…begins.
A lot of people have been wondering when he’s going to start fighting back against the Obama campaign lies and smears that have been going on all summer. He’s apparently been keeping his powder dry, and in the post-debate environment, I think these will have a devastating effect on the undecideds.
The Left’s narrative problem:
Because they basically control the mainstream media, and because they have created for themselves a fictional conservative worldview (evident in many an Aaron Sorkin project and Barack Obama speech) rather than confront the actual conservative worldview, liberals are often caught off guard when faced with an actual argument for positions they disagree with. What we’ve seen in the wake of the debate is that some on the Left are so wedded to their imaginary right-wingers that when their actual opponents advance positions or make arguments that are different from those imaginary ones they will call those actual opponents fakes and liars. They believed their own caricature of Mitt Romney, and his unwillingness to play into it strikes them as dishonest. Or put another way: Confronted with evidence of their own dishonesty about who Romney is and what he stands for, they call the evidence a lie.
It’s often been noted that the Left has trouble debating when they get in real debates, where they have to confront real arguments instead of their fantasy straw men. That’s the disaster that comes from cocooning yourself in academia or a news room where your assumptions are never challenged. Even Dana Milbank sees the problem:
Obama has set a modern record for refusal to be quizzed by the media, taking questions from reporters far less often than Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton and even George W. Bush. Though his opponent in 2008 promised to take questions from lawmakers like the British prime minister does, Obama has shied from mixing it up with members of Congress, too. And, especially since Rahm Emanuel’s departure, Obama is surrounded by a large number of yes men who aren’t likely to get in his face.
This insularity led directly to the Denver debacle: Obama was out of practice and unprepared to be challenged. The White House had supposed that Obama’s forays into social media — town hall meetings with YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and the like — would replace traditional presidential communication. By relying on such venues, Obama’s argument skills atrophied, and he was ill-equipped to engage in old-fashioned give and take.
And unfortunately for Milbank, he’s much too optimistic about Obama’s ability to fix it in time to save the next debates, or his campaign.
The hilarious conspiracy mongering and projection of the Left.
[Update a while later]
Moe Lane has acquired Romney’s cheat sheet.
Which is good, because it will probably lose him the election.
…is “implausible,” and a “statistical quirk.” From that right-wing rag, The Economist.
This is shocking, to anyone unfamiliar with the Obama campaign. Or the Obama presidency.
Don’t hold your breath, Professor. Tutu is another sign of the degeneracy of the Nobel Peace Prize.
It’s nothing to cheer about.
[Update a couple minutes later]
Some improvement, but not enough. Still looks like a slowing economy. Whoever is president will probably inherit a recession next year. But one candidate actually knows how to get us out of it.
More thoughts from James Taranto:
We could spend hours quoting disparaging reviews of Obama’s performances from journalists who were never as head-over-heels as Matthews and Sullivan, but we like to pretend as if we have space constraints, so we’ll just take one representative example, also from the Daily Beast, where our friend Tunku Varadarajan writes: “My God, in the four years that we’ve seen him in the White House, I don’t think we’ve ever seen the president so flaccid, so dull-brained, so jejune, so shifty, so downcast.”
This columnist has to disagree. Obama’s lame performance last night seemed typical to us. We can think of a few occasions in which we’ve seen the president less flaccid, less dull-brained, less jejune, less shifty, less downcast. But only a few.
But these qualities–or, to put it another way, this lack of quality–was harder than usual to miss last night because of the contrast with the highly effectual Romney. One reason it came as such a shock to Obama is that it was the first time in his career that he shared a debate stage with a serious opponent.
Think about it: John McCain was feeble. Alan Keyes, whom Obama beat in his 2004 Senate campaign, was crazy. All the Democrats who ran in 2008 were preposterous except Hillary Clinton, and she, as a beneficiary of nepotism, was highly overrated as a politician. He used Chicago-style dirty tricks to dispatch his original opponent in 2004, as well as the state senator he replaced back in the 1990s. The test he failed last night is one to which he had never been put.
But the journalists who are pointing the finger at Obama have three fingers pointed back at themselves. Instead of challenging the president, the press corps–with a few honorable exceptions, like ABC’s Jake Tapper and the guys from Univision–have spent the past four-plus years puffing him up and making excuses for him. The American Spectator’s Jeffrey Lord explains:
The great James Taranto . . . long ago posited what is called the “Taranto Principle.” In short, it means that the liberal media so coddles liberal politicians that they have no idea how to cope outside that liberal media bubble. . . .
Barack Obama has been so totally coddled by the liberal media that he looked absolutely shell-shocked in this debate. Stunned, unhappy, angry, sour–and at some points genuinely incoherent.
Romney has had nowhere near that kind of treatment. He had serious opponents in the primaries–all of whom in their own way forced him to confront his ideas in a serious fashion. Conservatives were on his heels. The Obama media never let up. The man went through the political equivalent of boot camp.
Tonight, the Taranto Principle kicked in. Big time.
Outside the liberal bubble–forced to be alone on a stage with a very serious, very prepared candidate–Barack Obama was in trouble. Big Trouble.
One quibble, on a point of personal privilege: “Great” is not the right adjective. Isn’t “inimitable” in the Spectator stylebook?
Otherwise, though, Lord is right. What we saw last night was the real Obama–a bright but incurious and inexperienced man who four years ago was promoted well beyond his level of competency. The Obama that guys like Matthews and Sullivan expected instead was a character in a fairy tale–a fairy tale written by guys like Matthews and Sullivan.
Oh well, at least there are more debates. The last one, on Oct. 22, is on foreign policy, which is Obama’s strong suit. Then the handsome prince killed Osama bin Laden, and the ambassador lived happily ever after.
Ouch.
I think that it’s not so much that the emperor has no clothes as the clothes have no emperor.
