Topic: Decline of the West
President Obama kicked off his reelection campaign last week—and things didn’t go very well. That’s commentator Jeff Greenfield’s take on the Obama campaign kickoff, which included a half-filled stadium, a Biden gaffe, a lackluster campaign commercial and Saturday Night Live’s flirtation with a sketch mocking the President’s self-congratulatory commemoration of the first anniversary of the killing of Osama bin Laden. (SNL decided not to run with it but the script was leaked and as Greenfield notes, “[T]he existence of the sketch indicates that the notion of Obama exploiting Osama’s death has enough currency to be parodied on a show seen by millions. That notion, if it spreads, could undermine one of the president’s best arguments.”
To Greenfield's list I would add the truly creepy "Julia" slideshow—who the hell on Team Obama thought that was a good idea?
Small incidents, you might argue—and I would agree. But they signal that times have changed. In 2008, Barack Obama ran a tabula rasa campaign. Uplifting but vague, he persuaded people across the political spectrum to see in him what they would. No more. We know Barry now—and his supposedly healthy personal approval ratings to the contrary notwithstanding, I don’t think that the majority of us like him very much.
