WASHINGTON — As I suggested a few weeks ago, Senator Barack H.
Obama is not going to have an easy time of it. For one thing,
Senator John McCain is a much tougher candidate than has been
suspected. Looking over his career, one will note that McCain
learned politics before ever entering politics. As a young Navy
liaison to the Senate in the 1970s, he worked effectively with
Democratic and Republican hawks to reverse the post-Vietnam
military decline. He, having managed the largest fighter squadron
in the Navy, has management skills of which he can boast as Senator
Obama cannot — despite the junior senator from Illinois’
prodigious capacity to boast. McCain’s budget for his squadron was
more than a billion dollars. Finally, in this inhospitable year for
Republicans, McCain’s record of independent conservatism positions
him so that he is difficult to attack and poised to pounce.
Thus I am not surprised to see the likely Democratic
presidential standard-bearer slip into a dead heat this week with
the likely Republican presidential standard-bearer. What is more,
readers of this column might recall that weeks ago I spotted the
darkest of dark clouds glowering down on the unctuous young
senator’s halo. In a word, he seems to be victimized by the
bizarre. As befell Jimmy Carter years ago, perfectly commonplace
phenomena suddenly haunt the candidate’s campaign. A waffle appears
on his breakfast plate while he is waffling. He laments
the price of arugula at his upscale Whole Foods store while
campaigning in rural Iowa. His speech becomes a series of
gaffes, allowing us to rechristen the affable senator the gaffable
senator. Soon all civilized members of the electorate begin to
snicker every time the Prophet Obama steps toward a microphone —
nose raised heavenward, eyes glistening — to pontificate on the
metaphysics of “hope,” the imminence of “change,” and the glories
of “tomorrow” or “the day after tomorrow” or anytime in the future
— just get us through this godawful vacuous speech.
Yes, I think the Prophet Obama is in trouble. Thus members of
the Obama cult within the media are striving to ever higher levels
of inventiveness to maintain their oracle’s exulted presence in the
presidential race. One tactic they tried this week was to claim
that Obama haters on the fringes of the blogosphere have been
planting slanderous misinformation about the Prophet amongst
members of the moron vote. Some claim that he is a covert member of
the Muslim faith. Others insist he attended Islamic schools in a
faraway country. Still other spread the rumor that he smokes
cigarettes, possibly even indoors. None of this is true, cult
members in the press insist. So he should be elected president.
An even more inventive tactic was tried by a reporter for the
New York Times, Bill Carter. His thesis is that it is
almost impossible to get a laugh off of the suave, erudite,
eloquent, highly intelligent, incomparably gifted Prophet Obama.
Yes, the same Obama who had so much difficulty several months back
with the waffle and the gaffability, and was he attacked by that
amphibious rabbit or was it Jimmy Carter who was ambushed? The
Times reporter looked everywhere for drolleries or
witticisms about Obama and came up empty-handed.
He sifted through the late-night humor of the talk shows. He
interviewed writers for the late-night comics. What he came up with
were lines such as this: “The thing is he [the Prophet Obama] is
not buffoonish in any way.” That is the judgment of Mike Barry
“who,” according to the Times, “started writing political
jokes for Johnny Carson” and “has lambasted every presidential
candidate since.” Or savor this observation from ABC’s late-night
host, Jimmy Kimmel: “I think it’s more a problem [writing jokes
about the Prophet] because he’s so polished, he doesn’t seem to
have any flaws.”
What we, of course, see here is surreptitious praise of the
Prophet by a cult member who assumes a high level of stupidity
among his readers. He also assumes they never listen to talk radio,
especially talk radio’s Rush Limbaugh. Limbaugh has been laughing
it up at Obama’s expense for months. He has his own funny lines. He
airs skits by the amusing political impersonator Paul Shanklin.
Then too, Rush has enlisted his longtime colleague Bo Snerdly to
serve as Official Obama Criticizer. Anyone familiar with Limbaugh’s
work — and there are many millions — knows that you can get an
avalanche of laughter working the Obama persona. My only complaint
is that Rush calls him The Messiah. To my mind Obama is The Prophet
— only I am not quite certain of what he is prophesying. He is so
famously vague.
