I shut off my Tabloid Friend's feed to my wall on Facebook a couple of days ago, because it had reached a level of shrillness that I didn't feel like dealing with anymore, attempting to match Republican hysteria point for point. And the party national conventions haven't even taken place yet! Both Obama and Romney are the candidates presumptive, without having been formally nominated. I keep hearing about how expensive this campaign is going to be, with ominous letters from the Obama machine warning that he'll be "the first president in modern history to be outspent in his re-election campaign, if things continue as they have so far." Obama outspent McCain in 2008, too -- does that mean that it's not the best candidate who wins, but the one with more money? I don't think the President's devotees want to think about that too much.
But I have other Obamabot friends who are still passing along the memes, if less mechanically and obsessively than Tabloid Friend; one of them who shared the image above. Four months to Election Day: it's going to be a long, hard pull.
It's not that I wish Obama's daughters anything but well. It's not their fault their father is president. But the moist, creepy doting on them that so many Obama devotees (most of them women, I think) indulge isn't balanced by any attention to issues or policy or reason. A few days I quoted an Obama loyalist who insisted that most voters base their choice on "tribal loyalties and misunderstood rumors," not on policy or rationality, as "we" wise elites do. But one thing that emerges from the battlegrounds of political debate is that any attempt to discuss policy or issues rationally (even away from TV cameras or the columns of the elite print media) will be met with furious denunciation and abuse. If anything, it seems to be educated, respectable, nice party members who base their votes purely on tribal loyalties and misunderstood rumors. Attention to issues is a usurpation by the mob, or perhaps by malignant outside agitators trying to stir up the mob, of the rights and privileges of those who are anointed to rule.
