Now It All Makes Sense

As Kate McMillan writes at Small Dead Animals:

Now is the time at SDA when we juxtapose!

Carol Platt Liebau, March 2009 – [W]hen he was at the HLR you did get a very distinct sense that he was the kind of guy who much more interested in being the president of the Review, than he was in doing anything as president of the Review.

Michael Walsh, March 2011 – President Obama would be much more comfortable as a monarch without too many demanding duties, thus leaving him plenty of time for golf, hoops, trips to the winter palace in Hawaii, and, of course, vacations and down time.

Now it begins to make sense: “Barack Obama has been working in secret with conservative provocateur James O’Keefe since 2007,” someone named A. Barton Hinkle satirically writes at Reason:

[White House press secretary Jay Carney] said the scam entailed pulling together demographic, social, cultural, and policy characteristics to create the most exaggerated Democratic candidate possible without stepping over the line into caricature.

“By combining empty, touchy-feely slogans like ‘hope’ and ‘change’ with far-left-wing policy planks and presenting them in the person of a racial minority from a major Midwest city with an Ivy League background, we thought we might be able to make a good showing in Iowa and New Hampshire, maybe even capture the Democratic nomination,” Carney told reporters. “But the entire country? No. We never, ever for even a second imagined the American people would elect someone who had served only half a term in the U.S. Senate to be the leader of the entire free world.”

Obama won the presidency with 52.9 percent of the popular vote, defeating Republican nominee John McCain, who received 45.7 percent.

“All you guys in the press were so giddy about it,” Carney continued, “we couldn’t really just announce that the whole thing was a big fat joke, you know? I mean, how would that look?”

Contacted by phone, O’Keefe said he, too, was surprised the hoax had lasted as long as it did.

“I thought people would catch on in the early days, like with the clinging-to-guns stuff,” said O’Keefe, referring to an incident at a San Francisco fundraiser in which candidate Obama said small-town Americans “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them.”

O’Keefe said he also expected the ruse would be unmasked when Obama said that “under my plan of a cap-and-trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket,” and again when Obama claimed, “I’ve now been in 57 (U.S.) states,” with “one left to go.”

“We modeled the 57-states gaffe on Dan Quayle’s ‘potatoe’ mistake,” said O’Keefe, referring to a 1992 incident at a Trenton, N.J., elementary school in which then-Vice President Dan Quayle added an “e” to “potato.” “We figured Obama would become a national laughingstock like Quayle, (but we) underestimated the tendency of the press and the public to forgive mistakes by people they like.”