Reply #22: "Is it our fault for voting for him?" No, of course not [View All]

The movie quote was taken out of context because I don't know what the context is. I only saw the last part of the movie to begin with. and therefore had no context myself.

But when I went to find it Friday afternoon and stumbled upon that clip, the segment struck a chord in me. It seemed then -- and of course more so today -- to describe Obama first, but then also to describe our desire as the electorate to play the game, to succeed, to win.

However, this issue of competition and of winning also infects the right wing ideology. I wondered, during a conversation yesterday with the same person who brought up the movie "Instinct," why the right is so militaristic, and of course it's because they need winners and losers. No ambiguity, no uncertainty, a clear determination of who is "right" and who is "wrong." (See Altemeyer "The Authoritarians" and Jost, et al, "Political Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition" http://psychoanalystsopposewar.org/resources_files/ConsevatismAsMotivatedSocialCognition.pdf) This also explains (imho) why they don't want gays in the military. It has nothing to do with ability or vulnerability to blackmail or issues of potential rape (goddess knows we have enough of that already with the straights in the military!). It's about uncertainty and ambiguity and grey areas where up isn't exactly up and down isn't quite down and "yes sir!" doesn't really apply the way it sort of used to.

If we on the left -- and especially on the farther left -- attempt to fit our belief system into this kind of polarized mold, it doesn't fit. We try to honor the troops while protesting the war but Buffy told us 40 years ago that without the troops "all this killing can't go on."

My field is sociology, not psychology, so I don't presume to speak with any authority on this, but I think we'd all be stupid if we didn't expect Obama to be more than a little bit of a game player. He had to be in order to succeed. So did Bill Clinton. There are a lot of similarities to their backgrounds, which makes it not at all surprising that there are similarities in the way they play the political game.

And they definitely are players.

But I don't think Obama learned to live outside the game, even though he started outside it. I think he was very sharply focused, very much like Cuba Gooding's character, on playing the game by its rules, not his.

I don't think Jimmy Carter was, and I think that's why he wasn't considered a success by the party. Maybe it was his background in engineering which anchored him to a different reality that was less competition, less gamesmanship, more sense of simply doing what needed to be done rather than playing games that might or might not get the job done even if you "won." And I know that sentence is a syntactical nightmare but I hope I got the point across.

But one who definitely did NOT play the game was FDR, or at least imho. He was "a traitor to his class" and seemed to have a sense more of right and wrong rather than win and lose, if that makes sense. And yet he was thrust into one of the biggest games on a global scale of win or lose and managed to win. So looking back to FDR's strategy as a blueprint for Obama presents a stark contrast. Not to mention that the world -- and the game -- has changed in the past 70+ years.

So ultimately, I think it's difficult to make the comparisons too tightly, because there are so many other factors. But I do think Obama sees the game as a contest between himself and All The Others, where he has to win in order to succeed and he can only win by playing by The Others' rules. He doesn't know how to make his own.

And I think maybe that was the mistake we the electorate made -- not that we had much choice -- when we allowed ourselves to believe, even if only for the few seconds it took to cast our vote, that he stood for change. We should have known, even though most of us couldn't have known, that in order for Obama to get where he was, he had to be a game player. And game players play by the rules, they don't change them.



Tansy Gold