RUTHFULLY YOURS

JAMES TARANTO: HONEY I SHRUNK THE PRESIDENT *****

Posted By Ruth King on October 5th, 2012

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390443768804578036490415028514.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_MIDDLETopOpinion

Maybe there’s something to be said for clean living after all. Although Mitt Romney is closer in age to the venerable Jim Lehrer than to the callow Barack Obama, it was the Republican nominee who came across in last night’s debate as energetic and vigorous. And if Obama looked put upon when the cameras were on, imagine what he must’ve come home to. You spent our anniversary doing WHAT?!

About the private reaction of Obama’s wife, of course, we can only speculate. But many of his lovers went public with their devastation: “I don’t know what he was doing out there,” wailed Chris Matthews. “He had his head down, he was enduring the debate rather than fighting it.” One expected Matthews to burst into song: “The thrill is gone baby / The thrill is gone away / You know you done me wrong baby / And you’ll be sorry Election Day.”

Associated Press

Even better was Andrew Sullivan: “Look: you know how much I love the guy. . . . But this was a disaster for the president for the key people he needs to reach, and his effete, wonkish lectures may have jolted a lot of independents into giving Romney a second look. Obama looked tired, even bored; he kept looking down; he had no crisp statements of passion or argument; he wasn’t there.” Cue Shania Twain: “So you got the brain but have you got the touch / Don’t get me wrong, yeah I think you’re all right / But that won’t keep me warm in the middle of the night.”

We could spend hours quoting disparaging reviews of Obama’s performances from journalists who were never as head-over-heels as Matthews and Sullivan, but we like to pretend as if we have space constraints, so we’ll just take one representative example, also from the Daily Beast, where our friend Tunku Varadarajan writes: “My God, in the four years that we’ve seen him in the White House, I don’t think we’ve ever seen the president so flaccid, so dull-brained, so jejune, so shifty, so downcast.”

This columnist has to disagree. Obama’s lame performance last night seemed typical to us. We can think of a few occasions in which we’ve seen the president less flaccid, less dull-brained, less jejune, less shifty, less downcast. But only a few.

But these qualities–or, to put it another way, this lack of quality–was harder than usual to miss last night because of the contrast with the highly effectual Romney. One reason it came as such a shock to Obama is that it was the first time in his career that he shared a debate stage with a serious opponent.

Think about it: John McCain was feeble. Alan Keyes, whom Obama beat in his 2004 Senate campaign, was crazy. All the Democrats who ran in 2008 were preposterous except Hillary Clinton, and she, as a beneficiary of nepotism, was highly overrated as a politician. He used Chicago-style dirty tricks to dispatch his original opponent in 2004, as well as the state senator he replaced back in the 1990s. The test he failed last night is one to which he had never been put.

But the journalists who are pointing the finger at Obama have three fingers pointed back at themselves. Instead of challenging the president, the press corps–with a few honorable exceptions, like ABC’s Jake Tapper and the guys from Univision–have spent the past four-plus years puffing him up and making excuses for him. The American Spectator’s Jeffrey Lord explains:

The great James Taranto . . . long ago posited what is called the “Taranto Principle.” In short, it means that the liberal media so coddles liberal politicians that they have no idea how to cope outside that liberal media bubble. . . .

Barack Obama has been so totally coddled by the liberal media that he looked absolutely shell-shocked in this debate. Stunned, unhappy, angry, sour–and at some points genuinely incoherent.

Romney has had nowhere near that kind of treatment. He had serious opponents in the primaries–all of whom in their own way forced him to confront his ideas in a serious fashion. Conservatives were on his heels. The Obama media never let up. The man went through the political equivalent of boot camp.

Tonight, the Taranto Principle kicked in. Big time.

Outside the liberal bubble–forced to be alone on a stage with a very serious, very prepared candidate–Barack Obama was in trouble. Big Trouble.

One quibble, on a point of personal privilege: “Great” is not the right adjective. Isn’t “inimitable” in the Spectator stylebook?

Otherwise, though, Lord is right. What we saw last night was the real Obama–a bright but incurious and inexperienced man who four years ago was promoted well beyond his level of competency. The Obama that guys like Matthews and Sullivan expected instead was a character in a fairy tale–a fairy tale written by guys like Matthews and Sullivan.

Oh well, at least there are more debates. The last one, on Oct. 22, is on foreign policy, which is Obama’s strong suit. Then the handsome prince killed Osama bin Laden, and the ambassador lived happily ever after.

Obama’s Accountabilibuddy
National Journal’s Ron Fournier deserves some sort of ironic award for this postdebate commentary:

Call it the curse of incumbency. Like many of his predecessors, President Obama fell victim Wednesday night to high expectations, a short fuse, and a hungry challenger. . . .

To be fair, the deck was stacked against Obama, who came into the debate with a lead over Romney plus the baggage of incumbency.

First, voters expect sitting presidents to win debates and, indeed, polls showed that Obama was favored Wednesday. That benefits a challenger like Romney who grows in stature simply by standing next to the president.

Second, challengers have more time to prepare than do busy presidents. Romney was ready. Finally, incumbents aren’t used to being challenged. Obama’s thin skin showed more than his Hollywood smile.

Fournier’s premise is arguable, if banal; he cites other examples of presidents who’ve performed weakly in debates (Jimmy Carter in 1980, George H.W. Bush in 1992, George W. Bush in 2004).

But as we noted in 2007 and again in 2008, it was Fournier then with the Associated Press, who invented something called “accountability journalism.” In an internal AP newsletter, he wrote:

We can be provocative without being partisan. We can be truth-tellers without being editorial writers. We can and we must not only tell people what happened in politics today, but why it happened; what it might mean for our readers and their families; and what it might reveal about the people who presume to be our leaders. Sometimes, they’re just plain wrong.

Among his examples was this lead paragraph from a Sept. 2, 2005, piece about Hurricane Katrina:

WASHINGTON (AP)–The Iraqi insurgency is in its last throes. The economy is booming. Anybody who leaks a CIA agent’s identity will be fired. Add another piece of White House rhetoric that doesn’t match the public’s view of reality: Help is on the way, Gulf Coast.

This is atrocious journalism in its own right, for reasons we explicated back then. But if Fournier were consistent he would have put those 2005 problems all down to “the curse of incumbency.” Well, if he were consistent in his journalistic philosophy as opposed to his partisan loyalty.

Two Reichs in One!

• “Obama never mentioned the regressiveness of Romney’s budget plan. . . . He never mentioned Bain Capital, or Romney’s 47 percent talk, or Romney’s ‘carried-interest’ tax loophole. Obama allowed Romney to talk about replacing Dodd-Frank and the Affordable Care Act without demanding that Romney be specific about what he’d replace and why. And so on.”–Robert Reich, Puffington Host, Oct. 4
• “Obama won on substance.”–same article

Even the Pundits Are Unpredictable to This Guy
“Which brings us to tonight’s debate. There are so many experts invested in the idea that Romney has no chance against Obama that it will be almost impossible for much of the post-debate analysis to be fair. Even if the Obama in the [racially inflammatory 2007] video linked to above were to reappear in Denver, he would be pushed out of the way to accommodate the hero his sympathizers and apologists want to see. The debates matter, but for many who will be commenting after-the-fact, Obama has already won.”–Ed Rogers, Washington Post website, Oct. 3

Future Columnists of America
A reader sends along a column from the Daily Princetonian, an Ivy League student newspaper, with the comment: “She has a future as a New York times columnist with this self-absorbed drivel.” That seemed harsh, but our curiosity was piqued, so we clicked through. Here’s how the piece, by sophomore Susannah Sharpless, starts:

It is the year 2004 in Indianapolis, Ind., and my friend Ian and I are standing on the playground in the shadow of the monkey bars, yelling at the enemy camp set up behind the tetherball pole.

“My parents are voting for Kerry!” I shout. “We HATE George W. Bush!”

Ian, a little hyperactive, throws a handful of mulch up in the air.

My classmates holler back, “Well, we’re voting for Bush! Kerry’s bad!”

And just like that, I learned how to talk politics.

There are other gems, such as her observation that “my conservative friends aren’t all that soulless or fascist or even really that racist,” and this penetrating observation about an Urban Outfitters advertising campaign: “At its core, this is an advertising campaign.”

We suppose it’s unsporting to make fun of college students, but we never claimed to be sporting. Here’s another astonishingly infantile piece:

Imagine a kindergarten with 100 students, lavishly supplied with books, crayons and toys.

Yet you gasp: one avaricious little boy is jealously guarding a mountain of toys for himself. A handful of other children are quietly playing with a few toys each, while 90 of the children are looking on forlornly–empty-handed.

The one greedy boy has hoarded more toys than all those 90 children put together!

“What’s going on?” you ask. “Let’s learn to share! One child shouldn’t hog everything for himself!”

The greedy little boy looks at you, indignant. “Do you believe in redistribution?” he asks suspiciously, his lips curling in contempt. “I don’t want to share. This is America!” . . .

That kindergarten distribution is precisely what America looks like. Our wealth has become so skewed that the top 1 percent [blah blah blah] . . .

Only that didn’t appear in a college newspaper or even in a high school newspaper. It was written by Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times. Our reader was on to something after all.

Metaphor Alert
“Last night’s debate was a bloodbath. . . . We were not seeing 30-second soundbites hand-picked for us by Obama’s journalism cheering squad, or teleprompter-assisted speeches, or dueling press conferences where Romney is grilled but Obama is treated with kid gloves. Up until now, the mainstream press has allowed this president to sit in a bubble, largely unchallenged. Their narrative is that he’s likable, he’s smooth, he’s amazingly cerebral. As for Romney, he’s been branded as stilted, out-of-touch, and phony. Amazing how that conventional wisdom collapses when you peel away the selective lenses and the outside chatter, leaving two men alone on a stage, armed with just their own words.”–Alana Goodman, Commentary website, Oct. 4

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