Welcome Back

During the Trump administration, media folks paid far more attention to comments and communication from the former president himself than from spokespeople. For one, he never shut up, even when he would have benefited from doing so. And since he could still make money for Twitter company officials had no interest in shutting him up. Combine these factors with the duty many of those people felt to Save the Republic and we generally had to dig down fairly deeply into the average news item to learn what someone who knew more than the president did about something might say.

This situation meant that we missed out on one of the frequent features of the Obama administration, the tone-deaf statement from some political automaton about the real-life concerns of people whose lives they knew nothing about. Although former president Obama could do these himself -- the man who had never operated a business telling those who had created them, "You didn't build that." -- the job was usually left to said automata and apparatchiks.

With the dawn of the Biden administration (motto: "Whose third term?") we have some of those statements beginning to surface again, perhaps from some of the same people. Some excellent examples have happened when members of the administration are confronted with claims that their green energy emphasis hurts employment in the traditional energy sectors. Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry countered that claim with one that coal miners could now be solar power technicians, without any recognition of how different the two jobs are and the amount of time needed to retrain for the new one. You may remember Kerry as the Obama administration's second Secretary of State, who didn't show up in France for an anti-terrorism unity march following the Charlie Hebdo massacre but did bring James Taylor with him the next week for an event titled Homage de John Kerry a Paris. Rumors that Kerry's title will be changed to Special Presidential Envoy Without a Clue are, as yet, unfounded.

Even non-governmental groups got in on the action. The fact-checking site Politifact, in examining a claim that revoking the Keystone XL pipeline construction permit would cost 11,000 jobs, said that the construction jobs involved were only "temporary." I've never worked a construction job, just like most of the people at Politifact and the sources it used for its report, but even I can figure out that most construction jobs are only temporary -- because the project being constructed is eventually finished. Justifying the job loss in whatever numbers it may be on this basis is the kind of thing we just haven't seen enough of over the last four years.

It brings back fond memories of Obama adviser David Axelrod explaining why the president boosted the thermostat in his office while talking about energy conservation: "He's from Hawaii, OK?" At the time the former president was 48 and had lived a total of 12 years in Hawaii, most recently about 30 years previous. He spent the bulk of the subsequent years in Chicago and New Haven, Connecticut, where folks often achieve indoor warmth by following the lead of native Georgian Jimmy Carter and putting on a sweater.

Considering the larger fibs that most every politician tells with respiratory regularity, these kinds of tone-deaf head-scratchers may seem like quibbling, and they probably are. But when all of the little clues suggest the emperor or empress has no knowledge of what he or she is talking about then it may be time to recognize the big zero in the room.