A Fantasy Election, an Imaginary Man

City Journal ^ | October 5, 2012 | Andrew Klavan

[yoe]

Even before his inauguration, Barack Obama was an imaginary man, the creation of his admirers. Think back to the 2008 Time magazine cover depicting him as FDR, the Newsweek cover of the same year on which he was shown casting Lincoln’s shadow, or the $1.4 million Nobel Peace Prize awarded to him “for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples”—this in 2009, less than a year after he had taken office. It was not that Obama had done nothing to deserve these outsized comparisons and honors—it was not just that he had done nothing—it was that he seemed for all the world to be a blank screen on which such hysterical fantasies could too easily be projected, a two-dimensional paper doll just waiting to be dressed in leftist dreams.

This weird quality of emptiness incited the imaginations of his opponents as well. Among the more paranoid on the right, he’s been called several kinds of Manchurian Candidate: a radical disguised as a moderate, a Muslim disguised as a Christian, a foreigner disguised as an American, and so on. The idea was that his hollow identity was his own insidious creation, the result of sealed college records, votes of “present” in the Illinois state senate, and a supra-partisan persona carefully crafted after a scuttled lifetime of revolutionary ferocity.

To be sure, Obama has disowned the depth of his past associations with such fire-breathing America-haters as William Ayers (“A guy who lives in my neighborhood”) and Jeremiah Wright (“He was never my spiritual mentor”)...

[yoe]

Had pundits, reporters, fact finders come out of the Obama closet a little earlier, maybe the people would be listening to two sides of reason and fact.....not just one. Romney wants the United States to stay the United States....Obama sees the United States as an image of Greece............unsustainable perks.........

[thingumbob]

You can put me in "The Manchurian Candidate" column

But I'm not paranoid...... and after last Wednesday's debate the rest of the world gotta a chance to see the same.....stripped of his "media protection" jacket

Now Obozo and the media flacks have two whole weeks of Romneys momentum to endure before they get their next shot at a side by side comparison with Romney......

Good luck making up the difference if Ryan puts in a competent showing this week......and he will at minumum!

[Eric in the Ozarks]

Bammy won Iowa some weeks before his radical ties were generally known.
I've often thought the MSM has carried on a long term cover-up of their own negligence.

[FrankR]

[Calpublican]

Come on, only a genuine person could make Chris’ leg tingle.

[arthurus]

The kenyan is the creature of whoever authorizes or writes his copy, his teleprompter text. He knows what his positions are supposed to be without the TOTUS but he is real fuzzy on the details and doesn’t put things together very well. He reads well, though.