Last week the Obama campaign responded to a press release from the Clinton campaign by simply annotating it.
It is in that same spirit that I annotate this diary entitled "On Why Obama Has Already Lost".
From the beginning, his campaign was driven by a cult of personality based off of the popularity of his two books, and not from any real political education or success. [So we start off with the type of reasoned, even-handed objectivity the likes of which were usually associated with Torquemada. Of course, the diarist is 100% correct that only those who read both of Obama's books are supporters, a not at all incredulous assertion given the fact that both books would have had to have sold over 25 million copies, making it the best selling pair of anything since the 1978 Farrah Fawcett poster].
He is essentially not a political figure. [Of course he's not. One does not become a "political" figure by winning "political" office at the state level, and certainly no one who has been elected as a United States Senator after a "political" campaign can be considered a "political" figure. Instead, he is considered by most not as a political figure, but as a "troubled rocker" or "song and dance man".]
The article in the NYTimes a week ago, which spoke about his "star role" but his "minor status" in the Senate, and his easy non-contested route to DC, help to prove that point. The article further shows that, before he even got there, the Senate was not big enough for his ambitions: he craved media stardom, he believed he has a special status. [A belief he honed deep within his volcano lair where he donned an eye-patch, stroked a white cat, and plotted the eventual dominance of his political--er, sorry--song and dance man career. Cue diabolical laughter.]
While the word on everyone's lips was "hope," he tapped into and exploited a civic-spiritual despair among voters who yearned for some higher meaning in their lives [sometimes called "hope"], since America has no concrete cultural and spiritual traditions of its own. [As anyone from Shelby Foote to David McCullogh will tell you, we Americans survive on a diet of culture and spirituality borrowed almost exclusively from a fusion of Asian and Viking influences.]
As David Brooks said, "they don't need a president, they need a feeling." [As LarsThorwald said, "David Brooks doesn't need a column, he needs a good dentist and a shoe up his ass."]
His voters on average don't have to worry about their health-insurance, their investment funds, their retirement funds, or much else. [As all of the problems of health care, investing for retirement, and much else have been permanently solved in Illinois, as well as in each of the 28 states that voted for Obama in theprimaries.]
They want and need a symbol that gives their lives meaning, at least for eight years, until consumer trends change and they get tired of that symbol and want a new product in the form of a new face. [Students, please note: Do not believe, on the basis of this sentence, that the casual mixing of spiritual, political, and marketing metaphors in a haphazard manner without regard to grammar will make you appear smarter. It will not. Rather, it will make you appear like that guy at the coffee shop who always wears black and tries to turn every conversation into an opportunity to discuss Proust, whom he has never read in full. That guy is a dick, and his breath smells like latte. Don't be that guy.]
That he has failed to connect with the working-class, the backbone of the county, and the largest segment of the population, is telling, and a warning. [And, according to results from Iowa, Wisconsin, Virginia, Maryland, D.C., Georgia--I could go on--a blatantly incorrect assertion pulled directly out of the diarist's copy of The Big Butt Book of Facts].
Although they may be less "educated" - meaning they haven't spent upwards of 100k to purchase a diploma from a private college where students who can afford it do drugs, plagarize papers, and sleep around, [I clearly went to the wrong college]
while their professors play at politics and frantically try to secure their tenure by publishing unreadbale academic papers in journals that never see the light of day [Uh oh! Looks like sommmmmebody didn't finish that program or get that teaching assistant position he was angling for]
- the working-class is well-educated in bullsh*t, they know it when they see it, and they have laregely rejected his campaign. [They also laregely reject the rantings of someone who would spell it as "laregely"]
Things seemed to be going well for him until two weeks ago, after he lost Ohio and Texas [Well, Ohio], two states that do matter - no matter what you say [Well, what I say is that I miss full-serve gas stations, but that's not important. What is important is that Texas is, as you say, important. And looking at my notes (flip, flip, flip)...Oh yeah, Obama won a majority of Texas' delegates. Or did you mean some other definition of "winning"?].
- and his campaign went into free-fall, with his academic advisors shooting their mouths off in all directions and contradicting the very things he had said on the trail.
[He free-fell his way from a win in Wyoming down to a win in Mississippi. If he continues to free-fall like that, he will be dizzy at his inauguration.]
When the chips were down and the opposition was strong...[Very strong, very Bruckheimer. I like this theme! Go with it!!]
...each member of his team self-destructed in their own way...[Yes! Yes! Highlight the fact that David Axelrod's head actually exploded, Scanners-like, right on TV! More Bruckheimer! Yes!]
...including the candidate himself...[Yes! Big Broadway finish, give it to me! Dazzle me! DAZZLE ME!!!!]
who stormed out of his own press conference after taking only eight questions, because those questions were not laudatory and fawning. [YES! YE--wait a minute. This is the big self-destruction? He cut off a press conference early? That's it? Really?. Man. What a let down. That really needed a huge finale before the credits. And a press conference about Rezko isn't it, particularly when he just sat down for 3 hours with two different newspapars on Rezko and answered every question, except questions like, "Why haven't you turned over your tax returns yet?" or "Who contributed to funding your Presidential library?", because he is not Hillary.]
In one of the debates, he said that he sees the role of president as a figurehead who gathers around him a really smart group of people to run things while the figurehead is off pacifying the people with telepromted speeches. [And when we say "In one of the debates, he said" we mean, of course, that he said nothing like this whatsoever.]
But we saw that week that he cannot control his advisors, and further that those advisors are amatuers when it comes to politics, since they have mostly played at politcs within the precincts of the corporate-molded and funded ivy league. [I am sensing a sort of literary theme here. Like "man versus nature" or "from the garden to the wilderness" or "the Diarist has a real f*cking problem with people who attended college"]
This is not the group of people who are going to end the war in Iraq, win the war in Afganistan, deal with Iran, turn this economy around, and institute health-care reform, much less insititute universal health-care. This is a group of people who want to feel good about themselves, and from their comments, it is clear that it all about them, not about the American people. [Why, just last Thursday I bumped into Obama advisors Chris Dodd and Bill Bradley at the local Piggly Wiggly, and we all got to laughing about how their support is all about making themselves feeeeeeel goooooood, and then we all went to the ice cream aisle and grabbed some Redi-Whip and went to the parking lot and did whippets and rubbed baby oil on each other, because that makes us feel good and that's what we are all about, baby.]
This weekend we had the Wright debacle. That it took the media so long to focus on Wright is a mystery since it was there from the beginning. [All other portions of the kitchen sink had been thrown, and it was time to toss the bendy pipe thingy that goes from the drain to the wall, the one that always has hair and grease in it in those Drano commercials]
There was an article in the NYTimes a few months ago that detailed how Obama played the racial divide from the beginning of the campaign, purposefully avoiding black events while he was campaigning in Iowa in order not to alienate the white voters there and then whipping up racial resentments when it suited his purposes in South Carolina. [Diarist may be paraphrasing here a bit. And by "paraphrasing" I mean, of course, just making sh*t up.]
The United States is not a color-blind country and the majority of Americans do not and will not like being called racists, which is what the Obama campaign is now doing at every turn. Just yesterday the new pastor of Obama's church decried the depiciton of Wright by the media as racist and compared it to the assisination of MLK Jr. Geraldine Ferraro was on the money in her response to the attacks on her coming from the Obama camp and that is why her comments reverberated so strongly throughout the country: anytime anyone says anything slightly critical of Obama or his campaign, even when Obama or his campaign is in the wrong, they are immediately labeled a racist, and the majority of Americans - and especially the Republicans and Independents - won't stand for that. [Honestly, this paragraph caused your annotater's head to spin and nose to bleed from the internal inconsistencies.]
Some argue that the Wright debacle has had no impact and that the media has already moved on. But these kinds of things work slowly on the consciousness. They linger after the public discussion has faded. They influence opinion sliently over time. And since race is an issue few people discuss openly because of the PC police and self-censorship, it will be especially true in this case. [Hundreds of words later, your diarist actually has a point here.]
The test will come in PA and the states after. If his support among whites dries up then we know that the Wright debacle was damaging. The Wright debacle is also another instance of Obamian double-talk: he presents himself as "post-racial" and yet there is his pastor making comments that make Al Sharpton seem mild in comparison. [Aaaaaand then he takes his point into his hands like big dumb George took up that bunny in "Of Mice and Men" and he crushes it between the palms of wishful tinfoil haberdashery.]
The meme being pushed by his campaign is that the election is about the math in the end. Yet another instance of double-talk: it is the least inspiring or hopeful argument one could make for a path to the nomination. But a primary election like this is not about the math in the end, it is about narrative and momentum and demographics... [Kids! Gather round! You are about to witness a most amazing feat of magic and prestidigitation! Watch as the Diarist attempts to make valid factors disappear and pull a wholly unsupportable justification out of his hat!]
...The second meme being pushed by his campaign is that the so-called superdelegates must follow the "will" of the voters...[Now he says the magic words....ABRACADABRA!]
...But that is not what the superdelegates were instituted to do; in fact, they were instituted to do exactly the opposite: to stop the nomination from going to an unelectable insurgent who misled the American people early on in the campaign, and this year they will be called upon to do just that, and they will. [POOF! Ta daaaaa!]
When push comes to shove, there is no way the elders of the Democratic party are going to give the nomination to a cipher [NOTE: You, too can lift Words of The Day FREE from the pages of George Will or Christopher Hitchens!]who can't win a big democratic state primary [Except Illinois, Wisconsin, Maryland, Washington...must I go on?], who can't control the people on his staff when the going gets tough [Penn: "If Obama cannot win Pennsylvania, he cannot win the general election." Press: "Really??" Rendell: "He didn't mean that." Ickes: "Shut up, Mark!" Press: "Fight fight fight!" Nita Lowey: "Look over there! A shiny penny!"], who played the racial deivide at every turn [Especially that part in South Carolina where he compared himself to Jesse Jackson. oh, wait...], and who misled the American people on his plans for withdrawal from Iraq, NAFTA, and health-care. [Wait, what?]
****
The longer this goes on the better it is for Clinton. By winning Ohio and Texas, she came closer to nailing the nomination. If she wins PA, the tide probably turns for good. [WE HAVE ALWAYS BEEN AT WAR WITH EAST ASIA. PENNSYLVANIA IS THE MOST IMPORTANT STATE. LESS DELEGATES IS MORE. LOSSES EQUAL VICTORY. ALL THESE WORLDS ARE YOURS, EXCEPT EUROPA, ATTEMPT NO LANDINGS THERE.]