Obama-the-Empty-Suit Day

Funny how our noble punditoriate all manage to write the same story on the same day.

Yesterday, everyone was writing a Valentine to John McCain. Today it’s “Obama the Empty Suit”.

You might think this is shameful, or a sign of laziness. But I think it is the same phenomenon as the idea of the Japanese as one hundred million hearts beating as one.

The fact is that the same idea is always occurring to a bunch of people at the same time. You could look it up.

Let’s start with minor league John Hawkins.

If even Paul Krugman is willing to publicly admit that Barack Obama is a human featherball — a slick, smiling, substance-free empty suit who excites gullible dimwits by repeating the words "change," "unity," and "hope" over and over — then who am I, a mere conservative blogger, to disagree?

Or the rest of us sandlot players.

But then there is the magisterial big hitter hitting the same pitch.Charles Krauthammer. The most remarkable skill in the world is to get people to pay for something that’s available free, he suggests.

And now, in the most amazing trick of all, a silver-tongued freshman senator has found a way to sell hope. To get it, you need only give him your vote. Barack Obama is getting millions.

We old veterans would never be taken in by a chancer like that, now, would we?

Even steady base-hitter Mona Charen has noticed the Obama effect. Old wine, new bottle, she reckons, because when you strip the gassy rhetoric away, there’s just same-old same-old.

Much of his rhetoric is lighter than air — almost content-free. It’s the past versus the future, hope over fear, one nation not two, yes we can, turn the page, and so forth. But when you get past the music and really focus on the lyrics, Obama emerges as an utterly conventional, down-the-line liberal Democrat. He claims to be all about the future, but his policy ideas are about as modern as disco and the leisure suit.

Even Jonah Goldberg has surfaced from his book tour to claim that all this talk of unity and coming together was exactly what he has been writing about in Liberal Fascism.

How long will the spell last? Krauthammer reckons it has a ways to go.

My guess is that he can maintain the spell just past Inauguration Day. After which will come the awakening. It will be rude.

Hmm. Mr. Optimist.