If President Obama had been sitting in my chair last evening, he and his thin skin both would have been disappointed by the paltry debate audience.
Wouldn’t it be stimulating, I had thought, to watch the debate by lying down in a natural hotbed of Obama enthusiasm, a college campus?
Wrong.
Organizing for America, an Obama re-election group, invited like-minded persons to spend the 90 minutes in a sparkling 200-seat setting at West Los Angeles College. Owing to lack of enthusiasm for the former Messiah, 85 percent of the chairs went vacant.
Energy was so low Sherlock Holmes would have needed a month to unearth a speck. The two dozen persons, uniformly pro-Obama, acted as if they were obligated to be there.
What a disaheartening change from the first debate two weeks ago. On that bright, upbeat night, the fiery energy of an overflow, unanimously Obama crowd at the Eso Won bookstore in Leimert Park Village made it the most enjoyable outing I have experienced in months.
Bill Wynn, the affable President of the Culver City Democratic Club, and I were the first arrivals yesterday afternoon at West.
We also were practically the only ones visible when the program was scheduled to start. Two women had drifted in.
The pre-debate exercise was curious. Led by the oddest of all campus creatures, a left-wing professor – wow, a dinosaur – Olga Shewfelt gave a rigorous How to Vote presentation:
She raved about the beauty of Prop. 30, the school-funding tax, and she roared about the ugliness of Prop. 32, which would eliminate involuntary political party deductions from worker paychecks by labor unions and corporations.
Hmm. Whom Can We Blame?
In a state where not one Republican holds an office higher than assistant dog catcher, Prof. Shewfelt said that since 2008, “we have lost 450,000 community college students and, throughout the state, we have reduced the number of sessions we offer by 25 percent.”
Darned Republicans. Sounding as if she had just left a White House briefing, Prof. Shewfelt said those intolerable Republicans with their nasty rich friends have caused “the worst recession since the Great Depression.” Actually, it is the worst since Jimmy Carter left President Reagan with a mess to clean up in 1980. But what is 50 years between friends?
A winning vote on Prop.30, she said, would allow West to offer 120 more spring classes.
On Prop. 32, Prof. Shewfelt, president of the faculty union, entered through a side door. If it passes, she said “it will have a devastating effect on California’s 2.5 million union workers.”
Really? How?
Imaginatively, she argued that “all of us have (involuntary) payroll deductions, for Social Security, for medical benefits.” Why not include political contributions, too? Prof. Shewfelt wondered.
Since labor unions only contribute to Democrats, the presumption is that all workers are Democrats. Thus, they won’t mind.
Following that unerring logic and strict academic objectivity, I nominate Prof. Shewfelt to moderate the final debate on Monday evening.
It will be like taking Candy away from a baby, eh Barack?
