{"id":3016,"date":"2012-10-04T21:54:50","date_gmt":"2012-10-05T02:54:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/?p=3016"},"modified":"2012-10-05T21:44:29","modified_gmt":"2012-10-06T02:44:29","slug":"has-obama-lost-heart","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/?p=3016","title":{"rendered":"Has Obama Lost Heart?"},"content":{"rendered":"

After watching the first Presidential candidate debate last night, the thing that comes to my mind, along with thousands if not millions of other would-be pundits, is whether Barack Obama still really wants to be the President of the United States. Many commentators did sense a lack of enthusiasm on his part in his performance against Mitt Romney last night. E.g., Ms Franke-Ruta in The Atlantic<\/a>. <\/p>\n

Andrew Sullivan said that Romney started reminding him of Ronald Reagan<\/a> during the debate. That briefly crossed my mind too last night. What was even more scary was Obama’s dispirited closing remarks about his not being a perfect man or a perfect President. (Back to Mr. Sullivan for a quick second, he also accused Mr. Obama of “political malpractice” in his debate performance.) This all reminded me of the incumbent President that Reagan beat in 1980, Jimmy Carter. I’m specifically thinking of a clip that I saw on American Experience<\/a> of a very exhausted Mr. Carter making a short speech to a campaign crowd in the early morning hours of Election Day. His closing words to the crowd were “help us”, spoken in a rather dejected, rather pathetic fashion . . . as though he already knew what was coming. In a way, I sensed that the soon-to-be-ex-President was saying “help ME”; and I also sensed that the best way to personally help this man was to lift the great burden of world leadship off his shoulders, let him have a long rest.<\/p>\n

Which is how things turned out. And after Jimmy Carter had that long rest, he returned to the public scene and did many, many good things for both our nation and the world overall. And he’s still not through. I don’t at all relish the idea of Mitt Romney in the White House; but Mr. Obama would probably make his greatest overall contribution to human-kind by going the route of James Earl Carter.<\/p>\n

PS, we saw another situation not long ago here in New Jersey where a dis-spirited Democratic incumbent (ex-Governor Jon Corzine) failed to hold off an energized Republican new-comer (now-Governor Chris Christie). Some people are energized by both political battles and real military battles (e.g., Winston Churchill, Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan), while others just don’t hold up (Carter, Corzine, and apparently, Hilary Clinton). Last night, it appeared that Barack Obama belonged to the latter group. We shall soon see if it was just a bad night, if he can somehow get his mojo back.<\/p>\n

Oh, my vote for the most naive review of last night’s debate goes to Gail Collins<\/a> at the NY Times. She seemed to be whistling past the graveyard, repeating the old saw about Presidential debates seldom making a difference. Meanwhile, her liberal friends at MSNBC (most notably Chris Matthews) were expressing their great angst<\/a> over how Obama had just thrown his entire campaign and his Presidency into the sewer!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

After watching the first Presidential candidate debate last night, the thing that comes to my mind, along with thousands if not millions of other would-be pundits, is whether Barack Obama still really wants to be the President of the United States. Many commentators did sense a lack of enthusiasm on his part in his performance […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3016"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3016"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3016\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3018,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3016\/revisions\/3018"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3016"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3016"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3016"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}