I'd have to agree with the libs on that one.
For all the talking he does, I've never seen anyone who says so little. You can listen to him for an hour (if you can possibly stand it) and come away with maybe a couple of fully formed concepts.
Leading up to the 2008 election, I'd force myself to actually listen to him in interviews and such. No matter how long he talked, or how eloquently he expressed himself, I always found myself wondering what the hell he was talking about.
I'll say one thing for the Punk. He's mastered the art of BS, and taken it to a whole new level. He conned half the country into believing that he's some sort of brilliant megawatt intellect, when nothing could be further from the truth.
He is definitely not a great communicator. I wonder if the Alinskyin angle is part of the reason? According to Rules for Radicals, the Organizer/Agitator is never supposed to fess up to his radical objectives. He’s supposed to come across as an unthreatening entity who’s ‘just like you’, except he has ‘hope and change’. [Alinsky hypes ‘hope and change’ on every other page.]
So Obama is constantly walking a tight wire between concealing his true radicalism and attempting to portray himself as an every day, ordinary American. It would be tough to communicate interesting, powerful, and memorable themes under those constraints.
I depart from your analysis a bit on the final point. I don’t think Obama mastered BS or conned half the country. I think that was entirely the MSM’s doing. They shielded him from even a cursory vetting, and they never once asked him a difficult question. When the Saddleback man asked about abortion, and Joe the Plumber asked about wealth redistribution [the two most difficult questions O faced in the entire campaign] Obama blew both answers, and lost ground with the electorate. If he’d had to cope with tough press, a thorough vetting and difficult questions throughout, he’d have wilted like three day old arugula.
So we can thank the miserable knee-padders in the press for what we ended up with. That, and the lousy campaign/candidate that was McCain. That’s how I see it, anyway.