Can You Fix It?

"I looked him in the face and I asked him one thing. I said, can you fix this?" Foxworthy said. "And he did not blink, he said 'yes, I can.'"

Friday, October 26, 2012

The Real Obama

Peggy Noonan's opinion article today is - as she so often is - precisely attuned to reality.  I encourage you to read the whole article.  A few excerpts:
"Why was the first debate so toxic for the president? Because the one thing he couldn't do if he was going to win the election is let all the pent-up resentment toward him erupt. Americans had gotten used to him as The President. Whatever his policy choices, whatever general direction he seemed to put in place he was The President, a man who had gotten there through natural gifts and what all politicians need, good fortune.
What he couldn't do was present himself, when everyone was looking, as smaller than you thought. Petulant, put upon, above it all, full of himself. He couldn't afford to make himself look less impressive than the challenger in terms of command, grasp of facts, size.
But that's what he did.
And in some utterly new way the president was revealed, exposed. All the people whose job it is to surround and explain him, to act as his buffers and protectors—they weren't there. It was him on the stage, alone with a competitor. He didn't have a teleprompter, and so his failure seemed to underscore the cliché that the prompter is a kind of umbilical cord for him, something that provides nourishment, the thing he needs to sound good. He is not by any means a stupid man but he has become a boring one; he drones, he is predictable, it's never new. The teleprompter adds substance, or at least safety."  
And more:
"People back home, he [a U.S. Senator] said, sometimes wonder what happened with the president in the debate. The senator said, I paraphrase: I sort of have to tell them that it wasn't a miscalculation or a weird moment. I tell them: I know him, and that was him. That guy on the stage, that's the real Obama.
Which gets us to Bob Woodward's "The Price of Politics," published last month. The portrait it contains of Mr. Obama—of a president who is at once over his head, out of his depth and wholly unaware of the fact—hasn't received the attention it deserves. Throughout the book, which is a journalistic history of the president's key economic negotiations with Capitol Hill, Mr. Obama is portrayed as having the appearance and presentation of an academic or intellectual while being strangely clueless in his reading of political situations and dynamics. He is bad at negotiating—in fact doesn't know how. His confidence is consistently greater than his acumen, his arrogance greater than his grasp."
A man out of his depth, who thinks he's great but is actually bad at the job he's had to do?  A teleprompter man who thinks he can just wow his way to success through appearance?  That's our president, it appears.

Which is yet one more reason, to me, to underscore how important this election is - we urgently need a competent president who can face up to the brutally serious challenges we face as a nation.

Let's renew our efforts for the next 10 days - let's do it on behalf of our future, our families, our nation.

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