1. I admit it. I’m more indulgent toward the president than many conservatives, including Carl.
2. So the president didn’t study for his debate, preferring to visit the Hoover Dam instead. Is that arrogant? Sure. But we can see how Romney tricked him into complacency with his rather astounding serial ineptitude–chronicled ably on POMOCON by Pete.
3. So the president thought he won when he really lost. We’re all the worst judges of our own performances. I’ve been with many a scholar unduly pleased with his lecture or whatever, oblivious to the fact that he stunk the place up.
4. The president’s vanity has been enflamed by flatterers who’ve mistaken him for a god. If he were more Christian, he would have been able to remember better that he’s a mere man and so not qualitatively superior to his opponent. But how many hugely powerful and (used to be?) charismatic leaders are that Christian? The nastiest thing I can say is that he should have been more ready for Romney not treating him as a god. Romney gave him the respect he deserved and that did confuse him.
5. I’ve taken it as a given that the president lies more and is better at Machiavellian semi-sincere deception than Romney. That’s why Republicans should be the very opposite of overconfident now.
6. Maybe we should be a bit sympathetic to the thought that the real burdens of the office have chastened the president enough to keep him from being as readily upbeat with the hopey-changey thing as he used to be.
7. The fact remains is that he’s clueless about what needs to be done to make our country’s future–from national defense to indispensable entitlements–sustainable.
October 10th, 2012 | 9:35 am
“So the president thought he won when he really lost. We’re all the worst judges of our own performances. I’ve been with many a scholar unduly pleased with his lecture or whatever, oblivious to the fact that he stunk the place up.”
You can’t win a fight by beating up the other guy’s fists with your face.
October 10th, 2012 | 9:54 am
Obama expected Romney to be as clueless and as inept as popular public perception holds him to be. He isn’t. The scramble for excuses by the president and his folks for ineptitude where it evidently is will only be embraced by those who truly love him. That’s because true love is blind, not because the president deserves sympathy or indulgence.
October 10th, 2012 | 10:09 am
I sympathize with the president for having what by all accounts was a pretty emotionally rocky upbringing, but not one whit for finding himself in a job for which he had zero qualification for and that turned out to be hard.
I’ve always thought that he didn’t actually want or expect to be president at this point, but found being a Senator a miserable job (as he’s apparently found every job he’s ever held) and wanted out. Running a campaign against sure-thing Hillary was an easy out, and would allow him to then resign his position “to concentrate on fixing the real problems out there beyond the Beltway” and set him up for a future run in 2012 or 2016. But then people actually fell for his nonsense, and then he was stuck.
October 10th, 2012 | 10:24 am
No, we were stuck.
October 10th, 2012 | 12:33 pm
Who was it who once *actually* pleaded for sympathy that his POTUS job was (unexpectedly) “hard” in debate? Oh, yeah, that was G. W. Bush.
I largely agree with Peter above, except for points 5 and 7. Re 5, see the always sensible conservative comments on Romney’s complete lack of regard for the truth by Daniel Larison at TAC, e.g. http://www.theamericanconservative.com/larison/another-reason-not-to-trust-romney. Re 7, a lot of us think the recent empirical evidence just hollers out that Republican mainstream thought is even more clueless (think of that fellow who found it “hard” to be president above).
October 10th, 2012 | 1:00 pm
HT: The transcripts of the 2004 debates are here. Please find whatever it is you think you remember. I’m pretty confident your comment has nothing to do with reality.
October 10th, 2012 | 2:43 pm
So Larison’s big point is that because Romney has admitted that the 47% comment was a mistake he is not to be trusted? Good heavens. Of all the things to criticize Romney for, that’s the example you wanted to give us?
October 10th, 2012 | 3:00 pm
I was relying solely on my memory, Brian, which is sometimes faulty. Thanks for the transcript pointer. If you do a Find on “hard” in the first debate text, you’ll find a number of places where the president stresses how hard things have been for him. I believe the bit I was remembering is:
“LEHRER: New question, Mr. President, two minutes. You have said there was a, quote, “miscalculation,” of what the conditions would be in post-war Iraq. What was the miscalculation, and how did it happen?
…[in Bush's answer]: We’re making progress. It is hard work. It is hard work to go from a tyranny to a democracy. It’s hard work to go from a place where people get their hands cut off, or executed, to a place where people are free.”
That is, grammatically, an excuse for the “miscalculation”. I remember it as an implicit plea for sympathy because of his distinctive Bushian tone of voice and facial expression when he delivered these remarks (he was clearly on the defensive). (That memory MAY be inaccurate.)
You may place a different construction on this reality if you like, but there’s nothing dishonest or naive in mine.
October 10th, 2012 | 4:35 pm
Peter: Larison, who is a conservative Christian with a head on his shoulders, whatever you think of his views, has had a running commentary for quite a while on Romney’s dissimulations and evasions and foreign-policy comic-book world. I just grabbed a representative recent sample. I don’t expect you guys to read Krugman (say), though you should, but you *could* keep up with what serious non-neocon conservative Christian commentators with real historical knowledge think. I don’t consider myself a conservative (or even a particularly political person) at all, but some of the folks at TAC (not all, not Buchanan e.g.) are well worth reading if you follow politics from any point of view, and Romney has provided them with plenty of opportunities for doubting his veracity as well as his consistency. Jeez that Bubble is hard to prick.
October 10th, 2012 | 7:02 pm
has had a running commentary for quite a while on Romney’s dissimulations and evasions and foreign-policy comic-book world.
Yes he has. To bad he keeps letting that running commentary get distracted by his latest running commentary “why Georgia is a bigger threat to world peace than Iran and Romney put together.”
October 10th, 2012 | 9:20 pm
“The fact remains is that he’s clueless about what needs to be done to make our country’s future–from national defense to indispensable entitlements–sustainable.”
Well, Peter, I’m pretty clueless about it, too. So why don’t you share all those great clues you have about what does need to be done to make our country’s future sustainable.
I’m all ears.
It would certainly be a lot more interesting than this constant rehash of Obama’s sins and flaws, which have retained pretty much the same sequence, content, and lack of any authoritative factual evidence since about July 2008.
Here are the relevant facts at the moment. Romney did very well and Obama did very poorly in the first debate. In consequence, Obama’s polling number have been, and still are, in free fall, leading to the clear conclusion that Romney has won both of the last two news cycles. If this continues, Romney will be President, if it doesn’t, Romney still might be President.
So since he might just win this election, I’d love to hear what evidence you have that Mitt Romney has the most important clues about what needs to be done to make this country’s future sustainable.
Again, I’m all ears.
And, since he actually might be President, I’d like to here what all the good folks here think of the things Romney has actually had to say about anything in this campaign. Are there any memorable nutshell quotes of his that have struck you about his vision for the future of America?
Or, failing that, do any of you “postmodern conservatives” have any ideas of your own about what the future of America might be or should be?
Other than, of course, that the first step would be to make Mitt Romney President. I think we can all take that for granted.
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