WSJ
The vultures are now beginning to circle over Obama’s campaign:
“What he couldn’t do was present himself, when everyone was looking, as smaller than you thought. Petulant, put upon, above it all, full of himself. He couldn’t afford to make himself look less impressive than the challenger in terms of command, grasp of facts, size.
But that’s what he did.
And in some utterly new way the president was revealed, exposed. All the people whose job it is to surround and explain him, to act as his buffers and protectors —they weren’t there. It was him on the stage, alone with a competitor. He didn’t have a teleprompter, and so his failure seemed to underscore the cliché that the prompter is a kind of umbilical cord for him, something that provides nourishment, the thing he needs to sound good. He is not by any means a stupid man but he has become a boring one; he drones, he is predictable, it’s never new. The teleprompter adds substance, or at least safety.
*** A great and assumed question, the one that’s still floating out there, is what exactly happened when Mr. Obama did himself in? What led to it?”
Oh, I think its obvious looking back at 2008 debates and the two subsequent debates that he was angled into taking a dive.
Why? To save the two party system. If folks abandon. The GOP that scares the ruling class because they will get involved with things like practical politics.
Read Exodus 17:10 and after.
As we do not have a TV hooked to the Jewsmedia umbilical cord, all of my ‘visuals’ were still pictures of Obama, from 2007 on. I was in a restaurant while (I believe) the second debate was going on, and looked at some YouTube videos, and was confronted with the utter SIMIAN looks of the Obamanation.
Big ears, neanderthal jaw, huge teeth, and those hooded, feral eyes, (when the light did not ‘catch’ the carefully coiffed and made-up visage) of the Nigger-in-Chief.
My GOD- how could White Americans have voted for this CHIMP, in the first place?
He’s a bloody apeman, for crying out loud. I merely objected to him on principle alone, but to SEE him?
Darwinian Man (by W.S. Gilbert) thy name is Barack.
“While Darwinian Man, though well behaved,
At best is only a monkey shaved.”
http://ordman.net/Edward/Darwinian.html
Imagine what a chink or a Russian sees when they meet with Obama
“He a monkey alright. He look like he tear my face off. What is wrong with America?”
Something like that right?
What happened? This is what happens when a 10%dr nig confronts a deeply average white. I see it in class all the time. Obama is the best they have. Romney? He’s bright and clever but he’s not unusually gifted for a white man.
“What happened? This is what happens when a 10%dr nig confronts a deeply average white. I see it in class all the time. Obama is the best they have. Romney? He’s bright and clever but he’s not unusually gifted for a white man.”
I used to see this all of the time during military schools. Beginning of classes, some loudmouth black would declare himself expert and lord of all, by the end some white guy, thoroughly average white guy, would be eating his lunch. Sometimes I was that average white guy. They always looked like an idiot, empty uniform by the end. They must have very poor short-term memories.
Northern BRA libtard candidate: Robama or Obamney.
Southern “thinking man’s” candidate: Virgil Goode.
Voting this year is like an IQ test.
If you vote Republican or Democrat, you are just plain stupid…or a yankee.
Is there a difference?
Deo Vindice
Noonan’s air-headed “me too” diatribes is one reason I cancelled my journal subscription.
Noonan’s ‘gina was all tingly for black jesus just a few years ago.
http://www.johnziegler.com/editorials_details.asp?editorial=223
White men really don’t understand how brilliant even the most average among them are. We are the most adaptable breed.
“Northern BRA libtard candidate: Robama or Obamney.
Southern “thinking man’s” candidate: Virgil Goode.
Voting this year is like an IQ test.
If you vote Republican or Democrat, you are just plain stupid…or a yankee.
Is there a difference?”
Yes. The difference is, when you vote Republican or democrat, at least the Electoral College HEARS your vote! IF you vote for Vergil, you vote for No One. Until you can either secede, or change the rules, Apu…….
You also speak as if Southernors were of a superior intellect, with inflammatory rhetoric about Yankees, even on a board where we Northernors are ON YOUR SIDE!?
Talk about dumber than a hillbilly in a double-wide, handling snakes for Jeeee-zusss in his Appalachian [sic] ‘church,’ dumber than sheeee-it, Church’s Fried Chicken , stars-and-bars yahoos!
Vote Anglo-Saxon, drive the nigger from office, and THEN work to either secede or change the parameters. I’d almost think those who are voting for a third-party candidate, never learned how elections work here in the USA while in Public School.
But, then, regional H.S. graduation rates in the South ARE lower……
http://www.vdare.com/articles/winters-are-good-for-your-genes-lynn-book-finds-world-average-iq-90-declining-from-north-to
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/2010/11/patchwork-nation-mapping-high-school-dropout-rates.html
(Look at these maps- highest concentrations of high performing schools in the nation. Living in Eastern MN, I can honestly say we have more MA’s, and above average children (Thanks, Garrison Keillor) than ANYWHERE in the USA… and then look at the opposite graph- the ‘dumb and dumber’ types…Where are they located? Duh. THE SOUTH. South Carolina is almost ‘totally red’ in this graph.. And then you wonder, why your racial secessionist views aren’t given credence, even when you have the crime stats on YOUR side?
Steele’s multi-graph analysis of the US, also points out a fact that any cursory reading of this blog will show.
http://benjamindavidsteele.wordpress.com/2011/03/07/americas-northsouth-divide-other-regional-data/
Pride is a sin. And it clearly points out that, whether black or white, some of the ‘proudest’ folk (with little to be proud of) live, not in the Midwest (and I wrestle with this issue daily- we have the Jante Law counterpart here in MN.!) but IN THE SOUTH.
http://www.wired.com/culture/education/magazine/17-09/st_sinmaps
(Here’s a clearer map of the seven deadlies…)
SO, Apu and those who continually act as though no one else has ANYTHING of merit to teach YOU, (but especially we Yankees who agree with you!?) take a lesson from the Pastor on Board.
Repent. of. your. PRIDE.
Maybe you can swallow your egos, get off your collective Dixie asses, and really, truly secede, and not just for your ‘honor’ – but for the good of all White Humanity. Then, I’d be HAPPY to worship at Stone Mountain…. or Appomattox… or wherever you want. But, till then, keep your trap SHUT, esp. when all you engage in, is four letter nigger vocabulary vulgarity.
I am willing to give HW the benefit of the doubt about Yankee Supremacists, but the South ain’t so saintly, either. Just look at the stats.
Imagine what the “ruling elite” thinks with having this guy as their leader for the next four years if he beats stiff old Romney?
The left and its institutions are failing, the next stop for them is gangster state and an American gangster state is not going to rule the world as the elite thinks they do now, needless to say a mighty big adjustment is about to hit our elite.
David Duke’s latest video …….
” The Zio Election from Hell! ” Oct 28, 2012
7 min
Afterthought: Great post. I think you are right, the establishment needs to keep the Republican (or Reargard?) Party on life support to prevent the rise of a real conservative movement.
Agreed. The niggers need to be beaten back into line of there are no more junkets to London or Geneva or Tahiti.
A few good public beatings of packs of nigs in the streets will sort it all out.
A few good public beatings of packs of nigs in the streets will sort it all out.
Getting whites back to the point where they’re ready and willing (they’ve always been able) to deliver those public beatings…priceless.
Can’t think of a better barometer for the future of the world ATM…
I mean, can anyone here really imagine how great it would be to live in a place where white men stood ready, willing, and able to deliver public beatings to niggers at a moment’s notice?
If white northerners really were ON OUR SIDE, we would not have a mulatto in the White House to begin with.
We hillbillies have been down this same road before. Over and over again for the past fifty years. White northern Republicans like Romney despise us and repeatedly say as much without any hesitation. Then they expect us to vote for them and betray us as quickly as they can. Rinse and repeat every four years.
Repent? To you? You are not God. Your “white guilt” trips are an epic fail.
I remain an unreconstructed Southerner to my dying day. What part of “unreconstructed” do you not understand?
I expect this election to leave no doubt about northern negro worship and animosity toward Southerners. You’re starting to sound like your hero Chris “Tweety” Mathews’ latest rant against “racist” Southerners.
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/chris-matthews-sees-more-racism-gets-emotional-while-describing-how-it-wont-go-away/
Deo Vindice
RCP shows Obama gaining ground in the Northeast and Midwest lately. Rather odd how lily white Minnesota continues to lean toward Obama… Surprising? Not at all.
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2012/president/2012_elections_electoral_college_map.html
I don’t think most yankee men much like your talk of beating their negro “friends,” Svigor. They would much rather see their daughters beaten to death by their negro “friends,” then wring their hands and cry helplessly like women. Remember, they fought us to the death to free these darkeys and give them “cibbil rights.”
Deo Vindice
“If white northerners really were ON OUR SIDE, we would not have a mulatto in the White House to begin with.”
Apu, didn’t you READ what I wrote.
I never said ALL, I said those who WERE on the side of HW, OD, and the South, are treated in these comments of your’n, as though we ALL were dumb YS’s.
Yes, there are loads of foolish people in every state. But let’s look at maps and make prognostications based on DATA, and not on emotion.
“Rather odd how lily white Minnesota continues to lean toward Obama… Surprising? Not at all.”
Yes, and do you know why? Because we ALL are rather more intelligent Whites in the Upper Midwest, we actually CAN still believe in equality, because most of us ARE equal. That is why smart people are moving here in droves.
However, because the Jewsmedia doesn’t tell them that living with negroes eventually means death, poverty, stupidity, and a lowered standard of living, these naive intellects (for sagacity and intelligence are two different things), and because we don’t have a ‘critical mass’ here…. yet, we have been slow on the uptake. But give them/us time. They may be liberal, but they’re not stupid. Just naive.
.
Peggy’s Mission Impossible
Journalists or public commentators speaking or writing on politics can show partisanship in their commentaries and still be credible. Selling the facts about your candidate better than others can undermine the opposition in a way that fair-minded persons can appreciate and respect. But there is no worse public death than being drowned in a partisan tank. So, watching Peggy Noonan flail around these days on the pages of the Wall Street Journal has got me shaking my head sadly at another loss of decency in this silly season.
In three separate pieces in her column in the Wall Street Journal between 19 October, 2012 and 2 November, 2012, Noonan propounded a theory that is breathtakingly pigheaded in its assumptions as it is precipitately celebratory. It is the Theory of One! This theory declared President Obama, the undisputed winner of two of three presidential debates as the loser and proceeded to proclaim (not predict) an electoral defeat for him on the basis that in one 90-minute night in Denver during the first of these debates, Americans suddenly woke up to the realization that the man they’ve had in the Oval Office for the past four years is a fraud. Now, they’re welcoming Mitt Romney, the Knight in Shiny Armor who rode out of Denver to rapturous national reception and with a momentum that took him to victory! If on reading this you’re becoming confused as to whether the election has actually taken place and Romney has won, don’t be. Peggy Noonan can traverse two alternate worlds of reality and wishful thinking and merge it all into some revelatory analysis.
Oh, and if her prancing theory fails, we need not fear for her either, because as a veteran survivor of political tsunamis, she’s already hedged her bet in some creeks and crannies of these articles with such superfluous caveats as: “If Barack Obama barely scrapes through” and “Mr. Obama may yet emerge victorious.” These caveats were not products of any rigorous analysis. These were her grudging attempts to still appear to live in the real world where the elections are yet to be held and where the same President Obama, her dead man walking could actually win, like most Americans expect, at least according to a recent Gallop poll which says 54% of Americans expect him to win compared to 34% for Romney. So, Peggy’s safe, only that this time, she needs to be told that she’s morphing into something she never was in her most desperate moments in the past. She’s becoming a Dick Morris complete with all his bitter bits.
The column of 27 October, 2012 titled “When Americans Saw the Real Obama – Why the Denver debate changed everything” more or less encapsulates her argument, having set the justification for her theory in her column of 19 October 2012 with an unsupportable declaration that Romney won the “postdebate”. In essence, on October 27, she was reviewing the supposed Mitt momentum and explaining why Obama is on his way to a loss. Armed with the testimony of a faceless and nameless senator she claimed served with Obama and some harebrained conclusions from Bob Woodward’s book, “The Price of Politics”, Noonan presents an Obama that is arrogant, robotic, anti-social, distant, mean-spirited and essentially lacking in commonsense. Obama is the idiot who has too high an opinion of himself, his abilities and capabilities and who has made himself the obstacle to progress in Washington. She determined that there is so much pent-up resentment towards him in America that all he needed to do in that first debate was to tread gingerly around Americans so as not to trigger an explosion of that feeling. But, of course, the bumbling, professorial airhead couldn’t manage that. Forcibly weaned off his teleprompter, his advisers and handlers, he stood on the stage there, all lonely, a surly punching bag for Romney.
Of course, there is no doubt that Obama was off his game in Denver, but the reasons for this are no mysteries. It was a failure of strategy, not of content. He came there thinking after serving four years as president, he was going to appear serious and refrain from going negative and only concentrate on letting Americans know what he has been doing and where he wants to take the country in the next four years. He did not think the times called for flowery oratory, so he attempted to project that sobriety in his demeanor. For this reason also, he deliberately refused to play the rhetorical game even as Mitt Romney pranced around the stage, mischaracterizing his achievements, denying positions he has been known to hold on issues for years and effortlessly lying through his teeth. The president later said the problem was that he was too polite and that’s true. The president of the United States should not allow anyone, including a political opponent, use the same stage with him to lie to the American people without challenging such a fellow. Obama misread the mood of Americans on that night. Like the Roman mob watching gladiators in an arena, Americans always want to see ‘blood’ on the floor in a debate, but Obama denied them their ‘gruesome’ fix and in the process made the underdog look incredibly good. What they needed was for someone to light up their night and Obama just wasn’t shinning, having put the dampeners on himself in a tactical miscalculation. People understood the president’s low-key performance in Charlotte was a respectful way of not attempting to outdo President Bill Clinton, the First Lady, the Vice President and all those who gave rousing testimonials on his behalf; but the debate is a different kettle of fish entirely. You have to take out your opponent! It’s the only way!
Thus, the air of mystery being allocated to his performance from that day by commentators like Noonan is actually an attempt to cover up the real emptiness of their favored candidate, Mitt Romney. The man has been campaigning for President for the past six years, but no one in America, apart from possibly his campaign staff understands exactly what he is talking about or what he intends to do if he gets elected. In fact, in a rare moment of candor, his long-term adviser and campaign chief, Eric Fehrnstrom confessed openly that his man’s vision is Etch-A-Sketch, sort of making it up as they go along. There is no pretence to vision, which is why he chose Paul Ryan as his running mate, because of the latter’s pretensions to intellectuality and some wonky knowledge which all makes him sit atop the brainy throne as “the intellectual leader of the Republican Party”. However, despite the boasts that they are into discussing big things and having big debates, their whole agenda is nothing but delivering America back into the pockets of some rich, angry old men to shape according to their will – all in the name of free enterprise and American exceptionalism. If there’s one word that describes most of the policies Romney’s proposing, it is deceit. Every proposed Romney policy holds back something, hides something, refuses to elaborate on important aspects of it or is simply a lie soaked in obfuscating snake oil.
The only reason the race is close is because of the fanatical determination of the extreme right and their culture warriors to defeat Barack Obama. In all their ideological and neo-racist incarnations, they’ve been howling like crazies to return the White to the White House since the first day Obama took office. Mitt Romney was not one of them in the beginning, but having financially bullied his way through the Republican primaries’ field, he and the moneybags directing the Get-Obama-At-All-Cost campaign showed they have the same mission with the Tea Party and the extreme right of the Republican Party. The party crazies quickly adopted him, re-baptized him in their ideological cesspool and let him loose on America! He came to Denver disavowing nearly everything Americans have associated with him and his campaign and won the debate by making it The Great Denial. Poor Barack Obama was shell-shocked by his open lies and disavowal of what all America knew. Obama misjudged the situation by thinking Americans have had enough of cut and thrust politics and opted to be dignified. He chose to plainly talk about his own vision when Americans were yelling at their television that he should take that shape-shifting changeling down! He didn’t, he lost and thoroughly disappointed his base.
And that was all it was – a temporary base disappointment. All the stories about the surge towards Romney are farcical. Yeah, the needle was moved a bit by a debate most people thought he won largely because of the disappointment with the President’s approach – not attitude or the content of policies. Indeed, there was nothing Romney said on the day that was profound in terms of policies, because it was the same generalized campaign talking points he repeated on one hand, while on the other hand, he denied those policies he knew he couldn’t defend, but which had been associated with him throughout the campaign. And when we talk of lies, we are not only talking the barefaced policy ones the fact-checkers later called him out on, we are talking the manipulation of the audience with anecdotal lies woven experientially in a personal way that is difficult to challenge, but which at that very point in time do a lot for his optics.
Take, for instance, his approach and answer to the first question at the Denver debate. The question was what the differences are between both candidates in relation to creating new jobs. Obama was the first to go. He is the incumbent and it was appropriate to preface his answer with what he has done about job creation while in office. He gave a brief background of the tanking economy when he came in, talked about 5 million jobs in the private sector for 30 months, the saving of the auto industry and the fact that the housing market is now looking up. To build on these, he wants to invest in education and training and develop new sources of energy, change the tax code to help small businesses investing in America and use money saved from winding down two wars to build infrastructure and then reduce the deficit in a balanced way to allow for critical investments. He concluded his submission by declaring his view as “a new economic patriotism that says America does best when the middle class does best”. He described Romney’s plan as comprising of “top-down economic policies”.
But how did Romney approach this? Obviously very much concerned that he is seen as out of touch with the ordinary American, he began his answer by going anecdotal and experiential. He called it “a very tender topic” and talked about how “over the last couple of years” he’s been meeting people across the country. “I was in Dayton, Ohio, and a woman grabbed my arm, and she said, I’ve been out of work since May. Can you help me?” Hmm…Here was Mitt who has no understanding of ordinary people being grabbed by the arm by a woman who’s been out of work for four months wanting help. Of course, we remember that Mitt has proclaimed that while Obama is promising to begin to slow the rise of oceans and heal the planet, all he wants to do is help Americans and their families. So, here is the messiah being put to task. Absolutely Christ-like! And then the foremost disciple comes into the picture. “Ann yesterday was at a rally in Denver, and a woman came up to her with a baby in her arms and said, Ann, my husband has had four jobs in three years, part-time jobs. He’s lost his most recent job, and we’ve now just lost our home. Can you help us?” Again, he made sure to put in that language of “help”. Of course, these are cheap tricks but they work with an electorate that is uninformed or semi-informed and the uninformed and semi-informed make up majority of the voting populace and majority of the 70 million glued to their television set on that day. The pictures he paints there are most probably not true, not only because the stories conveniently posit the economic problem as he had framed it for months (families with children, with father and mother out of work and losing their homes), but also because we now know he’s given to not speaking the truth about his role in some of these stories, for instance, as we saw with his story on “binders full of women”. He most probably only concocted these stories to paint the image of a desperate, vulnerable America that needs an economic superhero, someone not fully understood by the majority he wants to save, but whose messianic qualities are conveniently recognized in Ohio and Colorado, two battleground states.
“And the answer is yes, we can help, but it’s going to take a different path, not the one we’ve been on, not the one the president describes as a top-down, cut taxes for the rich. That’s not what I’m going to do”. Again, we note the patronizing language of help. He can help, but Americans must first believe in him as their helper. And then he lies about how he wants to go about it! He denies his signature tax-cut plan! He wants to make the election a referendum on the economy, but it’s an economic image he and the GOP have concocted, not the one Obama inherited four years ago with its iron-cast realities. “My plan has five basic parts. One, get us energy independent, North American energy independent. That creates about four million jobs. Number two, open up more trade, particularly in Latin America; crack down on China if and when they cheat. Number three, make sure our people have the skills they need to succeed and the best schools in the world. We’re far away from that now. Number four, get us to a balanced budget. Number five, champion small business”. No specifics, just a wish list. He then declared the position today as unsuccessful. “The president has a view very similar to the view he had when he ran four years ago, that a bigger government, spending more, taxing more, regulating more — if you will, trickle-down government would work. That’s not the right answer for America. I’ll restore the vitality that gets America working again”.
Jim Lehrer then gave Obama the opportunity to respond directly to Romney’s charge that the President was running a “trickle-down government”. This was where Obama’s strategy failed him, not his facts. A consideration of the President’s response to this very question would indicate clearly that all the facts were there, except the right tone and emotion and a failure to wrap the response in an overarching philosophy that explains the benefit of government to the people, specifically to ideologically counter the derogatory notion of “trickle-down government” (which was a new Romney zinger unleashed that night). The president denuding himself of adequately expressive emotions made him look disinterested and disconnected with Americans in the audience and those at home, but what he was really trying to avoid was to appear ideological. He didn’t want to fall into the trap of those who call him a socialist. However, he did himself a huge disservice by merely repeating what he had said earlier about improving the educational system and generally proclaiming that he and Governor Romney agree on tax code being too high or the need to boost American energy production. Why should he be the one to be pointing out what they agree on in a functionless statesman-like manner when all this did was give the false impression that he was not ready to debate? Indeed, by the time he was actually dealing with the differences in vision by talking of reducing manufacturing tax rate to 25%, closing loopholes that are giving incentives for companies that are shipping jobs overseas, providing tax breaks for companies that are investing at home and Romney’s unaffordable tax cuts, most people had lost interest in his answers, because they were not couched as fighting talk!
The question was that he should respond to the charge of running a “trickle-down government” by an opponent that had all the while based his campaign on meaningless mantras of smaller government and individualism which they have fashioned into a stalking horse against the interest of the middle class and ordinary Americans. It was not negative to sound ideological if it addresses the fundamental differences in visions. President Obama should have used the opportunity to educate Romney on his overarching philosophy that explains the benefit of government to the people and its role as a facilitator in the economy, it’s role as an arbitrator and defender of fairness in a free market system, its obligation to create opportunities for the best expression of the people’s economic and entrepreneurial ingenuity through tapping of the national and natural resources, its duty to firmly use the law and governmental institutions to correct distortions in the system created by institutions and persons trying to cut corners or not playing by the rules and its role in creating a conducive environment for profitable investment. This is not trickle-down government; this is not socialism; this is a fair government that understands its responsibilities to the American people with regard to the American economy. It’s an irony that the president has found his voice in this overarching role of government in these last days of the campaign due largely to Hurricane Sandy. It is this same role that the government is playing in providing relief and essential services that it plays with the economy. While a debate can be had as per extent, there should be no doubting its necessity.
Romney’s lies and snake-oil salesmanship managed to fool the press into representing this first debate as him moving to the centre away from his party’s extremist platform, rather than calling it for what it is, which is an unprincipled display of political desperation calculated to deceive Americans. But when the press is drugged on this deceit and runs with the myth of a Romney moving to the centre, there was really little Obama could do but plan for his next debates. The press did not stop there, a section of it also managed to create a narrative that all that happened in Denver was that a Romney the president and his team had spent all summer defining in a way he is not came out finally to show Americans who he really is. Really? Yes, a lot of Americans bought it without question! No one asked how and where Obama had that freedom to define Romney without Romney having a chance to counter or defend himself. No one asked how it was possible to so hoodwink Americans about this man who’s been running for President before Obama thought of it! No one remembered that the flip-flopping, out-of-touch Mitt was a creation of the extreme right of the Republican Party who saw him as a Massachusetts liberal masquerading as a conservative. This was how all his opponents defined him throughout the Republican primaries while the President waited for who was going to win it and fly the GOP flag against him. From Rick Santorum through Rick Perry to Ron Paul and Newt Gingrich, that image was sold!
Also, several of Romney’s statements and actions throughout the primaries confirm that the picture created by his own party men and women in the minds of Americans is true. When Americans watched him stammer his way through his multi-choice abortion positions, attempt a bet of $10, 000 with Rick Perry on a debate stage, declare corporations as people, boast of his wife having a couple of Cadillacs and how he likes to fire people, they didn’t need political adverts from the President and his team to define him. He had very much defined himself before the end of the Republican primaries. The Obama team didn’t have to invent him; he was ready. All they have done is to keep reminding Americans of what they know about this man. The image isn’t a caricature, it’s real and Denver did not exactly change that, except that the bigger story from there was Obama’s no-show.
Despite Vice President Joe Biden winning his own debate with Paul Ryan and Obama cleaning Romney’s clock in the town hall debate and schooling him in the Foreign Policy debate to the extent that Romney simply abandoned all pretensions to a policy of his own as he shamelessly endorsed the president’s policies right there on stage, Peggy Noonan and her fellow travelers want us to believe that the first debate is all that counts and all that accounts for Romney’s supposed surge and his impending win! Knowing very well that all that is a ruse, Noonan’s specific job with her piece was to strike where it matters. It was to find a way around the Obama firewall in Ohio. They know that without Ohio, all their efforts would come to naught, considering the very narrow path Romney has to reach 270 electoral votes. The Romney campaign strategy was therefore to ‘commission’ all the intellectual giants on the right, especially those who’d criticized the campaign earlier or who have had some nice things to say about Obama, like Noonan and David Brooks, to begin recanting.
It’s no surprise therefore that David Brooks has suddenly become so cynical as to pen a piece unashamedly titled “The upside of opportunism” in his New York Times column of 30 October, 2012. In that piece, Brooks turned logic on its head by advocating that people should vote Romney, because his lies and shape-shifting nature make him the perfect candidate likely to get bipartisan reform and the big stuff done, as opposed to Obama whose honesty and ideological commitment to his position would only get Americans “small-bore stasis”. Of course, Mr. Brooks did not tell us why he thinks Romney would get bipartisan reform with a Democratic Senate more likely to pay him back in the same coin they paid Barack Obama. In fact, his logic soundly fails to appreciate that with Obama, it would be easier this time to get things done since he would not be standing for another election while members of Congress would be very much aware of the historical low this Congress had sunk in the opinion of Americans and why. Of course, if Obama is reelected, it would be in the interest of Congress to work with him, because members seeking reelection would not go back to their constituents with the excuse that the president with a fresh mandate is a problem. Mr. Brooks has since written another piece published on 2 November 2012 and titled “The Final Reckoning”. Unsurprisingly, this again has Obama as the subject. This time, Mr. Brooks paints the image of a president that started off with big visions, but who got sucked in by short-term things, a president who did not learn the right lessons from the midterm defeat by moving to the mythical centre. In all that of course, there is the decided attempt to thoroughly underplay the hyper-political and intensely ideological role played by the opposition whose whole focus from day one and voiced by Senator Mitch McConnell eight months into Obama’s presidency was to do anything to stop the president’s reelection.
That battle to stop Barack Obama, declared by the extreme right of the Republican Party has now reached a denouement and Peggy Noonan is that intellectual foot soldier still talking up her chances when all her flanks are exposed. But someone should tell her that what we see here is desperation to ingratiate herself to Anne Romney and Mitt Romney after her attack against his campaign earlier. The fact that she is prepared to toss her credibility to the wind and go fact-free against Obama on the strength of one of three debates says it all. Noonan knows that no genuine independent or undecided voter jumped on the Mitt bandwagon after the first debate, except those already inclined to go with him. As we are clearly seeing from the polls now, the Mitt ‘surge’ is more noise than substance as a proper reading of all the polls still clearly shows the President leading in the states that would determine the election. If there was a surge, everyone is agreed now that it’s dead in its tracks and the advantage in terms of the Electoral College votes is still with the president.
So, in conclusion, there’s no doubt that Romney’s Oscar-winning lying performance and the fact that the president chose not to confront him about this gave the first debate to him in the eyes of watching Americans. But Americans are no fools and the reason the president is going into the election polling ahead of Romney is because they are no fools. Hate and anger alone do not win you elections in America. Mitt Romney has entertained us in Denver, but most know he’s no hero. They know he has no core. Mitt’s desperation is written all over him. He wants to be president because to him and his family it’s an entitlement. He has lined up the most intimidating array of moneymen to take out Barack Obama whose only defence are the people Romney has scared shitless with his picture of a future under Obama. But Romney can summon a zillion Noonans to charm us with empty words, yet I somehow believe that when Americans speak on 6 November, it would be: “Dear Peggy, We don’t date losers. Signed, Americans”.
Kennedy Emetulu
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