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This is a good one, folks,enjoy.
Posted on 10/07/2012 5:52:09 AM PDT by expat1000
The outcome of the debate between Obama and Romney had less to do with any extraordinary qualities possessed by Mitt Romney than with the purely ordinary qualities of Barack Obama. No matter how much Team Obama tried to warn the media faithful against any enthusiasm, the expectations were high and remained high until the Chicago Messiah began to speak. And then there was nothing.
Obama did not blatantly fail. He didn't forget the number of states or stand there stammering for five minutes before throwing a chair and storming off the stage. That would have been extraordinary. Instead his performance was ordinary, a bland heavily rehearsed stew of big government talking points with nothing behind them. It lacked confidence and inspired no confidence.
Romney did not come to the debate and deliver a brilliant performance. The former Massachusetts governor is not Ronald Reagan. He was just qualified and that word is more damning than any other because it highlights Obama's incompetence. His debate performance was the work of a professional politician who prepped for it, as he preps for everything.
Mitt had spent most of his life talking to people and trying to convince them of various things, religious, economic or political. His way of doing that is through methodical preparation for a presentation that convinces people of whatever he is trying to sell them on. He's not particularly charismatic, but he is qualified. And qualification means working to exceed the standards of your chosen profession.
Obama has spent most of his life convincing people that he is qualified for things that he isn't qualified for. He has faked his biography a disturbing number of times, padded out his resume and leaped from position to position until he became the living embodiment of the Peter Principle. He doesn't work for things, but skates by on doing the least amount of work possible. When he falls behind, then he quickly tries to get up to speed and dives in while hoping that no one notices.
That is what happened at the debate where Obama gave the kind of performance you would expect from an Illinois Congressman, which is the job that he should have had about now. And had he been running for that position, few would have questioned his abilities or qualifications. But it's not an acceptable performance from a presidential candidate.
Romney is a qualified professional. Obama is a talented amateur. None of that is really new. What is new is the product comparison that the debate made possible.
We've all seen ridiculous trends take off, bad art, bad music and bad writing. The power of such trends is that they exist in isolation. They are either so different as to be presented as incomparable or comparison is carefully avoided. A legendary image is manufactured for their creators. They are iconized and elevated to a unique stature so that no one can possibly judge their worth by a real world metric.
The iconization of Obama elevated an ordinary ambitious junior machine pol with a funky bio to the status of a deity. And it was done by singling him out, by treating him as a unique incomparable quantity, a force of history, a living embodiment of poetry, a racial healer and a thousand other empty titles. All of those were meant to avoid comparing Obama with anything else, except the occasional iconic dead president.
On stage at the debate, Obama did not seem unique. He seemed like a shorter surlier version of the icon, a politician blathering endlessly about the things that politicians bleat on about, promises, jokes that seemed witty on paper at 1 AM, long defensive ramblings about his record. He didn't lose by losing, he lost by destroying his own iconography.
Suddenly Obama could be compared to another human being. Suddenly he was standing next to that human being and fumbling with his lines and looking withered. Suddenly he was not a trend, an icon, a glorious new future, but only human. Suddenly there was nothing special about him at all.
Every rock star, every shiny new writer, every bright new thing hits that moment of unspecialness sooner or later, because specialness can only be sustained in isolation. It requires faith and denial that begins to fall apart when the special thing can be compared to the work of its peers and is found wanting. And then what seemed like genius becomes only a resonance, an echo that people wanted to believe in because they were bored or hopeless and wanted something new and special to save them.
The pathological investment of the media in Obama demanded that he be larger than life, so they made him larger than life. Like idiot tinsmiths, they made their own god and forgot that they made him and that being made of tin, he will melt if the temperature is high enough.
The cult of Obama has needed to believe in him. And at the debate he let them down by not being extraordinary and by seeming only human next to Romney. The media had been complaining for a while that the magic was gone. But the "magic", as with so many of these trends, is not in the speaker, it's in the audience.
Years ago the media had already become atheists in denial, trying hard to recapture the magic of '08 and blaming themselves and then their man for not feeling it anymore. The truth is that after Bush they needed someone to believe in and they found him. Obama's extraordinary nature was as fake as the rest of his bio. He wasn't special, he was just there when they needed him. Now he isn't.
Obama was a story that the left told itself and then they told it to us. The debate doesn't end the story, but it hurts the story. Belief is reserved for extraordinary things. Faith is for amazing things, not for ordinary politicians who do the minimum amount of work and stand there droning on stage about technical differences. Only fools put their faith in that.
It's hard to tell that the emperor is naked, if you never see him next to a man with clothes on. Unique, you come to think that it's perfectly normal for him to be naked. That this is what an emperor is. And no matter how many small boys shout, "The emperor is naked", that doesn't change. Small boys shout things all the time. Who pays attention to them?
It's when the emperor struggles into his pants, one leg at a time, and poses for a photo with a prospective emperor, then the sense of wrongness sets in and the emperor with pants on seems more naked than he ever did before.
But the "magic", as with so many of these trends, is not in the speaker, it's in the audience...
Can anyone remember one line from that speech???
The liberal media also lost big on Wednesday night.
Many of the 65 million watching saw for the first time that Barack Obama is nothing more than a media creation, a myth, an illusion. It will take time, but many will begin to blame the liberal media for selling them this bill-of-goods.
Will the liberal media realize they’ve been caught red-handed? They’ve cared not a whit about credibility, but they do care about their relevance. The question becomes then, will they realize they’ve lost that too. My guess is they won’t, as this should have been shown to them by their monumental shellacking during the 2010 mid-term elections.
A good talk—I contend that he learned very little from his time as President—he is and was, unable to get the finer nuance of the Job—Its not about hoops to hurtle as it is leadership—He lacks it. We have the job of bus driver for the nation to a 13 year old hot dog—who said he was a great driver—but only had a learner’s permit.
A very good article, thanks for posting.
A key tenet to conservatism is the belief in natural law, and to understand natural law is to compare things to things around them.
It is a conservative’s way to understand and buttress the view that slavery is wrong, by comparing. If one compares a man to a piano, it is clear that a man is not a piano, and vice versa. Compare a man to a giraffe or a monkey and one comes to the same conclusion. Likewise, when one looks at a black man standing next to a white man, it is clear beyond any doubt that they are both men. So to look at any object of property and a man, it is an ineluctable conclusion that a man cannot be property.
When I read this article, it was clear this type of thought process was at play by the author. If one can place a competent person next to an incompetent person (and see their capacity for competence clearly as if they were being seen as visually as the stripes on a zebra) then it is clear that one of them did not belong in the same grouping as the other.
I am not a huge fan of Mitt Romney, but I will give him his due here, in spades. By all accounts, he was better prepared to deal with all of the subjects discussed from a simply a base level of knowledge about them (he knew more about them without even having prepared or crammed for them) and spent the time and effort to sharpen and prepare himself by elevating his knowledge level and adjusting his focus on the context and presentation of those subjects.
As someone who has lived under Mitt Romney as governor, I can say that my comment about having a better foundation on the subjects in question is well founded. I have listened to him speak extemporaneously without notes or a teleprompter, and he can present his views without contradicting himself or making a simple factual in his first sentence or paragraph. That is something most liberals do constantly. Biden does it naturally because he is a bozo, and Obama does it whenever he speaks without a teleprompter because his basic grasp of truth, reality and the situations they spawn is a mile wide and a nanometer deep.
One has only to touch that shallow river to immediately understand there is no foundation. And that is what happened at the debate. Everyone who watched (I did not) saw the finger poke into that shallow body of water called “Obama’s Competence” and hit bottom at the point of touching the surface.
Please add me to this ping list. It was excellent
Very well put...post of the day!
A compliment from FrankR is a compliment indeed! Thank you...
It was so much easier, in 2008, for the fraud that is Obama to predict how great life would be under his leadership, than it is for him, in 2012, to explain why his predictions didn’t exactly come true.
"He's an a$$h0i3"
Good article bump.
Very well written and insightful.
“Can anyone remember one line from that speech???”
No, but I remember Hussein screwing up the Oath of Office. That was clear foreshadowing of what the next four years would be like.
Thus began the Reign of Incompetent Terror.
*Whew!* This guy can write, that’s for sure!
Great stuff, thanks for sharing!
You got it, Californian. You are now on the ping list.
The world will little note, but it’s not what your country can do for you because Eleanor hates war, can you hear me now?
Thank you for your very instructive comments.
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