We Have Met the Bitters, and They Is Us

Silent Creative Partner doesn’t follow politics and pays little attention to news, which makes him a far more typical American than we’ll ever hope to be. He’s solidly liberal in outlook — something we used to think was typically American — although we doubt he would label himself as such, because he doesn’t see himself in those terms.

(Not that we care for labels either — if forced to declare, we’d sign up for the Cannibal Anarchist Party — but obviously we travel with progressives, even if we don’t wear the uniform.)

Living in Southern California, the economy hasn’t really touched him, and while you can find teabaggers if you go looking for them, they’re not part of our daily landscape. Even government itself, which here as elsewhere permeates and underwrites our existence, isn’t quite visible — yes, we have cops and streets and garbage collection and an airport and even a military base up the road, but you can go very long stretches without quite being aware of what enables your bliss.

Which is, really, the Genius of America — at least for us Left Coast white males who benefit from it. Like Steve Jobs says, it just works.

And if a pollster somehow managed to reach Silent Creative Partner on his iPhone, that would help produce a result much like this:

Despite the loud outcry from television hosts, pundits, writers and even a few elected officials, majorities of Democrats and liberals still say they’re with the president on this — even though Obama himself made it clear that he didn’t like parts of the deal. Moreover, a separate Gallup poll released as the deal was being finalized also found no significant slippage in Obama’s approval rating among Democrats and self-identified liberals; in fact, his standing with liberals actually edged up slightly in the last week of July.

We’re going to guess most of those people haven’t been reading Krugman or Greenwald for years, don’t follow all the Bushian turns in national-security policy, maybe last noticed Obama when he took out Osama, and really aren’t going to tune back into politics until after Labor Day 2012 or something dreadful happens.

You know: Americans.

We can’t say we blame them. And we’re certainly not going to shout ourself hoarse telling them to pay fucking attention. They have their own lives to deal with.

But we have to recognize, at the end of a very frustrating week, that our frustration isn’t shared by all, or even a majority of those who lean in our direction. For them, Obama remains a nice guy, someone you could share a Beer Summit with, and certainly easier on the conscience than his predecessor. If we’re going to be bitter about it, that’s just something we’ll have to keep to ourself.

Unless someone makes the mistake of asking us.