http://spectator.org/archives/2012/08/20/campaign-contexts-the-kitchen/print
Campaign Contexts: The Kitchen Table Issues
We know the mess Obama has made of them. But what about Romney’s understanding?
We’ve heard a lot about “context” lately. It’s the first refuge of a scoundrel: what I said doesn’t mean what you think I said if you take it in context with everything else I said, whenever I said it.
But there’s a second part of the “context” issue, and it’s more important than the first. The second part is the context placing what politicians say into the issues that are in voters’ minds. How far apart is the rhetoric from what people really care about?
No longer does anyone claim the “context defense” for Joe Biden. When Mr. Biden he speaks, there is either no context at all, or there are so many unrelated concepts strung together that no one can keep track of them. Biden plays with words like a musician who changes the key he’s playing in three times in the course of one song.
Case in point: last week, Joe started with an accusation that Romney and Ryan would “unchain Wall Street” and ended the same phrase (sentence? paragraph? Who knows?) by telling an audience (about of which half were black), “…they’ll put y’all back in chains.” Only Joe would string together an accusation the first half of which is class warfare and the second half is the threat of a return of slavery. Rudy Giuliani had it about right in saying Biden evidently lacks the mental capacity to serve as vice president or president.