What if the passion was never there?

~ odd man out

Obama blew it. That’s the point of a long piece in today’s NYT by an exasperated academic who has stopped pretending Obama is the second coming of Martin Luther King. Instead, he asks sobering and long-overdue questions (overdue in the mainstream media, that is).

Published by odd man out

2 thoughts on “What if the passion was never there?”

  1. Obama has laid himself open to the worst insult imaginable for an American president. He looks like a wimp. He looks like a guy that just got rolled for his lunch money. Americans will not forgive this.

    Honestly, I don’t know what the poor guy’s going to do. Turning around and punching the liberals (again) is getting boring, and also starting to look like he’s beating up his little brother because he’s too scared to go after the real bullies. Start another war? We have, what, six going already? Maybe Michelle could have another baby…

    Anybody have any ideas on how he can regroup? By that, of course, I mean any ideas on things he would actually do, not the dozens of things that he could do or should do but never will.

  2. Westen is an expert in neuro-linguistics and neuro-marketing, which boils down to being an expert in getting people to buy things and to vote for candidates by using words, images and even smells to trigger unconscious reactions.

    Electoral success is about shaping and activating voters’ networks of association — bundles of thoughts, feelings, sounds, and images that become linked in the brain.  Political campaigns are about activating and shaping networks through stories and images. http://www.westenstrategies.com

    He is not the only one, Lakoff, Luntz and others do the same thing. In marketing the result is choosing one product over another in the market based on the words and colors on the box irrespective of the quality of whatever is in the box. This is how you end up with a President chosen on the rhetoric of his speeches and themes of his campaign, who turns out to be completely different when you open the box.

    Westen’s theories are great if the “narrative” told by the president is consistent with what the president actually believes and intends to do. Otherwise we are left with this strange feeling of disconnection between what we thought we were voting for and the actual man. And the president is angry and frustrated when confronted with people who question him about things he knows he never believed in or committed himself to.

    The simplest explanation of our situation is that we were lied to and deceived by someone who is skilled at saying whatever needs to be said to get into office.Or that he hired people like Drew Westen to get him elected and allowed them to say anything they thought they needed to say. I have to believe that Westen really believed in Obama and his potential and intentions for doing good, and he may be shocked to see what has actually come to pass. Mr Westen may well be feeling a bit of guilt about his role in getting Obama elected.

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