Bill Maher announced last week that he was donating $1 million to an Obama-linked SuperPAC and as he did so, said:
“If I had one bit of advice for our president, it would be stop trying to get everyone to like you. It’s never gonna happen. About half the country wouldn’t vote for you if you personally saved them from drowning.”
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Comments (19)
mmkay
He could have given the same advice to George Bush. Except he despised George Bush.
Bush Didn't Need That Advice
Bush never attempted to reach out. He and Karl Rove relied entirely on turning out the base for the election of 2004.
Down for the third time...help, help!
Why save "half the country" (Mayer's illusion) if they don't recognize the tail fins...dog paddling, Creeping Conservatives don't even realize they're swimming with sharks. Let them drown in their own bloody delusions.
Sink or swim; choices, choices...every voter is alone in the voting booth.
In a country where two thirds
In a country where two thirds of the population is convinced that they make more than the average, this is not surprising. They all think that he's giving money to someone else at their expense.
So much here!
Let's see:
1) A million dollars? And to a Super PAC? Can anyone with that kind of disposable money be trusted? Isn't he part of the hated 1%?
2) '...stop trying to get everyone to like you...' This is pretty sound advice but it's about three years too late. When Obama took office he certainly had enough political capital to try and tackle some of the structural problems that our economy has. Instead he tried some middling things that didn't really please anyone and didn't fix anything either.
3) In defense of half of the country, we can't afford to vacation in the same waters that the Obamas swim in. Or slopes that they ski on. Or hotels that they go to, etc, etc.
4) Is there any pundit that got more out of personally disliking a President than Maher did during the W Bush years? For him of all people, to suggest that other people can't focus on policy is simply too rich.
5) I know that it's easier to pretend that Obama's policy changes (flips?) have to do with pandering but the truth is that on things like war policy, he promised things that couldn't be done. Once he was actually in office he had no real choice but to do what he then thought best. For instance, Guantanamo prison is still open, not because of popular opinion but because he hasn't found a better solution.
Oh Peder
I suppose you are one of the people that will never change their minds about Obama, but you need some corrections.
1) I don't have the time to do the research but I suspect that Bill Maher's income and wealth are nowhere near the top 1%; compare to the Koch brothers, and, gosh, Mr. Romney. At any rate, there is wisdom rather than a problem in actual 1 percenters like Bill Gates and Warren Buffet supporting Obama's policies, promoting more progressive taxation and continuation of the inheritance taxes.
2) In case you didn't notice, the Obama administration passed the largest stimulus possible shortly after taking office. Some of us thought it should be larger and less focused on tax cuts, but it seems to have been the best possible given Republican intransigence. Even conservative economists like Bruce Bartlett give the stimulus credit for softening the crash.
3) I wholly agree that there is unjustifiable income inequality in this country. You've only cited the tip of that iceberg. What do you propose to change it?
4) There are plenty of people out there that Maher, and I, would probably dislike but never say a word about. We disliked Bush personally because his personality seemed to be genuinely of a piece with policies that tricked our nation into a needless war and brought dishonor on our country around the world...as well as contributed to the income inequality you object to.
5) Guantanamo prison is still open because Republicans in congress blocked funding for creating a secure infrastructure and trials in the US.
Need Better Corrections
1) Maher is indeed one of the 1%. He's worth somewhere north of $20 million. No, he's not worth as much as some, but he's up there. If you find him and others wise, so be it, but you should at least admit that the problem with others isn't their money but their opinions.
2) A stimulus is the very definition of a temporary fix. Set aside whether it worked or not (and I don't think it did), it isn't a permanent fix unless we're really expected to pay it out every year, forever. Obama's one serious attempt to fix a problem is in health care. Since it passed we've had a parade of news about how it will be more expensive than promised and won't help as many people as suggested. In any case, I don't know of anyone who thinks that it fixed the health care market.
3) Current inequality levels are much less than they were back during the good old days in the 90's. Inequality over the last forty years is pretty closely linked with overall economic performance. The better off the national economy, the more inequality. That's a tradeoff I'm very happy with.
My comment was more of a wisecrack about the Obama families big luxurious vacation habit. In the big picture it doesn't matter very much so feel free to ignore it if you'd like.
4) See, here is the deal. I don't have a personal dislike of Obama. I think he's interesting and smart but woefully over his head. I disagree with his policies and think that he's very ill served by all of the yes men around him. But personally I think he's a fine person.
I don't think this is far outside of most Republicans. As a group they detested Clinton much more than they do Obama. They might have detested Clinton as much as libs did W Bush, though I don't remember nearly as much of the torture pr0n . . .
5) I could hardly be more tired of libs pretending that '09 and '10 didn't happen. But I'll bite. What is the better alternative that Obama proposed?
If only your "steady stream of news"
If only your "steady stream of news" included more than Fox News.
Really?
That's your reply? Fwiw, I don't watch any Fox news at all. But still, thanks for the consideration and careful response to the points that I brought up.
"4) Is there any pundit that
"4) Is there any pundit that got more out of personally disliking a President than Maher did during the W Bush years?"
Oh, Rush Limbaugh and the Clintons (and Obama), Glenn Beck and Obama, Bill O'Reilly...
Good advice, Mr. Maher.
Good advice, Mr. Maher.
The issue was that Obama
The issue was that Obama wanted consensus, not affection. Hence. the preemptive adoption of Republican positions which lead to Republicans moving further right to intensify the difference. So now we have a centrist president and a far-right Republican party.
Where else would the policies of the furthest right politician of the previous election (Romney) be too left because the current president adopted Romney's health-care program. Hmmmm?
Henchmen Wanted
Obama should continue to act presidential, which some mistake for being too nice. What he really needs now are a few good henchmen. He needs a fighter to turn out the base, Biden to start talking about the Republican field of social extremists, and a young notable to reinvigorate the youth that got him elected in the first place. He has to stay above the fray and keep on message. I love Bill Maher, but he's hardly someone from whom I'd take campaign advice.
To the concession-giving before the discussion has started
I would add that the President needs to give up the idea he got from the book on Lincoln's intentional filling of his cabinet with those he knew disagreed with him. After listening, Lincoln didn't attempt to find consensus -- he did what he knew was right. That should be the real lesson from that book.
Mr. Obama's Wall-Street advising and cabinet members need a clearing out and replacement by those with strong knowledge of how economics really works together with a commitment to apply their knowledge to the healing of America. These new people would understand that "austerity" and "no new taxes" are destructive because they shrink economies, but that investment helps them grow. And they would know that the banksters' victims are the people who should be bailed out, not the banks who hold onto the bailout money and use some of it to pay their usual "merit-based" bonuses.
"investment helps them grow?"
Bernice, if there's anything the Obama term did for America it was to prove once and for all that Keynesian economics is a fraud and a failure.
Which investment is most effective, Bernice, the government picking and choosing who will get your money or you picking and choosing who will get your money?
Economies grow from the bottom up with millions of people deciding how to spend their money on which goods and services are worthy and appropriate. They don't grow from the top down when politicians and bureaucrats decide how to "invest" resulting in fiascos like Solyndra and electric car companies like "Ener1" going bankrupt.
Governments don't control economies from the top down, the people control economies from the bottom up.
You mean like "trickle down economics"?
Or Reaganomics? Or "supply Side Economics"? Or "vodoo economics"(George H.W. Bush)? Remember what a disaster that's been over the last 30 years. Unless you're a 1%er.
Deregulate, privatize, and give tax cuts to those at the "TOP". And then the benefits would "trickle down" to the rest of us. That really worked well...to increase inequality. And the National Debt.
Isn't It Fun
To be lectured by those who, without Obama's "failed" stimulus would be likely be sitting on a garbage heap scratching at their open sores with a potsherd.
Some of us need to be careful what we wish for because if we had stuck to the Friedonian economics (as in a lovely-but-deadly combination of Freidman and the Marx Bros. "Freedonia") that had dominated this country during Bushco, those of us on that garbage heap would still be somewhere between 30 and 50% of the population,...
and we would have taken down the rest of the world with us.
Of course some of our friends probably believe the Y2K problem was all hysteria and have never realized that nothing happened because huge amounts of corrective work taking millions of hours of human effort was put into preventing the disaster that would have occurred without that work.
Luckily we will never have to find out what disaster would have resulted in either case, but that the undeniable fact that the very LACK of disaster resulted from massive time, energy, and resources expended escapes some of our friends and neighbors doesn't mean that the disaster-averting effort was not important, tremendously useful, and, ultimately, successful.
Oh, and By the Way
The problem with an economy controlled by the way people spend their money is that it is completely anti-Democratic.
The people with all the money get all the votes and the economy inevitably shapes itself to serve only their perceived needs.
Those with no money (which in such a system, left unregulated, is always an ever-increasing portion of the population) have NO CONTROL over their economic and, eventually, their political and personal lives.
We can have unregulated capitalism operating under Darwinian "survival of the fittest" principles,...
or we can have a representative Democracy,...
but we can't have BOTH.
If you believe we can, you simply do not understand the depths of depravity to which money will inevitably lead those who are driven to possess too much of it.
Nudge
I'd suggest a reading of behavioral economics (such as the book Nudge, by Thaler and Sunstein) to get an idea of the irrationality of individual economic choice behavior.
If you're really serious you can go back to Kahneman and Tversky.