The fact that Obama quickly gets lost in the weeds when he’s taken off message should put a big fat bull’s-eye on him for any of his opponents in his upcoming reelection campaign. A point I’ve made in other forums and repeat here is this: A sufficiently ruthless opponent would not defer to him but take any and every opportunity to discomfit him. What this, and similar episodes, shows is that he has never had to deal with a very public event, from which he cannot escape, in which he’s lost control and is being made to look bad. That thin veneer of cool would quickly melt. He doesn’t improvise well and doesn’t know when to stop digging: it’s tough when you believe deeply that you’re the smartest guy in the room. In fact, the person he least respects has the greatest opportunity here. Media mavens that run our so-called debates can be counted on to try to keep things predictable. Obama’s opponents should not accommodate that ruse.
The great thing is that it’s not something he can fix. It would require him to completely reconstruct his self image, and his ego would never allow it. A Fred Thompson would have destroyed Obama in every debate. McCain wasn’t capable of it, either intellectually or by temperament. Oh, and I agree with John Hindraker that the president is not a smart man. He just plays one on teevee. I’ll be this is why we aren’t allowed to see his transcripts.
Just when I thought he was starting to get it, off he goes on another ignorant piece about the “loss of expertise” at NASA, and the “inability” of the commercial crew providers to do it without them. He doesn’t seem to understand that companies and agencies don’t have expertise — people do. All of the people at NASA who know how to develop launch systems are dead or retired (because it’s been over three decades since NASA did one), and no one at NASA has ever known how to do one cost effectively. That experience resides at SpaceX, and other places. Clark Lindsey addresses the nonsense in comments over there.
It could happen, if the dollar continues to fall. And the White House seems determined to make that happen.
I have an idea for an ad campaign next year. Show a video clip of Obama back in ’08, talking back how “gas prices will necessarily go up” to carry out his green agenda, or about “bankrupting the coal industry.” Then end the ad with, “He got what he wanted. Did you?”
business has been brisk enough for producers Harmon Kaslow and John Aglialoro to expand from 299 theaters to 425 this weekend and to 1,000 by the end of the month. They don’t have enough film prints to fill all the orders.
“Things have turned for us,” Kaslow said. “When we started, exhibitors were not embracing the film like we thought they would. Now, we can pretty much go into as many theaters as we want. It’s just a matter of logistics.”
Unexpectedly!
Though he’s still cautious, this would bode well for Parts 2 and 3.
The conference was very interesting, and I hope useful in the longer run, and I want to thank the Cornhuskers for their hospitality. Stayed at a very nice hotel downtown (Cornhusker Marriott) that would have been at least three benjamins a night in DC, for only one. I didn’t blog it yesterday because I was busy finalizing my own talk on Civil Reserve Space Fleet, Space Guard, and my three rules of space policy which are:
NASA wanted to wait until they had some certainty in their budget, so with the passage of the CR last week, they made the announcement today. I’ll be interested to see more details when I get some time, particularly as to what Blue Origin will do with their twenty-two million. But I found this statement by Ed Mango politically interesting:
“The next American-flagged vehicle to carry our astronauts into space is going to be a U.S. commercial provider,” said Ed Mango, NASA’s Commercial Crew Program manager. “The partnerships NASA is forming with industry will support the development of multiple American systems capable of providing future access to low-Earth orbit.”
While I agree with that (and it’s been true for years, really ever since Mike Griffin decided to waste money on Ares), it can’t thrill defenders of either SLS or MPCV on the Hill.