March 16th, 2012
I’ve got a little post over at the Standard about Talking Points Memo catching Obama making a hash of history. Here’s a relevant excerpt:
In mocking the GOP, Obama cited an anecdote about Hayes in which, upon using the telephone for the first time, he said, “It’s a great invention, but who would ever want to use one?”
“That’s why he’s not on Mount Rushmore,” Obama said. “He’s explaining why we can’t do something instead of why we can do something.”
But Nan Card, curator of manuscripts at the Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Center in Ohio, told TPM that the nation’s 19th president was being unfairly tagged as a Luddite.
“He really was the opposite,” she said. “He had the first telephone in the White House. He also had the first typewriter in the White House. Thomas Edison came to the White House as well and displayed the phonograph. Photographing people who came to the White House and visited at dinners and receptions was also very important to him.”
While often cited, Card said Obama’s cited quote had never been confirmed by contemporary sources and is likely apocryphal. A contemporary newspaper account of his first experience with telephone in 1877 from the Providence Journal records a smiling Hayes repeatedly responding to the voice on the other line with the phrase, “That is wonderful.”
But it wasn’t until just now that I put my finger on what really bothers me about Obama’s remarks. It’s not that he’s ignorant of history. It’s that he’s denigrating a former president of the United States.
Look back at that snarky passage about Hayes. Have you ever, ever heard a president speak so cavalierly about one of his predecessors? Mind you, Obama isn’t taking issue with policy–he’s not saying that the Monroe doctrine was a foolish idea or that it was evil not to pursue emancipation more vigorously. He’s just pointing and jeering: Hey, look at how stupid that old dude was!
The fact that the basis of Obama’s jeering is incorrect is nearly beside the point. Even after everything else from the last four years, the scope of Obama’s narcissism retains its ability to surprise.
Update: GFAW in the comments with a further observation:
[T]he *most* narcissistic aspect of this wasn’t just the fact that he glibly mocked another president. The worst part really was “That’s why he’s not on Mount Rushmore.” As if not being on Mt. Rushmore proves that a president sucks.
Hey, Barack — James Madison and John Adams called. They wanted to let you know that you’re a prick.
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That line bothered me, too. Admittedly, it’s probably not unprecedented — how many presidents have mocked Hoover? — but it’s ugly.
That said, the *most* narcissistic aspect of this wasn’t just the fact that he glibly mocked another president. The worst part really was “That’s why he’s not on Mount Rushmore.” As if not being on Mt. Rushmore proves that a president sucks.
Hey, Barack — James Madison and John Adams called. They wanted to let you know that you’re a prick.
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JVL – You should look into whether the Prez has the Interior Department gathering engineers, geologists, sculptors, etc. to do some rock carving in South Dakota a few years hence.
Of course, for it to actually happen, he’d probably have to promise to add Reagan’s visage as well.
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Intrade oddly shows nothing about “Obama on Mount Rushmore”.
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FDR and Kennedy mocked Herbert Hoover, still alive and widely known at the time. Incidentally TPM is citing Ronald Reagan as Obama’s likely source: the telephone line appeared in an RR speech about Apple, recounted in the recent Steve Jobs book, which explains *a lot*
This is a stark reflection both on Obama’s historical illiteracy and that of the know-nothing Ivy grads who work under him back at the shop. They glean their Age of Discovery info from Bugs Bunny cartoons and their presidential Americana tropes from pop biographies of a hippie computer guy. I’ve visited the Rutherford B. Hayes library in Fremont, Ohio and am confident that old white male who didn’t even win the popular vote occupies approximately zero mental space for someone in Obama’s milieu.
Despite the snarky Yelp reviews it is a classy, leafy, serene place (more so than Clinton’s in Little Rock, where I purchased a denim wine bag). Favorite artifact: a copy of the old-time songbook for “Vote As You Shot, Boys”
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At “George W. Bush’s Childhood Home” in Midland I purchased a yo-yo
Galley Friend J.E. March 16, 2012 at 11:23 am
Wow, so Obama is cool with (two) slaveholders being enshrined. Someone alert the PC education establishment that they can stop renaming elementary schools.