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.
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.
