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Maureen Dowd says Christine O'Donnell, like Barack Obama, is "smart to think of politics in terms of passion and myth."

That is, Barack Obama, the presidential campaigner. As an actual President, the "passion and myth... are sorely missing." 

Obama?s bloodless rationality has helped spawn the right?s bloodletting of irrationality.

Now, there's an assertion! I agree that the blood is on the right, but I'm not seeing much rationality from anyone.

[Obama] has never shaken off that slight patronizing attitude toward the working-class voters he is losing now, the ones he dubbed ?bitter? during his campaign....

The insane have achieved political respectability while the sane act too good for it all. The irrational celebrate while the rational act bored and above-it-all.

Oh, my. This is all so Dowdesque. She gets multiple themes going, many mixed images, and she demands that you believe that she's tied them all together when she says she has. It's ironic here, because she's the one full of passionate intensity and low on rationality. What I just can't buy is that Obama is rational. He's phlegmatic. He always was. You can read that as rational, but it's irrational to do so.


I was just reading an old post of mine from April 2007 ? "Is Obama a gasbag?":

[I]f I didn't know who he was and that there was a crowd there, I would picture an old man slumped in an armchair, expatiating for the benefit of anyone unlucky enough to be within earshot. It's formless stream of consciousness. Oh, there is that theme of hope. The stream swirls back there at predictable intervals....

[R]eally, such drivel. Just listing a lot of issues and saying hope, hope, hope should not inspire real hope. I can't believe people are hearing this and thinking: brilliant rhetoric. "Intellectual slovenliness" is a much more apt phrase.

Yes, I know, I ultimately voted for him. Here's a post of mine from February 2008 explaining how I got from "gasbag" to the decision to vote for him in the Wisconsin primary. I can't really say that I was terribly rational.

Full post as published by Althouse on September 19, 2010 (boomark / email).