Pages
▼
Tuesday, August 16, 2011
Obama's Magical Misery Tour Faces An Unscripted Moment
The president did an event in Iowa last night and wound up being confronted by a couple of Tea Party activists who pointed out that it was hypocritical of him to call for more civility in politics when Vice President Biden had echoed comments that the Tea Party were 'terrorists'.
Sans teleprompter ( or as some have dubbed it, the TOTUS) the president did not come off too well.
In fairness, two things. First I give the president credit for actually addressing these people and not simply avoiding them, although that might have looked bad since the initial comments the Tea Party activists made were quite audible during the Q&A part of the event.
Second,Biden has denied that he echoed the comments and the White House put out a public statement distancing itself from the remarks. On the other hand, senior members of the president's party have continued to use similar rhetoric, the president's media allies, many of whom get briefed and strategize with the White House on a daily basis have continued to push the 'Tea Party terrorists' meme and President Obama has had nothing to say about that.
In politics, this is known as plausible deniability.
Everyone knows about the daily briefings of the media by the President's campaign. If they didn't' like the meme they would have told their media allies to stop and told DWS and the DNC to stop it as well. Neither has happened. Remember technically Obama is head of the democratic party too.
ReplyDeletePlausible deniability is not the issue. The issue is if the President doesn't like the tone of his supporters he should control his campaign better. So either he gives his blessing or he is too incompetent to control those who campaign for him. Either way he doesn't' come off looking capable but rather as duplicitous as usual.
I think the tour is called Obama's Listen to Me Tour, or at least Obama thinks that what it is about, because he got pretty mad when this citizen didn't listen to him after he didn't listen to the citizen.
ReplyDeleteI used to be pretty confident that Obama would cruise to election, based on nothing more than the fact the crop of presidential candidates is so weak. But if he keeps up like this, even Gingrich could beat him handily.
ReplyDeleteWe have been told that the field of Republican candidates is "weak." In fact, we have been told this so many times by so many different people in the media over such a long period of time that I had begun to believe this myself.
ReplyDeleteThe Republican field may in fact be "weak", however, it recently occurred to me that to assume this based upon what we are told by the media is simply an article of faith. The Republican candidate field may in fact be quite strong.