HOW BARACK'S BERLIN BULL BOMBED
George Will
August 4, 2008
AS the presidential candidates enter the three-month sprint to November, Barack Obama must be wondering: If that didn't do it, what will?
"That" is his Berlin speech. "It" is assuage anxieties about his understanding of the need to supplement diplomacy with military force.
Obama exhorted Germans to be more willing to wage war, in Afghanistan. He was right to do so.
But polls taken since his trip abroad don't indicate that Obama succeeded in altering the oddest aspect of this campaign: Measured against his party's surging strength, he's dramatically underperforming. Surely this is related to anxieties about his thin resume regarding national security, the thinnest of any major party nominee since Wendell Wilkie's in 1940. But it also might be related to fatigue from too much of his eloquence, which is beginning to sound formulaic and perfunctory.
Even an eloquent politician can become, as Benjamin Disraeli described William Gladstone, "a sophistical rhetorician inebriated with the exuberance of his own verbosity."
Does Obama have the sort of adviser a candidate most needs - someone sufficiently unenthralled to tell him when he has worked one pedal on the organ too much? If so, he should be told: Enough, already, with the we-are-who-we-have-been-waiting-for rhetorical cotton candy that elevates narcissism to a political philosophy. [.....]
August 4, 2008
AS the presidential candidates enter the three-month sprint to November, Barack Obama must be wondering: If that didn't do it, what will?
"That" is his Berlin speech. "It" is assuage anxieties about his understanding of the need to supplement diplomacy with military force.
Obama exhorted Germans to be more willing to wage war, in Afghanistan. He was right to do so.
But polls taken since his trip abroad don't indicate that Obama succeeded in altering the oddest aspect of this campaign: Measured against his party's surging strength, he's dramatically underperforming. Surely this is related to anxieties about his thin resume regarding national security, the thinnest of any major party nominee since Wendell Wilkie's in 1940. But it also might be related to fatigue from too much of his eloquence, which is beginning to sound formulaic and perfunctory.
Even an eloquent politician can become, as Benjamin Disraeli described William Gladstone, "a sophistical rhetorician inebriated with the exuberance of his own verbosity."
Does Obama have the sort of adviser a candidate most needs - someone sufficiently unenthralled to tell him when he has worked one pedal on the organ too much? If so, he should be told: Enough, already, with the we-are-who-we-have-been-waiting-for rhetorical cotton candy that elevates narcissism to a political philosophy. [.....]
" a sophistical rhetorician inebriated with the exuberance of his own verbosity." You gotta love that phrase --- Sure plants the saddle squarely on his back!
Hope it becomes his political epitaph in November!!!
Speaking of this 'man of the people', Ole Pecoz wondered if y'all have had a chance to peek at his roughin' it ride -- otherwise known as "O Farce One". A modest little Boeing 757 customized for this citizen of the world.
This is his private dining section, the accompanying Secret Service agents and his staff crowd into some coach seats wayyyyy in the back of the aircraft!
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