DESPERATELY SEEKING THE BEST: When Wallace spoke with Jason Bateman...

WEDNESDAY, JULY 16, 2025

...she decided to call him a name: We don't think we've ever seen anyone lose his mojo faster than President Obama has.

That doesn't mean that he's a bad person, because of course he isn't. It means that a surprising type of disconnect seems to obtain in remarks like those recorded in this New York Times report:

Democrats Must ‘Toughen Up’ Against Trump, Obama Tells Donors

Former President Barack Obama has a stern critique for members of his party: Too many have been cowed into silence.

In private remarks to party donors on Friday night, Mr. Obama scolded Democrats for failing to speak out against President Trump and his policies, suggesting they were shrinking from the challenge out of fear of retribution.

“It’s going to require a little bit less navel-gazing and a little less whining and being in fetal positions. And it’s going to require Democrats to just toughen up,” Mr. Obama said at a fund-raiser for the Democratic National Committee at the home of Gov. Phil Murphy of New Jersey.

“What I have been surprised by is the degree to which I’ve seen people who, when I was president, or progressives, liberals, stood for all kinds of stuff, who seem like they’re kind of cowed and intimidated and shrinking away from just asserting what they believe, or at least what they said they believe,” he added.

There is no tape of the former president's remarks. Excerpts from his remarks were released by his office. 

That said, the former president's tendency toward the scolding of others has been noted by various people in the fairly recent past. A bit later in this morning's report, Shawn McCreesh includes this sardonic passage:

[T]he former president’s comments were interpreted by people in the room as a critique of the party’s elites for having gone quiet when they were sorely needed to step up, according to a person who attended.

The excerpts provided by Mr. Obama’s office contained no evidence of physician-heal-thyself reflectiveness. Mr. Obama, after all, has scarcely been at the tip of the Democratic spear in resisting Mr. Trump. He has issued few public statements opposing Trump administration actions and has yet to appear this year at a rally, town hall or other public event staged by opponents of Mr. Trump.

Should Obama have been "at the tip of the spear" in pushing back against the onslaught from President Trump? 

Maybe yes and maybe no. Given the norms of post-presidential conduct, you can teach it flat or round. 

That said, many players have complained about the former president's surprising lack of juice in recent years. At the same time, Michelle Obama has adopted a more sardonic tone since leaving the White House, where she famously offered this watchword:

When they go low, we go high!

By now, those days may be gone.

We can hardly blame Michelle Obama for that change in tone. At the Fox News Channel, to cite one especially egregious example, millionaire mutts like Greg Gutfeld entertain audiences on a nightly basis with suggestions that Mrs. Obama is secretly a man—and a (sexually dominant) man at that.

These angry sallies are accompanied by smutty, stupid, braindead claims in which the millionaire Fox News tool suggests that Mrs. Obama's husband is secretly gay. 

This prehuman conduct continued along on last evening's Gutfeld! show. But this dumbfoundingly stupid behavior rolls along night after night after night on this prime time "cable news" show, as the finer people—people even including Nicolle Wallace—refuse to report or comment.

Every night, Suzanne Scott pries the lid off the garbage can and the channel's Greg Gutfeld crawls out. He's accompanied by an ever-shifting array of peculiar D-list performers—people who are happy to join him in his assault on the culture

As this smutty, stupid pounding occurs, the New York Times and Mediaite agree to avert their gaze. At present, the star of that show is importing his degraded sensibility onto the nation's most-watched "cable news" program, The Five, where he serves as a daily co-host.

This is a classic revolt from below—a revolt of the D-list comedians and of the D-minus students. Within the realm of direct political power, President Trump continues a remarkably widespread assault on the traditional functioning of the federal government.

President Trump is assisted this time around by a team of dedicated ideologues who have spent their entire lives preparing for this multi-faceted onslaught. It's understandable that many players in Blue America may not have known quite how to react when this onslaught began to take place. They're being asked to react to a type of "night assault" which has basically never taken place on this landmass in the centuries past.

As this revolt takes place, it seems to us that President Obama, for whatever reason, has largely lost his mojo—has lost several miles off his fastball. He unveiled that fastball to high acclaim in July 2004, as he delivered the keynote address at the Democratic National Convention:

STATE SENATOR OBAMA (7/27/04): Even as we speak, there are those who are preparing to divide us, the spin-masters and negative ad peddlers who embrace the politics of "anything goes." 

Well, I say to them tonight, "There's not a liberal America and a conservative America—there's the United States of America." 

There's not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America. There's the United States of America. 

The pundits like to slice-and-dice our country into Red States and Blue States—Red States for Republicans, Blue States for Democrats. But I've got news for them, too:

We worship an awesome God in the Blue States, and we don't like federal agents poking around our libraries in the Red States. We coach Little League in the Blue States and have gay friends in the Red States. 

There are patriots who opposed the war in Iraq and patriots who supported it. We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America.

We are one people? An astounding new presence emerged that night, delivering what was, at the time, a striking and potent message. A mere four years later, he was sent to the White House with a victory margin of more than seven points:

Nationwide popular vote, 2008 election
Barack Obama (D): 69,498,516 votes (52.9%)
John McCain (R): 59,948,323 votes (45.7%)

That happened in November 2008. 

In fact, people still worship God and coach Little League in the Blue States. So how did we end up here? 

In the first episode of her new podcast, Nicolle Wallace joined Jason Bateman in trying to puzzle that out. 

Through her popular daily two-hour show, Deadline: White House, Wallace emerged as a major star at MSNBC during the first Trump term. As the leading authority notes, Bateman—a good, decent person—hails from a different zone:

Jason Bateman 

Jason Kent Bateman (born January 14, 1969) is an American actor. He is known for his roles as Michael Bluth in the Fox / Netflix sitcom Arrested Development (2003–2019) and Marty Byrde in the Netflix crime drama series Ozark (2017–2022), as well as for his work in numerous comedy films. His accolades include a Golden Globe Award and a Primetime Emmy Award.

Bateman began his career as a child actor, appearing on television in the early 1980s on shows such as the NBC drama series Little House on the Prairie from 1981 to 1982 and The Hogan Family from 1986 to 1991. Bateman's early film roles include Teen Wolf Too (1987) and Necessary Roughness (1991) before taking supporting roles in The Break-Up (2006), Juno (2007), Hancock (2008), and Up in the Air (2009)...

[...]

Podcast

In July 2020, Bateman, along with Will Arnett and Sean Hayes, created a comedy and talk podcast called SmartLess. In 2022, Bateman created a media company SmartLess Media in order to create four additional podcasts. In 2023, Apple revealed that SmartLess was #4 of the year's Top Shows.

Wallace is a fan of Bateman's SmartLess podcast. In large part for that reason, she recentlyspent an hour speaking with Bateman on her own podcast's first episode.

To watch that episode or to read its transcript, you can just click here. Based on that one-hour exchange, we'd say that Bateman is plainly a good and decent person, though we've always been a bit annoyed by what we would regard as Wallave's imperfect political judgment.

For the record, no one has perfect political judgement. That includes Nicolle Wallace, and that includes President Obama. 

In our view, State Senato Obama's statement at the 2004 convention was one of the most compelling political statements to emerge from within Blue America in the course of this century. We'd also cite President Clinton's statement in his book, My Life, in which he expresses his admiration for the Arkansas Pentecostals, a group of people who tended to vote against him. 

We'd also cite Bernie Sanders'; remarks in Welch, West Virginia, when he told a bunch of people in that red state that he was grateful for the work their parents and grandparents had done, digging the coal that had kept his family's modest apartment in Brooklyn warm when he was a kid.

(“These guys are heroes,” Sanders said. “I grew up in a rent-controlled apartment house in Brooklyn, New York, and I will never forget the piles of coal. I don’t know if it came from here or where it came. You kept my house warm. Thank you.") 

Somehow, we've moved from Obama's seven-point win to the state of play today. On MSNBC, talkers now cite encouraging polls—but the Trump II political machine is grinding ahead at a stunning pace. There is no roadmap according to which Blue America can stop its roll.

In the midst of all this, Wallace—a good, decent person—decided to start a podcast. On this campus, the young analysts screamed and tore at their hair when they saw the name she had chosen:

The Best People with Nicolle Wallace

"The Best People with Nicolle Wallace?" Why would she call it that?

We'd say it's clear Jaxon Bateman is a thoroughly good, decent person. We'd also say that we've rarely seen a dialogue as clueless as the dialogue which emerged from the first episode of this new podcast.

Wallace is the political / journalistic professional here. Bateman is a good and decent private citizen who wants to find a way "back out of all this now too much for us." 

That said, what was wrong with the views expressed by this pair of Blue American citizens?

Wallace started her podcast with Jason Batman—and she called him a name. She said that he's one of "The Best People."

Why would she want to do that?

Tomorrow: Mutual admiration