d Note the \u201cIt\u2019s not surprising . . .\u201d<\/p>\n

Obama would follow that pop psychology by analyzing the police as acting \u201cstupidly\u201d and stereotyping by race. In his unfortunate National Prayer Breakfast riff, he snarked at American Christians, advising them not to get on their \u201chigh horse,\u201d given the moral equivalence between the millennium-old Crusades and the present epidemic of radical Islamic terrorism. Snarkers usually project, masking their own high-horse moralizing by alleging bastard forms of it in others.<\/p>\n

Snarkers also don\u2019t discriminate in their targets. Sometimes Obama\u2019s snark has been directed at his own Democratic rivals. Hillary Clinton was not just someone Obama ran against and beat in the primaries, but comes off as a frumpy nice girl in his famous quip, \u201cYou\u2019re likeable enough, Hillary.\u201d Note the \u201cenough.\u201d<\/p>\n

By all accounts Obama has had a loyal and competent staff; in any event, it ran two winning campaigns. But Obama snarked at them too: \u201cI think that I\u2019m a better speechwriter than my speechwriters. I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors. And I\u2019ll tell you right now that I\u2019m gonna think I\u2019m a better political director than my political director.\u201d Note the \u201cI\u2019ll tell you right now.\u201d As far as Washington culture goes, Obama is the parent, it the child: \u201cWhat Washington needs is adult supervision.\u201d<\/p>\n

Obama is supposedly friends with basketball legend Michael Jordan. But the latter made a terrible mistake when he chided the golf-obsessive Obama as in fact a \u201chack\u201d and a \u201csh***y\u201d golfer. Obama quickly fired back that Jordan \u201cwas not well informed.\u201d He then went after Jordan himself as the less than successful basketball-team owner: \u201cHe might want to spend more time thinking about the Bobcats \u2014 or the Hornets.\u201d Snark is now exemplified by the president of the United States stooping to engage in a kindergarten tit-for-tat over relative golf skills with an ex-NBA player: \u201cBut there is no doubt that Michael is a better golfer than I am. Of course if I was playing twice a day for the last 15 years, then that might not be the case.\u201d Note the \u201cHe might want\u201d and \u201cIf I was playing twice a day . . .\u201d<\/p>\n

Sometimes presidential snark is just mean-spiritedness displayed through gratuitous smart-aleckiness. So when Obama once was asked about consulting past presidents, he replied of Ronald Reagan, \u201cI didn\u2019t want to get into a Nancy Reagan thing about, you know, doing any s\u00e9ances\u201d \u2014 a reference to decades-old rumors that Mrs. Reagan, octogenarian and widowed by the time Obama snarked at her, had supposedly consulted an astrologer. Note \u201ca Nancy Reagan thing.\u201d<\/p>\n

When Obama talks of his bowling skills, it is by way of deprecating the handicapped: \u201cNo, no. I have been practicing. . . . I bowled a 129. It\u2019s like \u2014 it was like Special Olympics, or something.\u201d Note the \u201cor something.\u201d<\/p>\n

The grandmother who worked overtime to raise him when his mother would not, and who saved to put him through a tony prep school, is psychoanalyzed away as little more than an ignorant racist stereotyper \u2014 a useful foil to contextualize and excuse the demonstrable abject racism of his own pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright: \u201cBut she is a typical white person, who, if she sees somebody on the street that she doesn\u2019t know, there\u2019s a reaction that\u2019s been bred in our experiences that don\u2019t go away.\u201d Note the \u201ctypical.\u201d<\/p>\n

Snark can also be a sort of smart-ass caricature in which the statesman devolves into the silliness of popular culture: \u201cI\u2019m presenting a fair deal, the fact that they don\u2019t take it means that I should somehow do a Jedi mind-meld with these folks and convince them to do what\u2019s right.\u201d Note \u201cmind-meld.\u201d To dismiss his opponents in his reelection campaign, Obama returned to popular-culture snark, \u201cAnd you can pretty much put their campaign on . . . a tweet and have some characters to spare.\u201d<\/p>\n

When Mitt Romney criticized Obama for deep defense cuts and reducing the navy to its smallest fleet size since World War II, Obama offered snark instead of a counter-argument: \u201cWell, governor, we also have fewer horses and bayonets, because the nature of our military\u2019s changed. . . . We also have things called aircraft carriers that planes land on and submarines that go under water.\u201d Note the snark \u201cthat planes land on\u201d and \u201cthat go under water.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the months before the Crimea and Ukraine crises, Romney presciently reminded Obama that Putin\u2019s Russia in 2012 was America\u2019s chief worry. Obama snarked back, \u201cThe 1980s \u2014 they\u2019re now calling to ask for their foreign policy back because, you know, the Cold War\u2019s been over for 20 years.\u201d<\/p>\n

When some Republicans at Obama\u2019s recent State of the Union address clapped when he noted he had no more campaigns to run, Obama left his teleprompter to interject the schoolyard tit-for-tat, \u201cI know. Because I won both.\u201d Touch\u00e9!<\/em><\/p>\n

To Senator Jon Kyl, who once questioned the newly inaugurated Obama about the proper mix between tax hikes and budget cuts, Obama offered the gloat, \u201cI won.\u201d To his Republican House opponents of his agenda, Obama snarked, \u201cMiddle-class families can\u2019t wait for Republicans in Congress to do stuff. So sue me.\u201d<\/p>\n

Snarkiness, as stated, is a sort of straw-man zinger, an adolescent cheap-shot one-liner to put off critics as losers. As for those who wanted the Keystone Pipeline built to enhance North American energy independence, jobs, and prosperity, Obama reduced them to obsessed one-issue zealots: \u201cLet\u2019s set our sights higher than a single oil pipeline.\u201d Note of the vast Keystone project the adjective \u201csingle\u201d \u2014 perhaps as in a single Hoover Dam or a single Golden Gate Bridge.<\/p>\n

Critics used to say they opposed Obama\u2019s redistributionist programs, but conceded that he must be a pleasant guy. Supporters lamented Obama\u2019s frequent inattention to detail but reminded everyone how charismatic the president was. Both diagnoses are probably mistaken. Snarkery is a character flaw of thin-skinned insecurity and juvenile mean-spiritedness \u2014 and embarrassing in a president.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

No one \u2014 least of all the American people \u2014 is exempt from our president\u2019s snark. by Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ National Review Online Snark is a popular word used for a particular sort of off-putting sarcasm. Snarkiness can manifest itself as adolescent cheap shots, snide condescension, or simple ad hominem patronizing \u2014 a sort […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[46],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-28j","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":13,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/angry-reader-7-a-response-to-the-liberal-aristocracy\/","url_meta":{"origin":8203,"position":0},"title":"Angry Reader #7: A Response to “The Liberal Aristocracy”","author":"victorhanson","date":"January 22, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"Angry Reader #6 wrote:\u00a0\u201cMr. Hanson unfolds the conservative Procrustean hide-a-bed. 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