Look Who's Smiling

Last winter I came across a piece about predicting presidential campaign winners based on who smiled the most, or essentially who inspired optimism for a positive future. I wrote comparing the primary candidates in January. The comparison is becoming more obvious as we approach Election Day.

This cover showed up in the Des Moines Register yesterday, illustrating this very point.

 

It is becoming a theme here that I have been praying for clarity, for Americans to see clearly who the President is and who Mitt Romney is, so that their decision will be based on reality and not deceit. I think that is what we are seeing, more and more.

Peggy Noonan has a piece today describing what happened at (and since) the first debate as Americans finally see the real Obama:

People saw for the first time an Obama they may have heard about on radio or in a newspaper but had never seen.

They didn't see some odd version of the president. They saw the president.

And they didn't like what they saw, and that would linger.

What people now see is not some larger-than-life transformational figure representing all the positive hopes for change they can place on a blank slate. What people see now is a petty, narcissistic, self-absorbed, little man, who condescends to disdain America and Americans. At the same time this negatively real Obama was exposed, the real Romney also appeared—reasonable, cool, confident, capable, experienced, and caring.

Contrast is more evident in this election than in any I recall since Reagan/Carter—and maybe surpassing that as well. In the language of the Spherical Model, what we see now in Obama is uncivilized. And what we see in Romney is quintessential civilization.

Obama did an interview with Rolling Stone Magazine, slated to his newsstands today, in which he is reported to have had this exchange, described by Douglas Brinkley:

"As we left the Oval Office, executive editor Eric Bates told Obama that he had asked his 6-year-old if there was anything she wanted him to say to the president. ... [S]he said, 'Tell him: You can do it.' Obama grinned," Brinkley wrote, according to Politico. "'You know, kids have good instincts,' Obama offered. 'They look at the other guy and say, 'Well, that's a bullsh**er, I can tell."

There is so much wrong with this. A positive, complimentary moment had just been passed along from a very young child. Obama doesn’t graciously say, “Thank you; the encouragement means so much to me.” He turns it into a vitriolic, anti-Romney moment, putting profanity in the mouths of children. Let me just say that, as a person dedicated to civilization, imperfect in my efforts, I not only never used such a word as a 6-year-old; I have never used that term at any age.

Lena Dunham from "Your First Time" ad

Yesterday I became aware of a new Obama campaign ad, unbelievably profane, called “Your First Time.” It has a 20-something actress describing her first vote, for Obama, to losing one’s virginity.  Ugly. Not funny. And not even original, but a copy of a Putin ad in Russia from last winter.

While Obama is out on the stump in Iowa, but apparently living in his own alternate universe, he says,

We joke about Romnesia, but all of this speaks to something that is really important and that the issue of trust. There is no more serious issue on a presidential campaign than trust. Trust matters. And here's the thing. Iowa, you know me. You know that I say what I mean. And I mean what I say….

And you can take and videotape things I said 10 years ago, 12 years ago, and you would say, man, this is the same guy. Has the same values. Cares about the same people. Doesn't forget where he came from. Knows who he is fighting for.

Except, of course, people take his advice and put together montages of his contrasting statements, because they’re so easy to find. This one is 10 minutes. This one is 13 ½ minutes. This is an 8-minute list Glenn Beck put together.  This one is an entertaining montage of varying “top priorities.” 

This is while more condemning details come out daily about what actually happened in Benghazi. It looks like purposeful neglect before and during the attack, pointing directly to the President, with added cover-up. This man may be seen historically as the absolute worst decision ever made by American voters.

Meanwhile, stories about the real Romney keep leaking out. Deroy Murdock wrote a piece in yesterday’s National Review Online, listing some of the untold stories of Mitt Romney’s private acts of decency (including even some stories I hadn’t come across before). He ends with this explanation:

Why is the real Romney totally unlike the terrifying caricature that has haunted this campaign? Team Obama’s distortions and lies have conspired with Mitt Romney’s modesty to mask his good deeds. Instead, Romney fans should make these secrets famous.

There is a beautiful story told about the behind-the-scenes view during a beyond capacity (10,000, with probably 1,000 turned away) crowd at Red Rocks Amphitheatre in Colorado Wednesday, as told in The Ulsterman Report, passed along by a “longtime DC political operative.” You’ll want to read this entire piece, but here are a couple of essential moments, from the beginning, and then from the end:

You know, I’ve gone from just trying to defeat Obama to really trying to help Governor Romney be this country’s next president.  I’m really starting to believe there might be something very special about this man….

[after giving his speech to cheering crowds] The governor returns backstage and he is smiling and shaking hands, taking congratulations from everybody around him.  He’s saying how great it was.  Somebody yells out he’s going to win Colorado and the governor laughs and says he thinks so too.  And then something very interesting happens.  He moves away from the group of people just a bit.  Maybe ten or fifteen feet or so.  Just enough to have a little space to himself.  And enough people notice that the area gets a lot more quiet, and they are trying to watch the governor without looking like they are watching the governor.  They can all kind of tell something is happening right then.  It was described as something very peaceful and powerful that came over that backstage area for a moment.  And the governor, he lowers his head and his eyes shut tight and you could see him take a slow deep breath and then he lets it out and says quietly, but just loud enough for some to hear, “Lord, if this is your will, please help to make me worthy.  Please give me the strength Lord.”  And then his eyes open up, and he’s back to smiling and laughing and shaking hands and being the candidate once again.

I’m 100% convinced Mitt Romney was shaken to his soul right then and there.  I think at that moment it was sinking in he might really be the next American president, and it humbled him right to his core, in every nerve of his body.  And as he was saying that little prayer, you could hear the sound of thunder from all those thundersticks outside. Like this huge low rumble that just surrounded all of them at once.  A quiet little prayer, and the sound of thunder.

The sound of God.

Humility and love—for God, for America, and for individual people. This man is civilized. I think there will come a day when we express thanks to God for preparing him for us, for this time, when such a man is so very needed.