white... hope

From: FightingBlog

"This fantasy ran wild four years ago. Obama is 'probably the smartest guy ever to become president,' the presidential historian Michael Beschloss announced shortly after the November election. The then-candidate’s Philadelphia address on race and Jeremiah Wright was 'as great a speech as ever given by a presidential candidate,' a group of progressive luminaries declared in The Nation. Obama’s Dreams From My Father is quite possibly 'the best-written memoir ever produced by an American politician,' Time Magazine’s Joe Klein declared. 'He is not the Word made flesh,' Ezra Klein wrote of Obama’s rhetoric in The American Prospect, 'but the triumph of word over flesh, over color, over despair.'
     It’s easy to see why this kind of myth-making would infuriate Obama’s opponents. And so ever since the 2008 election, the right has embraced a sweeping counternarrative, in which the president’s eloquence is a myth and his brilliance a pure invention. Take away his campaign razzle-dazzle and his media cheering section, this argument goes, and what remains is a droning pedant, out of his depth and tongue-tied without a teleprompter.
     This is where [Newt] Gingrich comes in. Just as [John] Kerry’s candidacy represented an attempt to effectively out-patriot George W. Bush ('You have a war president? We have a war hero!'), the former speaker has skillfully played to the Republican desire for a candidate who can finally outsmart and out-orate Obama."
— Ross Douthat, The New York Times
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