“You’ve lost, that hopechangey feeling. Woa-o that hopeychangey feeling…”
Tongue-tied Barack Obama is turning into Jimmy Carter
Barack Obama’s gaffe mocking the disabled by comparing his (inept but improving) 10 pin bowling skills to the “special Olympics” illustrates the problem he now has in communicating with the American people.
Obama seems incapable of balancing the need to be a national leader and his childish desire to retain his image as the uber cool dude he so clearly believes that he is.
And it gets even better then that as the post goes on.
Allen and Vandehei are not the only ones who have noticed that Obama appears out of his depth. Michael Wolff, America’s premier writer on the media, a bit of a liberal, has just written a devastating critique of Obama’s speaking skills, comparing him to Jimmy Carter and branding him a “terrible bore”.
Let’s go to Wolff’s article
Barack Obama Is a Terrible Bore
Sheesh, the guy is Jimmy Carter.
That homespun bowling crap on Jay Leno, followed by the turgid, teachy fiscal policy lecture, together with the hurt defensiveness (and bad script for it) that everybody in Washington “is Simon Cowell… Everybody’s got an opinion,” is pure I’m-in-over-my-head stuff. Even the idea of having to go on Jay Leno to rescue yourself from the AIG mess is lame. Be a man, man.
The guy just doesn’t know what to say. He can’t connect. Emotions are here, he’s over there. He can’t get the words to match the situation.
Back to tongue-tied
But this is just the point, Obama’s skills from the moment he stepped on the national stage have been strategic and reactive. He’s fine when he’s laying out some great policy he has spent months working up and he can be effective in responding to crises.
But he is absolutely hopeless at spotting where these crises come from, useless at predicting them and when they do pop along, like the AIG bonus issue, he is far, far too slow to act.
Heck, at this point, even the Iranians, who he reached out to like a lost sibling, are blowing him off. The bloom is off the unicorns.
Meanwhile, Ed Morrissey points out that Slate is still caught up in BDS. Doesn’t Slate know this is the era of hopeNchange?
