KT, over at the Scratching Post, has written the article I wish I had. He makes the excellent point about the cocoon (or bubble if you will) in which Obama lives, along with the MSM. It has deprived him of the intellectual battle needed to sharpen his wit, leaving him mentally soft for the fight ahead. Now, he's not ready for the big leagues.Peggy Noonan also talks about the bubble journalists live in:
Let me say of myself and almost everyone I know in the press, all the chattering classes and political strategists and inside dopesters of the Amtrak Acela Line:
We live in a bubble and have around us bubble people. We are Bubbleheads. We know this and try to compensate for it by taking road trips through the continent -- we're on one now, in Minneapolis -- where we talk to normal people. But we soon forget the pithy, knowing thing the garage mechanic said in the diner, and anyway we weren't there long enough in the continent to KNOW, to absorb. We view through a prism of hyper-sophistication, and judge by the rules of Chevy Chase and Greenwich, of Cleveland Park and McLean, of Bronxville and Manhattan.
I think this gives Republicans an advantage; they are less likely to be in that mindset or lifestyle. When they had power for too long, it went to their heads and they started to act like arrogant Democrats, and look what happened to them in 2006.
Clive Crook at the Financial Times also makes a similar point about the Democrats (and by extension, the media) discussing their reaction to Sarah Palin's selection:
If only the Democrats could contain their sense of entitlement to govern in a rational world, and their consequent distaste for wide swathes of the US Electorate, they might gain the unshakeable grip on power they feel they deserve. Winning elections would certainly be easier – and Republicans would have to address themselves more seriously to economic insecurity. But the fathomless cultural complacency of the metropolitan liberal rules this out.
Maybe Obama will still win the election, but the country will be the worse off for the lack of challenge to his liberal orthodoxy.
FIN.
