No Cheerleaders

 One of those telling moments that Obama was up against the ropes last night came in his closing statement, where he stumbled over the phrases “fair shot” and “fair share.”  Perhaps it was the altitude, as Al Gore suggests.  But being in Denver didn’t affect during the 2008 campaign when he appeared before 80,000 people and practically crowned himself with a laurel wreath.  Wait – maybe it did affect him, come to think of it. 

There appear to be three basic things that went wrong for Obama in last night’s debate.  We’ll get to his “fair shot” stumble in a moment.

1.       No Cheerleaders.   After the basic introductions, the audience was not allowed to respond to either candidate.  This didn’t seem to make any difference to Romney.  That’s because he’s not a narcissist.  Obama needs feedback.  He needs adoration.  He needs squealing bobby soxers fainting in front of him in the first row.  He needs hordes of SEIU baggage handlers to intimidate anyone who cheers for the other side.  He also needed someone to tell him whether he was on the right track or not.  Even in the Senate, at least he had backers among other Democrats.  The puppet-master’s hand was not up the puppet’s back.  No Grecian columns, no laurel leaves, no roses in his path.  No teleprompter.  Just him and Romney.   The cheerleaders are having a pity party today, wondering where they went wrong.

2.      Obama was outmatched.  Now, the Liberals would naturally dispute this.  But in 2008, the election was a cakewalk.  The morons in the GOP put up an old, white-haired crippled man against someone nearly half his age.  Romney should have been the GOP candidate in 2008 but the machine decided (for us) that the extremely Liberal McCain was our guy.  They had to be kidding.  So, of course, hordes of Republicans and Independents, especially the young, stayed home and Obama won.  Now we’re in a big mess financially and globally.  Who comes to the Republican rescue but a man eminently experienced at turning around failing companies and governing at the executive level?  Pundits note Obama didn’t throw the 47 percent at Romney.  That’s because the 47 percent are stuck like glue to Obama.  He’d like to shake us off (I’m one of them – I’m unemployed) but he and the Democrats created us.  I know exactly who’s responsible for my situation and it’s not my company or millionaires; it’s the New Jersey Democrats who drove my company to leave the state and a high corporate tax that makes the U.S. the highest taxer of companies in the world.  Obama’s not fooling the 47 percent.  He owns us. 

3.      He didn’t like what he was saying.  Our speechwriters always gave the speakers ample opportunity to supply input to their speech.  The speech has to sound like something the speaker would say.  The words have to be in their voice and language.  Sometimes the executives had too much input and would keep the videographers waiting for a couple of hours while they rewrote the speeches.  Well, that’s the life of a communications strategist, isn’t it, JD?  The puppet masters put words in the puppet’s mouth and he stumbled and choked on them.  “My faith and confidence in the American future is undiminished.”  Not exactly what he meant or wanted to say.  He added, “because a company in Minnesota…was willing to give up salaries and perks for their executives to make sure that they didn’t lay off workers during a recession.”  Or this:  “Four years ago…I…promised that I’d fight every single day on behalf of the American people, the middle class, and all those who were striving to get into the middle class.”

But here was the telling statement, and in the video, you can hear him stumbling:

“All those things are designed to make sure that the American people, their genius, their grit, their determination, is – is channeled and – and they have an opportunity to succeed.  And everybody’s getting a fair shot.  And everybody’s getting a fair share – everybody’s doing a fair share, and everybody’s playing by the same rules.”

It sounded like he was supposed to say “everybody’s doing a fair share” but said, “everybody’s getting a fair share” instead and had to go back and correct himself.  “Everybody’s getting a fair shot:”  that’s what started his trouble.   Everybody already has a fair shot.  That’s not his doing; you’d have to go back about 50 years to find the Democrat responsible for that legislation – so what’s Obama’s beef?  Notice that the “everybody’s doing a fair share” phrase is grammatically incorrect.  A grammatical error from the former editor of the Harvard Law Review.  That should have been “everybody’s doing their fair share.”  A cliché, but acceptable.

What Obama really wanted to do was go back in time to 2008 and repeat his “transforming America” mantra.  But that won’t really work this time.  There’s plenty of evidence that his “transformation” is working – just the way the puppet masters want it to and the way he wants it to – only America is transforming the way Americans thought it would and they aren’t very happy about it.  What’s more, a segment of Americans organized themselves into the Tea Parties and began protesting his socialist, communist, redistribute the wealth policies.

They didn’t protest in the streets, like Occupy Wall Street, and burn cars and so forth.  They rallied in their own hometowns, places at least one of the organizers (ahem) knew Obama was targeting.  Indeed, at the same time the Tea Parties were organizing, so was Obama’s Building One America, a plan for cities to annex suburbs, something they’ve done in Virginia (one of the reasons Obama won there) and they’re in the process of doing in Ohio.  BOA’s organizers readily admit one of their goals is to upset the political landscape in the suburbs, by federalizing Section 8 vouchers and forcing suburban towns to accept these new “residents”.  In our suburbs here in New Jersey, the number of minorities, particularly Mexican has increased, typically from 4 percent in 2000 to 10 percent in the 2010 census.  Enough to change our political landscape, especially in Passaic County.

We can’t even trust our Republican representatives; Sen. Joe Kyrillos is in favor of this regionalization.

In any case, ironically in the aftermath of the debate debacle, Obama sent out a letter of apology to his supporters for flubbing the debate.  He owed them apology for acting like a sullen teenager who just lost the student council debate.  It may seem silly to talk about smiling, posture, articulation, all the basics to good public speaking.  Obama has never been a good speaker.  What he does well is smile (just like his late father), and in a good mood, he can mesmerize an audience.  Last night, he showed us the real Obama:  temperamental, egotistical, immature, and very, very angry. 

Apologizing:  it’s what Obama does best.  Romney’s job is to make Obama scowl in the upcoming debates.  The best way to do that is to get Obama to defend America.  He might say the words, but he won’t like it and he probably won’t be able to hide it.  No speaker pronouncing words he doesn’t believe ever succeeds in convincing his audience that he’s sincere, at least not when he has real competition.