Amused Cynic

I don’t generally watch Obama speeches, mostly because he makes my skin crawl, and I don’t like having my modest intelligence insulted. I prefer to read what he says the next day, so I can absorb and appreciate the true vapidness of this ludicrous presidency.

Yes, up till about an hour ago, my feelings were simpatico with Smitty at The Other McCain, [h/t Obi's Sister] who put it very well indeed:

No, I’m not going to watch your ratchet-head emit another series of empty clichés at the presser. Fear, guilt, and straw man arguments do not an impressive leader make.

Hard to argue with that, in fact I wouldn’t even try. But then, I read this piece by famed Beltway harrumpher David Gergen, and I got to thinking…(here’s what he said that made me pensive):

First, he does not yet have a fully formed health care plan to “sell” to the country. Ordinarily, a president trying to persuade the public on a contentious issue has a firm plan to present in prime time. But the nature of the process in health care has meant that five different Congressional committees are working on ideas — and two of the most influential have not even reported yet on their recommendations.

As a result, the President is left to rail against the status quo — and he does this with great persuasiveness — but he is unable to bring his much respected oratorical power to bear on convincing people exactly what to do to fix things.
…this will be one of the steepest, most important climbs of his young presidency.

Now, when you cut away all of Gergen’s excess harrumphing as I have done here, it crystallizes into something amazing, something that speaks as poorly of Gergen and the rest of the SRM (”State-Run-Media”—as Rush is now calling them) as it does of Obama, and it is this: Obama is going on TV tonight to try to sell us a bill of goods. He is trying to sell us on something that can barely be called an idea, let alone a plan. He doesn’t even have a plan, he doesn’t even really know what he’s trying to sell us.

And Gergen knows this. And instead of being appalled that the president is obviously a bull-shit artist and calling him on it, Gergen simply wonders, with strange detachment, if he can pull off “one of the steepest, most important climbs of his young presidency.” Well, I am appalled, and I think that sentiment is spreading:

The only problem is this: although most (if not all) presidential candidates do some dissembling and spinning during their campaigns, and all make promises they are not able to keep, and most are met with circumstances that require them to be flexible about some of the matters they campaigned on, I believe that Obama is the very first president whose campaign persona was a studied lie and a con.
[...]
What’s more, Obama’s predecessors could not have done what he did, even if they had wanted to, because the press wouldn’t have let them. It would have done its job in following clues and exposing the scam. Obama gambled that the press would never treat him like that, either because of his narcissistic belief in his own specialness (which they seemed to share), the fact that they’d not successfully done it to him before despite opportunity, and/or his feeling that they would be unlikely to criticize him because of fear that charges of racism would be hurled back at them. Whatever his reasons, he found out early on that he could get away with it, and so he did.

I think tonight could be the most interesting installment of the Obama Show yet.

UPDATE: This should make it even more fun… (h/t Ace)