Blogito

Maureen Dowd, in perhaps her funniest column ever, explains Obama’s problem to us as she talks about the problem posed by Palin:

He’s a highly intelligent man with a highly functioning West Wing, and he’s likable, but he’s not connecting on the gut level that could help him succeed.

The animating spirit that electrified his political movement has sputtered out.

People need to understand what the president is thinking as he maneuvers the treacherous terrain of a lopsided economic recovery and two depleting wars.

Like Reagan, Obama is a detached loner with a strong, savvy wife. But unlike Reagan, he doesn’t have the acting skills to project concern about what’s happening to people.

Obama showed a flair for the theatrical during his campaign, and a talent for narrative in his memoir, but he has yet to translate those skills to governing.

Conveniently forgotten is the fact that Maureen’s crowd called Reagan the amiable dunce. Now the highly intelligent Obama is Reagan without the acting skills which he has yet to translate to governing.

Reagan, of course, actually HAD governing skills which had been honed not only through years of political infighting at the Screen Actor’s Guild but also two terms as governor of the nation’s largest state before it recently became the nation’s largest ward of the state thanks to another actor who proved to have a flair for the theatrical but...why is this refrain starting to sound familiar?...no actual experience.

What is it about having actual previous experience that is so difficult to understand?

I mean, when it comes to acting then Obama has it over both Arnold and Ronald hands down, he could win an Oscar as easily as he did a Nobel Prize but with considerably more justification.

It’s translating acting skills, the flair for the theatrical and the talent for narrative, into governing that is the hard part, if for no other reason than the fact that they, well, simply don’t translate.

But now, Maureen tells us, an actor who never got above the B-movie level, had the acting skills necessary to project concern which the highly intelligent Obama lacks.

I don’t think I’ve ever read a funnier twisting and turning justification for Obama’s failure, particularly when he won the election on the basis of charisma alone. He had no record upon which to run, no legislative triumphs to his name, not a single arrow in his quiver aside from personal charm. Today the only poll number to his credit above 50% is his personal charm.

If only, Gregg sobs, he had Sarah Palin’s executive experience, let alone Reagan’s.

To top this Sunday sundae off with the final cherry, Maureen sighs that now Obama has sputtered out in the animating spirit category. This on the same day that Sarah is seeing the print run of her book double and redouble as her animating spirit captivates the country as Obama’s once did.

Perhaps it’s her literary skills? Consider her opening paragraph, as recounted yesterday by Seth Goldberg:

“The apartment was small, with slanting floors and irregular heat and a buzzer downstairs that didn’t work, so that visitors had to call ahead from a pay phone at the corner gas station, where a black Doberman the size of a wolf paced through the night in vigilant patrol, its jaws clamped around an empty beer bottle.”

Other readers pounced like wolf-sized Dobermans on an intruder. One guffawed, “That sentence by Sarah Palin could be entered into the annual Bulwer-Lytton bad writing contest. It could have a chance at winning a (sic) honorable mention, at any rate.”

But soon, the original contributor confessed: “I probably should have mentioned that the sentence quoted above was not written by Sarah Palin. It’s taken from the first paragraph of ‘Dreams From My Father,’ written by Barack Obama.”

Obama, it would seem, now lacks the literary skills he once was lauded for as well as Reagan’s acting skills he apparently never achieved.

Just like the disastrous and anti-intellectual W., this Visceral One never doubts herself. The Cerebral One welcomes doubt. ...

Palin can be stupefyingly simplistic, but she seems dynamic. Obama is impressively complex but he seems static. ...

The Cerebral One may not welcome doubt, exactly, even as he attracts it. And what if he is actually statis but merely SEEMS impressively complex? Maureen tops this off for me with this:

If we could see a Reduced Shakespeare summary of Obama’s presidency so far, it would read:

Dither, dither, speech. Foreign trip, bow, reassure. Seminar, summit. Shoot a jump shot with the guys, throw out the first pitch in mom jeans. Compromise, concede, close the deal. Dither, dither, water down, news conference.

“To be, or not to be; that is the question: whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing end them?”

All the world’s a stage, they say, and if Obama cannot out-act Reagan then it’s time to give him the hook.

Californians had hoped they could overcome their dysfunctional system by electing an outsider, a former movie star, Arnold Schwarzenegger. He would slay the system, like the Terminator. But he couldn’t.

Mr. Obama was elected for similar reasons. People had hoped that his unique story, personality and speaking skills could bring the country together, overcome paralysis and deliver nation-building at home. A lot of the disappointment settling in among Obama voters today is prompted by their dawning realization that maybe, like Arnold, he can’t.

No, a lot of people who elected Obama are discovering that he plans on bringing them something quite different than what they expected when they voted for him. They don’t WANT the nation he intends to build here at home.

In one e-mail, the center's director, Phil Jones, writes Pennsylvania State University's Michael E. Mann and questions whether the work of academics that question the link between human activities and global warming deserve to make it into the prestigious IPCC report, which represents the global consensus view on climate science.

"I can't see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report," Jones writes. "Kevin and I will keep them out somehow -- even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!"

In another, Jones and Mann discuss how they can pressure an academic journal not to accept the work of climate skeptics with whom they disagree. "Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal," Mann writes.

"I will be emailing the journal to tell them I'm having nothing more to do with it until they rid themselves of this troublesome editor," Jones replies.

Don’t you just love the notion of ‘consensus’ being reached by redefining peer-review if necessary in order to keep, ah, non-consensus stuff out? Kind of reminds me of the ‘elections’ in some dictatorships in which the guy wins with 100% of the vote.

Mann, who directs Penn State's Earth System Science Center, said the e-mails reflected the sort of "vigorous debate" researchers engage in before reaching scientific conclusions. "We shouldn't expect the sort of refined statements that scientists make when they're speaking in public," he said.

Mann channels Orwell. Translation: “vigorous debate” means leaving you out of the debate entirely. “Refined” means it’s 99-and-44-100ths pure bullshit, not the ordinary crap.

"I can't see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report," Jones writes. "Kevin and I will keep them out somehow -- even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!"

"I will be emailing the journal to tell them I'm having nothing more to do with it until they rid themselves of this troublesome editor," Jones replies.

Mann channels Orwell. Translation: “vigorous debate” means leaving you out of the debate entirely. “Refined” means it’s 99-and-44-100ths pure bullshit, not the ordinary crap.

David S. Broder on the problem still facing legislators running for reelection next year:

The day after the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) gave its qualified blessing to the version of health reform produced by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Quinnipiac University poll of a national cross section of voters reported its latest results.

This poll may not be as famous as some others, but I know the care and professionalism of the people who run it, and one question was particularly interesting to me.

It read: "President Obama has pledged that health insurance reform will not add to our federal budget deficit over the next decade. Do you think that President Obama will be able to keep his promise or do you think that any health care plan that Congress passes and President Obama signs will add to the federal budget deficit?"

The answer: Less than one-fifth of the voters -- 19 percent of the sample -- think he will keep his word. Nine of 10 Republicans and eight of 10 independents said that whatever passes will add to the torrent of red ink. By a margin of four to three, even Democrats agreed this is likely.

That fear contributed directly to the fact that, by a 16-point margin, the majority in this poll said they oppose the legislation moving through Congress.

How The Science Gets Settled [Mark Steyn]

It all depends on how you look at it. From The Boston Herald:

In an embarrassing blow to the movement to combat global warming, hackers have posted hundreds of e-mails from a world-renowned British institute that show researchers colluding to exaggerate warming and undermine skeptics.

From The Guardian:

The alleged emails illustrate the persistent pressure some climatologists have been under from skeptics in recent years.

Yes, it's awfully stressful having to develop models to "hide the decline" in global temperatures, "balance the needs of the science and the IPCC", pressure scientific journals to exclude dissenting views, and delete (illegally) material requested under the Freedom of Information Act.