Silly Little Country

A Bad Week for The One

And Mark Steyn revels in it entertainingly.    The whole thing is worth the read.

So what went wrong? According to Barack Obama, the problem is that he overestimated you dumb rubes' ability to appreciate what he's been doing for you. "That I do think is a mistake of mine," the president told ABC's George Stephanopoulos. "I think the assumption was if I just focus on policy, if I just focus on this provision or that law or if we're making a good rational decision here, then people will get it."
But you schlubs aren't that smart.

I view Steyn as loose with the facts at times but here he reports and interprets Obama's comment exactly.

"The same thing that swept Scott Brown into office swept me into office," said Obama. "People are angry, and they're frustrated, not just because of what's happened in the last year or two years but what's happened over the last eight years."
Got it. People are so angry and frustrated at George W. Bush that they're voting for Republicans.

This self-deception is not just sad, it is dangerous, and suggests he cannot learn much very easily.  Oh I miss Bill Clinton who got hammered politically in his first time and learned from it.

Presumably, the president isn't stupid enough actually to believe what he said. But it's dispiriting to discover he's stupid enough to think we're stupid enough to believe it.

This is very well put and something that has puzzled me; why does he want to keep insulting the intelligence of the whole country?

The defining moment of his doomed attempt to prop up Martha Coakley was his peculiar obsession with Scott Brown's five-year-old pickup:
"Forget the ads. Everybody can run slick ads," the president told an audience of out-of-state students at a private school. "Forget the truck. Everybody can buy a truck."
How they laughed! But what was striking was the thinking behind Obama's line: that anyone can buy a truck for a slick ad, that Brown's pickup was a prop – like the herd of cows Al Gore rented for a pastoral backdrop when he launched his first presidential campaign. Or the "Iron Chef" TV episode featuring delicious healthy recipes made with produce direct from Michelle Obama's "kitchen garden": The cameras filmed the various chefs meeting the first lady and then picking choice organic delicacies from the White House crop, and then, for the actual cooking, the show sent out for stunt-double vegetables from a grocery back in New York. Viewed from Obama's perspective, why wouldn't you assume the truck's just part of the set? "In his world," wrote The Weekly Standard's Stephen Hayes, "everything is political, and everything is about appearances."

This WAS a clear mistake by his speechwriters and it was profoundly stupid.  Who on his core staff had the dumb idea to focus on the truck?  I imagine it was, though, almost a reflex for his 'green' team.  And he likely projects from the fraudulence of his own image. as Hayes/Steyn suggest.
The finish:

America is becoming a bilingual society, divided between those who think a pickup is a rugged vehicle useful for transporting heavy-duty items from A to B, and those who think a pickup is coded racism.
Unfortunately, the latter group forms most of the Democratic-media one-party state currently running the country. Can you imagine Bill Clinton being so stupid as to put down pickup trucks while standing next to John Kerry? And what's even more extraordinary is that those lines were written for Obama by paid professionals.
But fine, have it your way. Tuesday's vote was really a plea by a desperate people for even more Obama. We're going to need even more Obama teleprompters, even more Obama speeches, even more sonorous banalities unrelated to action, even more "Let me be clears..." prefacing even more tinny generalities, on even more reams of even more double-spaced paper. And we're gonna need a really heavy duty rig to carry all that verbiage.
Maybe Scott Brown can sell 'em his truck.

By the way, no, I cannot imagine Bill Clinton being that stupid.  Nor Dubya.  And the thought of even more Obama on TV causes me utter dismay.  I tried to watch his townhall in Ohio yesterday but he was so bad, so self-absorbed, so completely not what Bill Clinton (or Dubya) would have been; Clinton could have engaged the questions, and would not have made such ludicrous claims about where his administration was going.

We don't have Bill Clinton; we have this joke instead.

posted by Alan Adamson @ 12:46 PM