The most extraordinarily revealing scene of the past weekend played out, unintentionally, on a red-faced Friday afternoon in San Jose.
Could not have happened to a nicer chap.
President Obama, perplexed, understandably embarrassed, fuming, was effectively marooned at a remote bus stop in the pouring rain, sans umbrella.
This was a delicious Seinfeld interlude.
It was as if his vaunted motorcade accidentally had driven off without him.
Or he had worn but one shoe to work.
Bewildered, he was scared scriptless.
Even though I am staunchly opposed to most of his policies, most of his invisible work habits, most of his interminable, escape-motivated cross-country and foreign travel plans, this time I felt a twinge of sympathy for him.
Ever since the scandals circling around the Obama Enemies List broke last month, the peripatetic President has been traveling with the desperation of a killer on the lam, to get his Daddy Loves His Citizen Family photo-ops in the newspapers. Last Thursday he was all over South Carolina. Flying as if he were the third Wright Brother, the panicky (They Can’t Pin Anything on Me) Prez overnighted – just like FedEx – to the West Coast. Before lunch, he parachuted into Santa Monica, where he almost had a multiple murder for dessert, clotting Westside traffic, his face wreathed in a benign smile. Dashing off to the Bay Area, lunch napkin in hand, presumably he had hoped not to leave fingerprints.
Bark and His Bite Both Silenced
Imitating an instant orphan when he reached the lonely podium in San Jose, poor Mr. Obama resembled a puppy whose master had wandered off for a toddy. Arf, he said, arf. No one should be allowed to get scorched in public the way the poor President was.
As if his shoes had been drenched in tough-skin, his perpetually fluttering tongue paralyzed by multiple paper clips, the usually poised Mr. Obama gave his rendition of a popsicle.
Froze in place.
He may as well have melted.
Did not know which way to turn.
His flustered speechwriters, you see, unbelievably had gaffed.
A now-jettisoned shlub had forgotten to post Mr. Obama’s speech, his 2,540th clichéd defense of ObamaCare.
This caused the cerebrally denuded President to mutely confess to his adoring minions that he truly is the emperor who has no clothes – without a how-to script clutched in his manicured fists.
So much for the inviolable six-year-old First Commandment of Obamaism: He owns a silver tongue.
Ain’t even silver-plated, Murgatroyd.
Thou shalt ‘fess the truth next time, pardner.
A century ago, William Jennings Bryan, the Ross Perot of his day, was the Democrat nominee for President every time an elected was called. He was known as a silver-tongued orator. Mr. Obama reminds me of WJB. He is just as well-spoken as Mr. Bryan is today as he lies in his grave.
Couldn’t Think up Anything
Even after fastidiously lip-synching 2,539 tightly scripted, boringly repetitious defenses of ObamaCare, the anguished guy frantically glanced left, right, south to his shoes, secularly praying for a miracle from heaven or hell, that a wandering waif might fly out of the ceiling and tell him what to say.
Until, at length, an aide lurched onto the stage, stumbled and leaned into camera range, thrusting a hard copy into Mr. Obama’s perspiring fingers, the President of the United States was as vocally stifled as a deaf student with the burping butterfly jitters.
Incapable of amateurishly ad-libbing, even the most rudimentary vamping, the difference between Mr. Obama and a corpse was the distinction between vertical and horizontal.
Now even liberals must realize:
The leader of our country, twice elected by impressive margins, is as incapable as Charlie McCarthy of expressing himself, in bare schoolboy language, unless armed with a script. He reads every word, in and out of parentheses.
With numbing regularity, Mr. Obama has rubber-stamped the Hollywood axiom that intelligence and awesome power are antithetical, as unrelated as Brad and Angelina.
