Maybe, but I don’t know who Jeffrey Hart and Peter Wehner are, and I’m pretty sure Bennet and Lowry won’t be voting for Obama.
Hell, I have praised Obama my self. But my praise for him has been exclusively in the arena of his oratory skills and ability to rhetorically stun audiences into forgetting that he isn’t actually saying anything.
Remember when there was a term called ‘political doublespeak’ or ‘talking loud and saying nothing’? Obama needs his own saying like ‘inspiring the masses to do nothing in particular’ or ‘saying so eloquently so much and conveying so little’.
Actually, Obama reminds me of Oprah. Think about this. Oprah is amazingly famous and has a Svengali-like following of women(mostly) who hang on her every word. Yet nobody you ask could actually tell you what it is that Oprah really believes in. What religion does she practice? What does she think happens to you when you die? Does Oprah believe that tax increases create or suppress economic activity? Hell, what brand of hair spray does Oprah like the most?
Oprah talks about virtually everything but she rarely if ever takes an actual position on anything which has two sides. If she talks to a guy who believes that upbringing causes your sexual orientation, she is fascinated and acts as though she agrees. Next week, she has someone on her show who proclaims that it is a scientific fact that sexual orientation is genetic and Oprah says ‘I’ve heard that from many people’. But after both shows, you really don’t know which one Oprah herself thinks is true.
When we are talking about fashion or what your dreams mean or feng shui, its easy to not have a firm opinion since there is no right/wrong answer. But what about partial birth abortion? The Estate Tax? Jessicas Law? Nobody knows. Her viewers, readers and sychophants certainly don’t. They have a general feel of what she thinks but not about virtually any real issue which is politically contested.
Obama votes like a McGovern/Feingold/Bernie Sanders socialist but he talks like a guy who is charging $25,000 an evening at corporate retreats as a motivational speaker. Obama has yet to do anything that any garden variety motivational speaker doesn’t do every day on the job. They inspire, they excite and they provide a host of catchy phrases like “If you believe you can or you believe you can’t, you are right” which sound deep and profound but are intellectual cotton candy.
It would be a fascinating experience to have a US President in office who has absolutely no affiliations to anybody in business, politics or any other organizations and no policy plans. There are somewhere around 100,000 Federal employees who would be taking direction from a guy who doesn’t know who or where they are and what they do.
Apparently Hart, a Dartmouth professor who wrote speeches for Nixon and Reagan, is.
That's surprising, though he's been quite erratic lately.
More here.
I gather he was upset about Iraq, and about Schiavo and the evangelicals.