{"id":17263,"date":"2012-10-09T14:47:53","date_gmt":"2012-10-09T19:47:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=17263"},"modified":"2012-10-09T16:42:38","modified_gmt":"2012-10-09T21:42:38","slug":"paul-wells-on-andrewsullivanammerung","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2012\/10\/09\/paul-wells-on-andrewsullivanammerung\/","title":{"rendered":"Paul Wells on “AndrewSullivanammerung”"},"content":{"rendered":"

In Maclean’s<\/em>, Paul “Inkless” Wells<\/a> has a look at Andrew Sullivan’s most recent panic attack over Barack Obama’s re-election chances and how his debate performance makes that task seem much harder now:<\/p>\n

The extended North American\/ Anglosphere Twittersphere is agog these days over the latest spectacle put on by Urblogger Andrew Sullivan, who edited The New Republic<\/em> in the days when paper was king and who has spent the past decade blogging, in succession, for (a) himself (b) Time<\/em> magazine (c) The Atlantic Monthly<\/em> (d) Tina Brown. Since 2007 Sullivan has been perhaps Barack Obama\u2019s leading gay British Republican supporter; he wrote a 2007 Atlantic<\/em> cover story explaining why Obama was \u201cnecessary\u201d to binding up the nation\u2019s wounds and a 2012 Newsweek<\/em> cover story asserting that Obama was about to become the most significant U.S. president since Reagan. (\u201cThe narrative writes itself. He will emerge as an iconic figure\u2026\u201d) About 6,000 times he has ended blog posts on Obama with the sentence-thing \u201cKnow Hope.\u201d<\/p>\n

But now comes Sully\u2019s crisis of confidence.<\/p>\n

He watched the same debate everyone else did last week; noticed, as many did, that the incumbent had a hard time of things, and then read yesterday\u2019s surprising Pew Center poll, which essentially showed Obama\u2019s support collapsing so rapidly he will soon owe Mitt Romney votes. [. . .]<\/p>\n

It is, in fact, entirely possible<\/em> that Obama blew the election with a single 90-minute display of I-didn\u2019t-know-this-would-be-on-the-exam. Certainly if he does lose, all the post-mortem tick-tocks will begin in Denver on the night of Oct. 3.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Wells also linked to Ezra Levant’s most recent article at Sun News<\/em><\/a>:<\/p>\n

Now we know why Barack Obama uses a teleprompter everywhere, even taking it once to a photo-op in an elementary school.<\/p>\n

Now we know why he hasn\u2019t had a press conference in months, preferring to go on entertainment shows like The View<\/em> (he told his fawning interviewers he is \u201ceye candy\u201d) and David Letterman\u2019s show (first question: How much do you weigh?).<\/p>\n

We know because of the shock of last week\u2019s presidential debate with Mitt Romney. The 60 million Americans who watched that debate had been told a hundred times that Obama was the smartest president since Jefferson, the greatest orator since Churchill. And they had been told that Mitt Romney was a heartless gazillionaire.<\/p>\n

What they saw was the opposite, for 90 excruciating minutes. When Obama didn\u2019t have a cue card or a teleprompter, when he couldn\u2019t simply skip questions he didn\u2019t like, or talk out the clock, he was a disaster.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Update<\/b>: Buzzfeed<\/em> has eight animated GIFs<\/a> that show Andrew Sullivan’s meltdown rather cleverly.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In Maclean’s, Paul “Inkless” Wells has a look at Andrew Sullivan’s most recent panic attack over Barack Obama’s re-election chances and how his debate performance makes that task seem much harder now: The extended North American\/ Anglosphere Twittersphere is agog these days over the latest spectacle put on by Urblogger Andrew Sullivan, who edited The […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[28,53,13],"tags":[158,188,806,310],"class_list":["post-17263","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-media","category-politics","category-usa","tag-barackobama","tag-electionwatch","tag-mittromney","tag-twitter"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-4ur","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17263","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17263"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17263\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17265,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17263\/revisions\/17265"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17263"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17263"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17263"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}