Amused Cynic

The One who is so smart, so articulate, so forceful of personality that he doesn’t need any executive experience to qualify for the presidency of the United States? What I saw last night was pathetic and disconcerting, not because I ever expected much from a President Obama in the way of substance, but I certainly did expect to see an articulate man, not a gawky teenager dressed up in daddy’s suit for his first real job interview. I think he said “uh” almost as often as Caroline Kennedy.

It was so awful that I became riveted. I kept thinking “Now, do they understand what they’ve done by electing this woefully underqualified twerp?” Someone once said of Al Gore that when he responds to a question, you can almost hear the hard-drive implanted in his robotic brain begin to whir as it searches for the appropriate canned reply. Obama was more like an infernal talking doll, a Chatty-Cathy from Hell with a 20-yard long pull-cord coming out of the back of his neck.

He spoke in vapid, platitudinous campaign-speak. I couldn’t decide if he was deliberately trying to run out the clock on the presser with absurdly long answers, or if he just had no idea of what he was talking about and thought an endless stream of buzz-words would so confuse the press that he’d get himself off the hook. If he tried to present that stuff at an oral board examination he’d flunk. I also think that his continuous use of malaise/catastrophe-speak to pimp the Democrats’ self-stimulus bill is unconscionable, and the last thing we need to hear at a time of crisis.

I was so riveted by this train-wreck that I damn near skipped “24″ last night so I could watch the pundits react. But I didn’t, so this is my own off-the-cuff reaction on the morning after. I was almost embarrassed for him. I am very concerned for the country.

UPDATE: I don’t often agree with what I see in The New Republic, but this piece from Walter Shapiro–a center-left pundit whom I respect–sums up my reaction quite well. I wonder if anyone else in the MSM will begin to call our new Emperor on his new clothes.

Through most of his inaugural primetime press conference, Barack Obama seemed like he was channeling a particularly loquacious combination of Joe Biden, Bill Clinton, and the ghost of Hubert Humphrey. The president’s response to the first question from the Associated Press about the risks of sounding too apocalyptic about the economy ran (or, to be more accurate, crawled) for nearly 1,200 words–and ended with Obama saying “Okay” with an implicit question mark as if he were requesting permission to keep on talking. A national poll from the Pew Research Center released Monday afternoon found that 92 percent of Americans described Obama as a “good communicator.” There is a suspicion that those astronomic numbers had dipped by the time that Obama exited from the East Room of the White House at 9 p.m. on the dot.
[...]
Obama radiated the sense of a leader who has digested too many economic briefings and memorized too many talking points in preparation for his primetime rendezvous with the public.
[...]
What Obama was decidedly not Monday night was Kennedy-esque. When JFK unveiled the live presidential primetime press conference 48 years ago, he answered 37 questions in the space of 40 minutes; Obama only half-responded to 13 questions in the space of an hour. Admittedly, Kennedy, who had survived a narrow election, was trying to demonstrate with his competence that he was a worthy successor to Dwight Eisenhower. Obama–who romped home in November and certainly does not lie awake worrying about invidious comparisons with George W. Bush–was trying to sell a set of economic talking points. As a result, the reporters and their questions were little more than potted palms as President Obama declaimed from the East Room.

The Anchoress has some comments and great links on The Malaise-Master-in-Chief

Neo-neocon wonders if Obama is playing on our fear of fearing fear itself. Sort of.

Powerline addresses the lack of substance or outright chicanery of the press conference directly:
a slippery and dishonest performance but probably a reasonably effective one

Over at Big Hollywood, Gary Graham’s assessment of the situation mirrors my own:

I’ve watched President Obama make his case on national television. I keep waiting for the entire Washington press corps to bust up laughing. I keep waiting for news anchors to crack up mid-sentence and not be able to continue, doubled over. I keep waiting for an incensed public to storm Pennsylvania Avenue and demand their money back. But then … I must be stupid.
[...]
But now Congress is being pressured to pass this spending bill and do it now! There’s no time to lose, we don’t have time for further discussion, no time for debate. We have to pass the bill now, yank the lever, press the button … pull the trigger.

What the hell is the rush!??? I’m missing the soup lines. I look but I don’t see throngs of homeless people trying to warm themselves by the oil drum fire. I have not had to swat the flies off of a little starving child once in the past month. I must have missed the food riots in Los Angeles as starving hordes prowl the streets looting Vons and Ralphs stores. And have you been on the freeway lately? I would think that if the ‘crisis’ was as bad as our President says it is, the 405 would resemble a ghost town. But there I am, jammed in, trying to shuttle my butt over the hill to L.A. in the same old rush hour slog. Okay, I’ll admit that the banking and financial markets are in monstrous disarray. And that yes, it could probably be considered a crisis. But … the end of the world type of crisis? The we-are-screwed-so-let’s-throw-capitalism-out-and-become-a-socialist-nation type of crisis? Uh … not in my movie.

But we are told we have to go a trillion dollars into debt or the world is going to end, and we have to borrow it immediately! (Even though it will be two years before the money would even start to get spent.) And where do we borrow it? From China!! Am I the only one left who sees this as an absurdly stupid recipe for disaster?? Two words: Tiananmen Square. I was there two years before the tanks rolled over the peaceful protesters, and I can tell you … things haven’t changed in the ‘People’s Paradise’ all that much since. Oh, you saw the Olympics on TV and they all look so advanced and peace-loving and civilized? The people, yes. The totalitarian Communist regime, nada. So sure … let’s reduce our dependency on foreign oil, but increase our dependency on a Chinese Communist oligarchy??