One gets a feel for why Barack Obama has been slipping in the polls by watching him interact with real people. Yesterday, a seven-year-old Indiana girl asked him, “Why did you run for President?” Obama’s response, which begins with “I got hit in the head with a rock,” leaves me wondering if he actually was and if I mightn’t be better off getting hit myself than listening to Barack talk. He droned on through so many liberal policy-wonk themes that I literally caught myself dozing in the middle of it.
Finally, at about the 7:20 mark, Barack reprises the refrain that he and Michelle have been hammering for 20 years — from Chicago to Washington to Kenya — that America basically sucks and he’s the only one who can save it:
“And I think about, uh, us still being so dependent on foreign energy that our economy is grinding to a halt and our planet, because we didn’t adjust from fossil fuels, has gone up two or three degrees and the polar ice caps have melted and the oceans have gone up and suddenly our ways of life have changed and America is no longer, uh, what it could be, what it once was.
And I say to myself [rightly so because at this point, everyone else is asleep], I don’t want that future for my children. I want America to be better. To be stronger. To be more unified. To be more prosperous. To be kinder. To be more tolerant [like Jeremiah Wright, Michael Pfleger, or Bernadine Dohrn? etcetera, etcetera, etcetera] . . .”
Speaking of polar ice caps, according to Gavin Menzies, author of 1434, a 1418 Chinese map of the world “shows a passage through polar ice across the North Pole leading to America.” Similarly, “according to the Dutch meteorological office, there were three exceptionally warm winters in the 1420s which could have melted the Arctic sea ice.”
Yes, I do believe that was before the invention of the automobile. And, yes, I know that it’s not in sworn affidavit. 
But could someone please point this out to Barack so that he doesn’t make such a idiot of himself on the stump?
Anyway, if you start at 5:20 and listen through about 7:40, you’ll see what I mean:
{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
Gravitas 08.08.08 at 2:03 am
Oh, quit spoiling our fun. Let him make an idiot of himself.
Hearing him um and uh through any unscripted response makes
his selection as editor of the Harvard Law Review more of a joke than an honor. He himself lectured recently on how he looks different than the presidents on our dollar bills.
I would never point that out, but he has made quite an issue of it — with no help from anyone else. So, by his own measure, how better to demonstrate the Harvard faculty’s belief in the post-modern religion of diversity than to give this supposedly articulate man the honor of editor of the Harvard Law Review. In fact, his hemming and hawing when required to articulate anything unscripted makes George W. Bush sound silver-tongued.
Thomas Forguson 08.08.08 at 8:32 am
Somebody must have George Bush with a rock when he was born.
able eddy 08.08.08 at 6:36 pm
Yeah, too bad for Bush bashers that George is not a candidate in this election. They will have to get their high somewhere else.
As to being bashed in the head with a rock, George never claimed such an incident for himself. Only Obama has done that. If BO were Republican, the media would now be claiming he has more difficulty chewing gum and walking at the same time than (so they claimed) Gerald Ford did.
Kleiglights 08.09.08 at 10:13 am
There are posts all over about the media love affair with Obama being over. But his arrogance is the big issue with them, not his verbal gaffes. This one has received a fraction of the coverage that it would — if only a Republican had said it. It goes back a generation or more, at least to George Romney’s remarks about being “brainwashed.”
No doubt a thrill still runs up Chris Mathews’ leg when he hears the Obamessiah hold forth — in his scripted moments, of course.
Pliggy 08.16.08 at 11:28 pm
The quote of the night:
“America is no longer what it could be”
Change! Change! Anyone got spare change?