Coincidences on Comedy Central

Though The Daily Show and The Colbert Report usually riff on the same events in a news cycle, it's surprisingly rare that they use the same jokes on any given night. But this week, it happened two nights in a row.

On Wednesday, The Daily Show parodied the trend of using the blizzard as proof that global warming is a hoax. Their bit climaxed with Jason Jones assuming that because it was dark outside, the sun had disappeared forever. Jon Stewart patiently explained that Jones was simply experiencing 'nighttime':

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Unusually Large Snowstorm
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Health Care Crisis

Colbert used the same premise to surmise that since it was dark outside 'soon all our crops will die and it's only a matter of time before the Mole People emerge from the center of the Earth to enslave us in Forvernight':

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
We're Off to See the Blizzard
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Skate Expectations

Last night, The Daily Show poked fun at the GOP for referring to Obama's televised bipartisan health care summit as 'a trap'. They did one of their trademark montages of various pundits reciting the talking point, concluding with Admiral Akbar ordering the retreat in Return of the Jedi:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
The Apparent Trap
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Health Care Crisis

A half hour later, Colbert used the same exact gag in The Wørd:

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
The Word - Political Suicide
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Skate Expectations

What Are We Fighting For?

Obama's candidacy would have never made it past Iowa if he had not made this speech in October of 2002:

I don’t oppose all wars...What I am opposed to is a dumb war. What I am opposed to is a rash war. What I am opposed to is the cynical attempt by Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz and other arm-chair, weekend warriors in this Administration to shove their own ideological agendas down our throats, irrespective of the costs in lives lost and in hardships borne.

What I am opposed to is the attempt by political hacks like Karl Rove to distract us from a rise in the uninsured, a rise in the poverty rate, a drop in the median income — to distract us from corporate scandals and a stock market that has just gone through the worst month since the Great Depression.

That’s what I’m opposed to. A dumb war. A rash war. A war based not on reason but on passion, not on principle but on politics.

What's the principle behind Afghanistan at this point?

Protecting a Chinese copper mine?

Capturing Osama bin Laden?

By his own 2002 criteria, Afghanistan can't be judged as anything but a war of passion and politics at this point, rather than principle and reason.

Hopefully his meditations today on the sacrifices of American citizens in wars of both types will help him realize (as usual) Joe Biden is right.

Obama At Hiroshima

Two competing perspectives from Japan:

Obama, as U.S. president, does not have to, and should not, visit Hiroshima and Nagasaki. If he does, then Japanese leaders must at least pay official visits to Pearl Harbor to apologize for killing innocent civilians there and for actually starting the war. -- MASANOBU SAITO

If Obama were to speak from Hiroshima (as no other sitting U.S. president ever has), this would allow the entire world to imagine a future no longer held hostage by fears of cold war, nuclear winter, or nuclear terrorism. As Obama has stated, political will and support for a nuclear-free world first requires imagination. An address from Hiroshima would be bold, historic and compelling.

Obama's groundbreaking April 5 speech in Prague — mentioned by many speakers at memorial events in Nagasaki and Hiroshima this past summer and widely reported in the Japanese media — shows just how closely attuned he is to the essence of Hiroshima's viewpoint -- JOHN EINARSEN

While I agree with the first author that Obama has no obligation to go to Hiroshima, a visit there certainly wouldn't require reciprocation by Japanese leaders. The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are not morally equivalent to the attack on Pearl Harbor, and moral equivalency is well beside the point.

I'm more inclined to agree with the second author. A visit to those sites would underscore his seriousness about abolishing nuclear weapons. (It would also prompt howls of indignation from the right that every time Obama goes overseas he apologizes for America, but they'll do that no matter what.)

Musical Tastes Are So Revealing...

It was an astute music critic for Stockholm's edition of Metro that called the Nobel for Obama in this morning's edition.

He noticed that Will & Jada Smith were hosting the gala concert in honor of the Nobel laureates and figured it was no coincidence. He also noticed that the other performing artists included several Obama favorites. So he wrote a piece saying Obama would win and placed a $150 bet on his conclusion. He ended up winning $7,000.

The Black Crowes, "Good Morning Captain"

(Helluva way to wake up, huh?)

The Real Legacy of Hillarycare

The standard takeaway from the Hillarycare debacle is that such a large scale policy can't originate from behind closed doors in the White House. By not consulting with the Hill and throwing elbows to anyone who interfered, Hillary doomed her bill to failure.

It's a good theory, but Dick Cheney, who's got the sharpest elbows in Washington, did the same thing with Bush II's energy policy and got what he wanted. Closed doors and cronyism are well nigh best practices in D.C.

Unfortunately, Obama's let Congress take the lead on the bill, priding himself on having learned from Hillarycare's defeat. This has set him up for another debacle, like the stimulus bill. As Camille Paglia put it this morning:

...the monstrous stimulus package with which this administration stumbled out of the gate will prove to be Obama's Waterloo. All the backtracking and spin doctoring in the world will not erase that major blunder, which made the new president seem reckless, naive and out of control of his own party, which was in effect dictating to him from Capitol Hill.

When you let Congress draft a bill of this magnitude, you are ceding your mandate to a sea of micro-constituencies that have no vested interest in genuine reform. The real problem, however, is the notion that a massive bill is needed in the first place.

That's the real legacy of Hillarycare: maximalism doesn't work.

Passing a bill that would provide the massive overhaul that our health care system needs would require a mandate far greater than Obama will ever have. The best approach would be the incremental one. Pass an insurance requirement. Build on the electronic records initiative championed by both Hillary and Newt. Create stronger consumer protections. Take baby steps, and we'll all end up in a better place than where we are now.

All Obama has to do is look back 4 months to see what a gargantuan bill generated by Pelosi's Congress will do for him.

Meet the New Boss, Same As the Old Boss

The change, it had to come
We knew it all along
We were liberated from the foe, that's all
And the world looks just the same
And history ain't changed
'Cause the banners, they'd all flown in the last war 
It's too easy to dump on Obama right now. He's had another awful week, scurrying away from campaign promises about gay rights, detainee abuse, and military commissions. He also aggressively began to lower expectations for health care reform, going from this:

I am absolutely certain that, generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless, this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.

to this:

We have, historically, a tradition of employer-based health care...and you've got a system that's currently in place...We don't want a huge disruption.

But the man is just making the necessary shift from soaring campaign oratory to mundane policy implementation. Compromises will always need to be made. Saving a political fight like 'Don't Ask/Don't Tell' for a day when you're less overwhelmed isn't the same thing as breaking a campaign promise.

Odds are that 'history ain't changed', but Obama shouldn't be a genuine cause for disappointment to any of his supporters yet.

Congress, on the other hand, has nowhere to hide. During the GOP's reign, the House Ethics committee was a sad punchline. Stripped of a quorum by Denny Hastert, it sat idle, like the FEC. The ethical black hole that was the Republican Congress functioned with impunity until John McCain came along with his relatively obscure committee on Indian Affairs. In 2006 and in 2008, the Democrats were handed back their majority in the belief that they would change things for good.

Instead, they are busy furthering the notion that Congress is incorrigible. The Democrats are dragging their feet when it comes to investigating their own. My Congressman, Charlie Rangel, still chairs the Ways and Means Committee despite a myriad of ethics violations. Jack Murtha has a lengthy history of corruption, but he continues to evade scrutiny, not to mention Jane Harman.

Where the Democratic Congress should remain on the offensive, they have shifted to the defensive. Jim Clyburn was reduced this week to threatening fellow Democrats against voting for an investigation of Murtha. Unless they're interested in losing their majority, this is not what the Democrats should be seen doing. In 2009, CYA means taking on scofflaws like Murtha and Rangel, not protecting them. America is tired of 300-lb men taking bribes and getting away with it.

While Obama can get away with punting on issues like Gitmo ('we'll fix it in a year'), Congress doesn't have that luxury on ethics. They are taking baby steps right now, and if they're interested in being a majority again in 2010, they need to start taking some giant leaps. Their poster girl just spent the whole week looking like a shifty Nixon in front of the cameras, needlessly digging herself a hole over CIA briefings. They can't keep this up. Something's gotta give, and if history is any lesson (which it always is), they'll be swept out of power unless they get serious about cleaning house. No one wants to get fooled again.

He Didn't Start The Fire (But It's His To Put Out)

Robert Gibbs gave an admirably nimble response to the concern that his brand new administration is trying to do too much in the face of such a massive banking crisis. He compared the country's plight to a house that's on fire, and joked that you wouldn't ask the fire department to put out only specific parts of the blaze. You just want the fire out.

True.

But his metaphorical logic comes up short on one key point. Again, staying with the fire metaphor, if you look at the National Fire Protection Association's standard #1710, which deals with the protocol for the 'Deployment of Fire Suppression Operations', the problem quickly becomes clear:

5.2.1.1* On-duty fire suppression personnel shall be comprised of the numbers necessary for fire-fighting performance relative to the expected fire-fighting conditions. These numbers shall be determined through task analyses that take the following factors into consideration:

(1) Life hazard to the populace protected
(2) Provisions of safe and effective fire-fighting performance conditions for the fire fighters
(3) Potential property loss
(4) Nature, configuration, hazards, and internal protection of the properties involved
(5) Types of fireground tactics and evolutions employed as standard procedure, type of apparatus used, and results expected to be obtained at the fire scene

-- NFPA 1710

Our current 'On-duty fire suppression personnel' consists of one guy:



That lonely name on the Treasury Department's website is Tim Geithner. It is abundantly clear to anyone with a TV that Geithner is stretched beyond his capacity. He does not have the resources to provide even a halfway decent response to a fire, let alone the several that are raging across our economy at the moment.

And Geithner's problems are Obama's problems. Much as I like Obama (especially how he plays small ball), he may well be sealing his fate in these first few weeks by not focusing all of his efforts on putting out this fire in the banking industry. Like all newly elected Presidents, he has embraced the mirage of political capital. By way of buzzkill, he need only look back 4 years to when Bush declared a non-existent mandate which he promptly squandered on a Quixotic attempt to privatize Social Security. He was a lame duck before his second town meeting.

Health care can wait. Education reform can wait. Everything. Can. Wait.

Our Federal Reserve just dumped Weimar-esque amounts of currency into the economy because of Obama's lack of focus. We spent the past week talking about garroting AIG staff with piano wire. The House has channeled the collective outrage into a bill of attainder. The political chatter next week will certainly center around Timothy Geithner's ability to stay on at Treasury, and none of this will inch us any closer toward the exit of our current crisis.

Obama needs to summon the strength that eludes him most: practicality. Instead of talking about food policy (which was the subject of his last weekly address), he should actually go back and listen to how plainly FDR spoke in his Fireside Chats. Skip the flowery rhetoric, skip the nuanced long-term outlook, and hunker down on concrete details. Explain the AIG collapse, apologize for the bonuses, promise to work ceaselessly to get a functioning Treasury Department in place and restore the vitality of the American banking system.

His rival in the election sealed his fate when he notoriously 'suspended his campaign' to return to Washington to focus on a solution to the banking crisis. That was half a year ago. If Obama can echo McCain's sentiment that the fundamentals of our economy are strong (which they are), perhaps he can also embrace the wisdom of actually shifting into crisis mode. The collateral damage of idiotic acts of Congress and blathering talking heads is unimportant, but in order to keep it strictly collateral, he has to actually address the crisis head-on. If he doesn't, Obama will be a lame duck faster than his predecessor, and the country will be on a fast track to even greater calamity.

Harlem Is Happy Tonight!!

As soon as the networks declared Obama the winner, the cheers on the street started wafting up to my apartment. (The news choppers had already been circling for about an hour) Ever since I was a kid watching Jesse Jackson at the Democratic convention, I've been waiting to see a black President, and as fate would have it, I happen to live smack in the middle of Harlem when that historic day finally happened.

So, I walked the few blocks over to Adam Clayton Powell Boulevard to mingle with the revelers. It was an electric moment. Usually, when you walk on 125th Street, you pass lots of people arguing, lots of incense and bootleg vendors, but not a lot of smiling people. Tonight, everyone was smiling. The street which usually seems hard and dirty was buoyant. A lot of people were crying. One guy just walked right up to me and hugged me.

Forgive the shakiness of the camera, but the audio speaks for itself. Harlem is one very happy place tonight:

Vote McCain!

One of the most isolating positions for a musician or an academic is to openly admit to being a conservative. I have had wonderful working relationships turn ice cold and even caused a cocktail to be dropped in astonishment once upon announcing that I was a conservative.

The loneliness of my political bent is exacerbated by two things. First, I am a political junkie, devouring every news cycle as if it were my last. Second, my field tends to attract not just liberals, but far-left liberals. The combination of impassioned fellows like Darcy Argue (whom I admire) and my own addiction to political news makes for an unstable mix. If I had no interest in politics, it wouldn't be difficult to ignore the politics of my peers, or tempting to engage them in a discourse. But I inevitably take the bait, and feel the worse for it afters. I just can’t help myself; so, here goes:

Vote McCain!



I have grown weary of this Presidential race which began nearly 2 years ago. One of the great pleasures of being on tour since August was not having the opportunity to follow the news as closely as I would at home. When McCain suspended his campaign, it struck me as the big October Surprise of 2008, and it seemed like he'd mishandled the moment. As we enter the last week of this interminable campaign, it seems like everyone is shifting into neutral, and Obama's election is a foregone conclusion.

I've written before about how little regard I have for Obama. I find him supercilious, and the one reason I would vote for him is the one reason we're not supposed to: his race. As much as I think it would be a mistake to elect him to the Presidency, I will be happy as a clam to see a black man of African Muslim heritage presiding over the White House. Truth be told, I think Hillary's election would have been the more transgressive move, and out of all of the candidates, on both sides, she was my first choice.

Fire-breathing, emasculating, far-left Hillary?!

Yep.

She's my Senator, and when she ran for office in 2000, I couldn't have been more opposed to her candidacy. However, over 8 years in the Senate, she's demonstrated an extraordinary capacity to work across party lines and on behalf of her constituents. She's a serious political thinker and an exceptionally hard worker. The country would be lucky to have her as President.

But right from the get-go, Hillary was a favorite target of both the left and the right. The Daily Kos and Huffington Post were behind Obama from the beginning, and Hillary was the whipping boy for millions of disgruntled liberals. It was no fun to watch her lose to Obama, which brings me back to McCain.

While most of the vitriol on the left seems reserved for Palin (which strikes me as odd, since she's as much of a cream puff as Obama is), McCain has come in for his fair share. Like Hillary before him, he has been outfoxed by Obama's campaign, and in the face of a tough, smart opponent, he has withered. Since he’s no longer his own best advocate, I do feel it's worth pointing out what an extraordinary figure John McCain is. It’s become fashionable to dump on the guy, and that just violates my sense of fairness.

For conservatives, Bush II has been a nightmare. We believe in smaller government. On every front, Bush II has violated our core principles. He's spent money like a drunken sailor, and right before he left office, he whipped out the credit card one last time to rack up another $700 billion (and counting) in federal debt. He's run headlong into an ill-conceived nation building project, and he's cynically proposed amending the Constitution to prohibit hyper-specific social behaviors.

In the eight years of this God-awful administration, its most vocal opponent has been John McCain. When Donald Rumsfeld was still stubbornly trying to 'transform' the military amidst a two-front war, McCain was calling for his head. While Bush was busy redacting government reports to eliminate evidence of global warming, McCain was pushing for caps on carbon emissions. And perhaps most heroically, when his party was knee-deep in corrupt excess, it was McCain who exposed the extent of their misdeeds with his investigation into Jack Abramoff through his Committee on Indian Affairs.

During the primaries, McCain's candidacy was deader than dead. At one point, political blogs were mocking him by posting pictures of him carrying his own luggage, but he soldiered on and that's always been part of what I admire about him. (It's also what I found endearing about Hillary: her ability to keep her game face on in spite of the most withering criticism.) When McCain made egregious ethical errors early in his Senate career, he learned from his mistakes and became a tireless proponent of campaign finance reform. When all of the political will in this country was focused on getting out of Iraq as quickly as possible, he never swayed from his stance that more (not less) troops were needed to keep casualties down (he was right, btw). When his party was foaming at the mouth to kick all of the illegal immigrants out of the country, he went all in on a politically reasonable solution which nearly killed his candidacy. When Senate Democrats were threatening to go nuclear over Bush's judicial appointments, McCain was in the thick of the bipartisan negotiations to avoid a political meltdown.

Barack Obama has not been similarly tested and has avoided taking any politically risky stances. While there's no reason to suspect that he will wilt in the face of adversity, there's also no evidence to suggest that he won't. Therein lies the issue. He has no credentials to speak of, and that seems to me be an awfully big risk, especially when his opponent has all the bona fides one could ever desire in a President.

The next President will face an ungodly federal debt, a war in Iraq and Afghanistan, and most likely, will preside over the transition of the US out of its role as the sole superpower. John McCain will be an able hand at the wheel in such tough times. He has proven his mettle time and again, and I think the country would do well to elect him.

Truthfully though, I wish we could fast forward to next Tuesday and be done with this whole thing and let whoever the next President is get down to the business of cleaning up after Bush II.

I Can't Believe I'm Not Bitter

Steve Smith, who singlehandedly made us buy tickets for Satyagraha, linked to Robert Reich's take on Bittergate, which is a hoot, because it steps into the same sinkhole Obama did.

It is all well and good for a liberal egghead to dig into the numbers, and Reich is very good at that, but what he and Obama fail to dispell in their protestations is the sense that they simply cannot grasp that people have a genuine attachment to guns, God and ethnic bias.

Liberals have an execrable instinct to explain away these attachments as some kind of dysfunction, induced by stimuli which their candidacy is meant to erase. To them, cultural conservatism is a disease to be cured.

Who cares if Reich takes the bait? Someone has to.

But Obama can't afford to go near this ever again. Just swallow the fact that you don't get Middle America, dude, and go back to sloganeering.

The more you try to sip a beer, bowl or talk your way out of this one, the more you look like a hapless member of the liberal elite.

That is pure, red meat to the GOP:

ANABlog Bashes MSM

A while back, one of our favorite bloggers, Marc Geelhoed, pined for a little Hunter S. Thompson in this campaign cycle. He pointed out that despite the wealth of material in this election, the media coverage has been downright eyeball glazing.

Nothing encapsulates that more than an appearance by the total limpdick that Rolling Stone has allowed to ape Thompson for the past few years. Matt Taibbi turns up every now and then on TV, which only reminds us that he's trying even harder than it seems when you read his columns. In person, he comes off as a reasonably-minded preppie, which makes the fire he breathes in print seem all that much more artificial. In private, he's probably not rabidly anti-Clinton or anti-GOP at all.

But Taibbi's not the only douchebag covering this election who likes to get hopped up on nothing harder than Red Bulls and toss grenades into their copy. Chris Matthews never met a boxing analogy he didn't like, and Keith Olbermann wants to be Edward R. Murrow so bad that it's surprising he doesn't broadcast Countdown in black and white.

Take today's big kerfuffle: The Pelosi Letter.

A bunch of Clinton donors didn't like what she had to say about superdelegates going with the popular vote; so, they wrote her a letter. Now, it is a perfectly ordinary letter from a group of donors to a politician asking her to bear their point of view in mind.

However, you wouldn't know that from the headlines, which have raised sensationalism to new lows:

'Top Clinton Backers Threaten Pelosi' (US News)

'Clinton backers warn Pelosi on superdelegate rift' (Reuters)

'Hillary Campaign Didn't Disavow Donor Letter To Pelosi' (TPM)

'Obama Camp Hammers Letter To Pelosi As "Inappropriate"' (TPM)

The coverage of this mundane little story typifies the media's default tone for every moment of this campaign. Other favorite headline verbs: 'bash', 'rip', 'slam', and 'slug'.

As Marc pointed out, this is all a very dim echo of Gonzo journalism, which got woven into the mainstream media so slowly and effortlessly that it's easy to forget how revolutionary it really was. Guys like Taibbi think littering their copy with f-bombs gussies it up enough to call it Gonzo, but what none of these pantywaists get is that Hunter actually had profound insights about the process.

These jerkwads are just ornamenting standard political beat stories with coarse language. Hunter used the vernacular to cut to the core of the matter:

"There is nothing in McGovern’s campaign, so far, to suggest that he understands this kind of thing. For all his integrity, he is still talking to the Politics of the Past. He is still naïve enough to assume that anybody who is honest & intelligent—with a good voting record on “the issues”—is a natural man for the White House.

But this is stone bullshit. There are only two ways to make it in big-time politics today: One is to come on like a mean dinosaur, with a high-powered machine that scares the shit out of your entrenched opposition (like Daley or Nixon)…and the other is to tap the massive, frustrated energies of a mainly young, disillusioned electorate that has long since abandoned the idea that we all have a duty to vote. This is like being told you have a duty to buy a new car, but you have to choose immediately between a Ford and a Chevy."

Unlike McGovern, Obama understands perfectly well that he's taking Door Number Two in Hunter's scenario. Can't reach working class voters in Pennsylvania? Well, then push to register every last college student you can in the state!

And for those who still think that 'Yes We Can' and 'We are the Change that We've Been Waiting For' is about anything but Barack Obama's unbridled ego, Hunter has a bucket of cold water for them too:

"…a man on the scent of the White House is rarely rational. He is more like a beast in heat: a bull elk in the rut, crashing blindly through the timber in a fever for something to fuck. Anything! A cow, a calf, a mare—any flesh and blood beast with a hole in it. The bull elk is a very crafty animal for about fifty weeks of the year: his senses are so sharp that only an artful stalker can get within a thousand yards of him…but when the rut comes on, in the autumn, any geek with the sense to blow an elk-whistle can lure a bull elk right up to his car in ten minutes if he can drive within hearing range.

The dumb bastards lose all control of themselves when the rut comes on. Their eyes glaze over, their ears pack up with hot wax, and their loins get heavy with blood. Anything that sounds like a cow elk in heat will fuse the central nervous systems of every bull on the mountain. They will race through the timber like huge cannonballs, trampling small trees and scraping off bloody chunks of their own hair on the unyielding bark of the big ones. They behave like sharks in a feeding frenzy, attacking each other with all the demented violence of human drug dealers gone mad on their own wares.

A career politician finally smelling he White House is not much different from a bull elk in the rut. He will stop at nothing, trashing anything that gets in his way; and anything he can’t handle personally he will hire out—or, failing that, make a deal. It is a difficult syndrome for most people to understand, because few of us ever come close to the kind of Ultimate Power and Achievement that the White House represents to a career politician."

While Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72 is far from necessary reading, it is still a bracing look into the political process, and when placed aside the impotent reportage of '08, it leaves us jonesing for some Gonzo.

Perhaps most indispensable of all, is the 'July' chapter, wherein a 28-year old Rick Stearns explains to Hunter how he and Gary Hart navigated the byzantine credential rules of the party to insure McGovern's nomination at the convention in Miami Beach.

The Democrats bring this shit on themselves with an unstinting devotion to fairness, which inevitably leaves its intended beneficiaries feeling royally screwed over. They've set up a system where neither Barack or Hillary can win the delegates necessary for the nomination.

So, eager young staffers on those campaigns ought to get a copy of Thompson's book and brush up on the art of maneuvering on the convention floor. It might just win their bull elk the White House.

In Living Colour

Most of our fellow new music bloggers seem to fervently support Obama, and more than a few have posted rapturously about this video.

We're wondering if we're the only ones who find it creepy and incoherent? With everyone talking or singing over the words, they are hard to understand, and the clip reeks of a cult of personality, which doesn't usually bring about the type of change these celebs have in mind.

Being Barry

It's been fun to watch the Chauncey Gardiner meme gathering steam as does Obama. The similarities between the two are indeed striking.

Both characters rush to enormous heights from the humblest beginnings at rather a breakneck speed. Chauncey is a completely empty vessel, and it is tough to think of a more vacuous major candidate than this fellow who launched his Presidential campaign just two years into his first Senate term.

Gail Collins dissects the Obama phenomenon expertly:

Barack Obama turns out to have a positive genius for making moderation sound exciting and is perhaps the only politician in American history who can get a crowd all worked up with a call to politeness. "We can disagree without being disagreeable," he said in his New Hampshire farewell, drawing a roar of approval.

The imbecile Gardiner knows absolutely nothing beyond gardening, but his simplistic declarations of fact are interpreted as gauzy aphorisms in the Obama vein. When he first meets the President, Chauncey is asked whether or not the country can stimulate economic growth with temporary incentives, the bewildered moron replies:

In a garden, growth has its season. There is spring and summer, but there is also fall and winter. And then spring and summer again...

To which the President responds, "I must admit, that is one of the most refreshing and optimistic statements I've heard in a very, very long time."

Six months before Obama entered the Presidential race Andy Martin had already called out the parallel:

Chauncey Gardner is a blood brother to Obama. Platitudes, bunkum, snake oil; Gardner and Obama share a common parent.

But it's not just the inane fluff which passes as the 'Politics of Hope' that mirrors Chauncey (and the 'POH' most certainly is inane):

"In fact that is our challenge to be hopeful about the future and recognize the challenges we face are not insoluble. (voice rising) Don't let people tell you we can't solve the problems of America. They are all problems that we can solve once we make a determination that we're gonna solve them. Once we have a sense of urgency that they need to be solved, we can fix what ails us here in America."

Many of the dramatic beats of their stories are identical, starting with their very names.

Chauncey's real name is Chance, but when he introduces himself to power as 'Chance the gardener', it is heard as 'Chauncey Gardiner', and the name sticks. When he's given the opportunity to correct people, he acquiesces and insists, "Chauncey is fine". Obama is understandably loathe to point out his full name, which conflates two of America's favorite bad guys (one letter away from Osama and a middle name shared with the dictator we just deposed). He's so happy to just identify himself with an 'O' (not unlike Oprah) that when his middle name is mentioned, he actually considers it an attack (we're looking at you Bob Kerrey).

Chauncey goes on to become a media darling, though he clearly has 'rice pudding between his ears' as his childhood caretaker points out. During a TV interview, he is asked about rising unemployment and responds, "In a garden, things grow - but first some things must wither," completely unaware that his comments are being taken metaphorically.

Obama's no imbecile, but he is happy to trot out clichés like quoting the Declaration of Independence in his career-making speech at the '04 convention. He might as well have opened his speech with Webster's definition of 'vapid'.

The final shot of Hal Ashby's 1979 film is of Chauncey walking on water, and Obama has certainly been lavished with plenty of Christ metaphors. No less than Oprah herself pronounced, "I do believe he's the one."

Finally, there is Barack's tendency to duck difficult issues by not voting and allowing himself to be marked 'present'. It's this same trait that defines Chauncey's rise to dizzying heights. As he is walking on water in that final scene, his powerful acquaintances are busy deciding that he should become the next President. All those powerful people who elevate Chauncey, this lost and confused fool, simply see in him what they want to see. His enormous success is achieved simply by dint of Being There.