…and the imaginary man, exposed:
The Obama of the imagination is the media’s Obama. Out of their fascination with the color of his skin and their mindless awe at his windy teleprompted rhetoric, they constructed a man of stature and accomplishment. Now, with the White House on the line, they’re waging an ongoing battle against the undeniable evidence that he has never been, in fact, that man. The result in these quadrennial autumn days has been media coverage of a fantasy election, an election in the news that may bear no relation whatsoever to the election as it is. Polls consistently skewed to favor Democrats in percentages beyond any reasonable construct of reality have left us virtually ignorant of the state of the race. Orchestrated frenzies over alleged gaffes by Mitt Romney have camouflaged an imploding Obama foreign policy, an Obama economy threatened by a new recession, and an Obama campaign filled with vicious personal attacks and lies.
Governor Romney’s unprecedented dismantling of the president in their first debate — an encounter so one-sided it reminded me of the famous cartoon in which Godzilla meets Bambi, with predictable results — was surprising only for Romney’s warmth and clarity. Obama’s hapless fumbling, bad temper, and inarticulate inability to defend his record were actually thoroughly predictable. They were simply facets of the man as he truly is, unfiltered by the imagination of his media supporters: a man who has succeeded, really, at almost nothing but the winning of elections; a man who cannot distinguish between his ideology and life; a man who does not seem to know how the machinery of the world actually works.
There’s no reason to suspect that he’ll do any better in the next debate, and particularly the last one.
a man who has succeeded, really, at almost nothing but the winning of elections
Careful. This is not true. Along with his cohorts he’s been able to move forward an agenda for over twenty years that will take generations to undo. But it is a great line.
Of course, there was the OTHER imaginary man during the debate: Obama’s strawman opponent, the one he thought he was debating. With Obama, it’s nothing but straw all the way down.
Let me speak plainly: I was always going to vote against Obama. And by that I mean I’d crawl-ten-miles-over-broken-glass-to-vote-for-a-syphilitic camel. But Wednesday I felt that Romney, the real one, was somebody I could actually vote FOR.
It would be hard for Obama to do any worse in the second and third debates. If he shows even the slightest improvement, you can count on the Press talking it up as the second coming of the messiah. After all, who are we to believe, the Press or our lying eyes.
Unless Romney does equally well in all three debates, we should expect the media to be ready with their new headlines “The Comeback Kid!”, “Obama Comes Back Swinging”, and the like.