Peggy Noonan on Barack Obama

Peggy Noonan on Barack Obama

In pursuit of the truth - cinops be gone - Monday, Oct. 29, 2012

From the Wall Street Journal, Sat. - Sun. October 27, 28, 2012

In Denver on Oct. 3 … nothing echoes out like that [presidential] debate. It was the moment that allowed dismay with the incumbent to coalesce, that allowed voters to consider the alternative. America doesn’t date losers… Why was the first debate so toxic for the president? Because the one thing he couldn’t do if he was going to win the election is let all the pent-up resentment toward him erupt.

What he couldn’t do was present himself, when everyone was looking, as smaller than you thought. Petulant, put upon, above it all, full of himself. He couldn’t afford to make himself look less impressive than the challenger in terms of command, grasp of fact, size. But that’s what he did.

And in some utterly new way the president was revealed, exposed. All the people whose job it is to surround and explain him, to act as his buffers and protectors - they weren’t there. It was him on the stage, alone with a competitor. He didn’t have a teleprompter, and so his failure seemed to underscore the cliché that the thing he need to sound good. He is not by any means a stupid man but he has become a boring one; he drones, he is predictable, it’s never new. The teleprompter adds substance, or at least safety.

What exactly happened when Mr. Obama did himself in? What led to it? Was it the catastrophic execution sound strategy? Perhaps the idea was to show the president was so unimpressed by his challenger that he could coolly keep him at bay by not engaging… So he sat back and let Mr. Romney come forward. But Mr. Romney was poised, knowledgeable, presidential. It was a mistake to let that come forward!

Maybe they assumed the election was already pretty much in the bag, don’t sweat it… The sheer number of people who watched - a historic 70 million - suggests a lot of voters were still making up their minds. Maybe the president himself didn’t think he could possibly be beaten because he is so beloved… the extraordinary internet effort to connect with every lonely person in America..

People back home he [the senator] said what happened with the president in that debate. The senator said, “I sort of have to tell them that it wasn’t a miscalculation or a weird moment, I told him I know him, that guy on the stage, that’s the real Obama.”

Which gets us to Bob Woodward, “The Price of Politics” published last month. The portrait it contains of Mr. Obama - of a President who is at once over his head, out of his depth and wholly unaware of the fact, hasn’t received the attention it deserves.

Obama is portrayed as having the appearance and presentation of an academic intellectual while being strangely clueless in his reading of political situations and dynamics. He is bad at negotiating - in fact doesn’t know how. His confidence is consistently greater than acumen, his arrogance greater than his grasp…

Business leaders and might CEOs felt patronized. After inviting them to meet with him, the president read from a teleprompter and included the press. They felt like “window dressing.” One spoke of Obama’s surface polish and essential remoteness…

He told staffers that John Boehner, one of 11 children of a small-town owner, was a “country club Republican… Mr. Woodward portrait of the President is not precisely new - it has drawn in other accounts and has been a staple D.C. gossip for three years now…

George H. Kubeck, Thanks Peggy, for now we know who he is!