The Emperor has no clothes, and for the first time, Obama knows it.
If you can, recall the press conference Obama gave during the budget negotiations in 2010. He didn’t know the press and many of the people already knew he had been shut-out from conference meetings by John Boehner, allowing only Democrat senate conferees to attend.
He marched out, spoke of his great disappointment in the management of the negotiation, and was just one offered hankie away from crying. He had never been so disrespected in his life, and had a real difficult time not giving it away.
(Next day, everyone knew anyway.)
Also next day, Rush Limbaugh made a persuasive comparison of Obama to Tiger Woods as he was trying to make a comeback after that year of fallen grace when it was revealed he was a serial womanizer, and not quite the pure-as-driven-snow super star America had come to love.
Rush simply mentioned how hard it must be for the most gifted golfer in the world to show up on the tee, with the whole world watching, knowing he was no longer the world’s greatest athlete but just your standard horn-dog kid, no better than a lounge lizard. Rush opined it must be awfully hard to bring your A-Game when the whole world sees you naked, all the protective glass around you shattered.
So, how much harder will it be for the world’s greatest phoney, now that he, too, was been publicly exposed as having no clothes just two weeks ago.
Yeah, he didn’t study. He cut class. He forgot his lines. He didn’t leap at openings offered up by Romney. Yeah, his heart wasn’t in it.
So all weekend, and today, everyone is saying he had better be prepared. He needs to bring his A-game this time
Only Barack Obama doesn’t have one. And he knows it. The Democrats don’t even have a D-Game. Even MSNBC couldn’t create a debate format in which only lies and distortions will be heard without rebuttal. (And history calls those debates “show trials”.)
Obama has to study and cram for answers to questions Romney knows by heart. Most of those answers Romney has known in one form or another for thirty years. He wears his answers as comfortably as Obama does his cufflinks. Obama has no such command of the facts. In fact, he has few facts….that can’t be disproved.
What to do, What to do, Barack?
As every lawyer is taught, if you can’t beat them with brilliance, baffle them with booshway.
Only here is an element of Obama’s game no one is speaking about. The gut-check. Confidence. Obama greatness is in the “speech,” a la William Jennings Bryan, and the teleprompter, and not in the oafish Q &A of discussing “facts” as Paul Ryan so tediously tried to teach him two years ago.
A British ambassador sent to represent the Crown among the Saudis after oil had been discovered in the Arabian peninsula wrote in 1921 that “the Arabs think it is noble to sit around and drink tea and discuss matters of great import. But the Arabs also think it is ignoble to actually have to work to gain a command of the facts involved in those discussions” (quoted from memory).
In the words of Jeremiah Wright, Barack’s chickens have come home to roost.
After that Boehner rebuff from the budget negotiations, if you didn’t notice, Obama only did stump speeches, and very few press conferences. And most of his speeches, even recently, have been before young (and gullible), bright-eyed and bushy tailed students. They represent his comfort zone. Adult audiences, filled with quizzical and questioning eyes, are not his favorite forum.
However Obama may have viewed the 70+ million who watched his performance in Denver two weeks ago, condescending or indifferent, whatever aura and persona he was selling, they weren’t buying. He said he thought he’d won. They didn’t agree. Not by a mile, did they think he was even close.
So, tonight, for the first time in his career, Barack Obama must walk out onto a stage and try to connect with an audience of around 80 independents, knowing 70 million people out there can already see him naked. Like NASCAR, most will tune in to see a crash.
Obama has never had to confront this sort of inner turmoil, self-doubt and fear before. Ever since Mom and Grandmother began showering him with daily praise, he’s never heard a discouraging word about his abilities. And suddenly this.
This is all terra incognita for Barack Obama.
Oh, he may be able to make the 80 in-house viewers swoon, but only if he can keep his composure. But there are those troublesome facts. Remember, Mitt Romney won’t be a potted plant. Barack really isn’t good on his feet. Joe Biden is. He has thirty five years of street fights with knives. But the best Obama can do is reach back to a couple of years talking down to welfare recipients and young kids (both very beneath him) back in his community organizing days in Chicago.
Tonight no one will be beneath him. Only 70 million doubting eyes, looking for him to crash.
And I’m not sure he can handle that.
