Who Needs Karl Rove?

We have been told Barack Obama is singularly brilliant, articulate, eloquent. We have been told that he is nuanced; deep. One journalist even suggested Barack Obama is more highly evolved than the rest of us. But what have we found? We have found someone blandly human, and not particularly original.

I made a mistake earlier this year when I praised the concession speech Barack Obama delivered the night he lost the New Hampshire primary to Hillary Clinton. I was stunned by his eloquence and force; I said that Hillary Clinton could never give a speech half as inspiring, even in her dreams.

In all honesty, I thought Barack Obama's speech that night was done extemporaneously. The TV feed I was watching did not show that he was reading it; there was no wide shot of his teleprompters guiding him through his "Yes We Can" speech, the one that even became something of a musical hit on YouTube. To my consternation, I had to admit that I was mistaken, and that I had been fooled (by my own hopefulness, perhaps). Anyone can be eloquent if he or she knows how to read. (And while I am thinking of it, what sort of person READS a concession speech after losing a tiny state primary?)

Now comes news that Barack Obama actually plagiarized -- and it is plagiarism -- a Tom Toles cartoon. Let me be generous and assume that Mr. Obama and Mr. Toles had worked out a deal where Mr. Obama could use Toles' riff without attribution. (There is a rather half-baked explanation here.) OK. Fine. Let's assume all is explained away. What remains? Two things, really:

1. Barack Obama is passing off someone else's words as his own. The Man Who Everyone Loves But No One Really Knows has now estranged himself to us: we don't know where someone else ends and where Barack Obama begins. He loses his identity the second he loses our trust.
   
2. Barack Obama has lost his most precious commodities, credibility and authenticity. Hence, he has lost even his extemporaneous eloquence we've heard so much about: He has given too much away, and we now see that even what looks spontaneous is rehearsed, memorized, pre-fabricated. Barack Obama did not just pull out of thin air, or from the inscrutably deep synapses of his brain, Tom Toles' exact, or near exact, words. No. He had read them, memorized them. And he told himself or, more likely, was told by others, that he could pass them off as his own. But even if there was no such internal conspiracy between his own inner selves or within his inner circle, there is no doubt that what seems so authentically off-the-cuff can never be trusted again. When we thought he was being clever and profound, he was merely reciting, copying, imitating. At best, the president who would be king is now known for pastiche.
   

The irony, of course, is that nothing about the Barack Obama slowdown has come from outside him: there is nothing "Karl Rove" about Mr. Obama's bad news. He has become his own worst enemy. Yes, I think that a shift in the polls against him could be traced to revelations of clear pro-Democrat bias evident in the media when the media chose to ignore John Edwards' extra-marital affair and his therefore hubristic bid for the White House; the media were profoundly derelict in their duties, and enough people were disabused of their hopes the media played fair that such disillusioned folks were affecting the polls. Irrespective of that bad bit of luck, Senator Obama has done himself no favors. He has blundered, faltered; his gaffes are his own.

Contrary to what I asserted in an earlier post, this is far, far worse than misspelling potato. Actually, spelling potato is probably more difficult than simply saying, "I saw in a Tom Toles' cartoon earlier this week..."

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