THE OBAMA BS

works like sorcery with left wing journalists, who see a magic pony in every steaming Obama speech.   But when you move from Democrats with bylines to actual voters, you find people in the post-Wright world are no longer mis-directed by the Obama's slight of hand, and see Obama for what he is, another politician piling the rhetoric higher and wider as his needs change from here to there.  So says Mark Steyn.  Worth quoting:

[Obama's] Philly speech is emblematic of his most pressing problem: the gap - indeed, full-sized canyon - that's opening up between the rhetorical magic and the reality. That's the difference between a simulacrum and a genuinely great speech. The gaseous platitudes of hope and change and unity no longer seem to fit the choices of Obama's adult life. Oddly enough, the shrewdest appraisal of the senator's speechifying "magic" came from Jeremiah Wright himself. "He's a politician," said the reverend. "He says what he has to say as a politician. ... He does what politicians do."

The notion that the Amazing Obama might be just another politician doing what politicians do seems to have affronted the senator more than any of the stuff about America being no different from al-Qaida and the government inventing AIDS to kill black people. In his belated "disowning" of Wright, Obama said, "What I think particularly angered me was his suggestion somehow that my previous denunciation of his remarks were somehow political posturing. Anybody who knows me and anybody who knows what I'm about knows that - that I am about trying to bridge gaps and that I see the - the commonality in all people."

Funny how tinny and generic the sonorous uplift rings when it's suddenly juxtaposed against something real and messy and human. As he chugged on, the senator couldn't find his groove and couldn't prevent himself from returning to pick at the same old bone: "If what somebody says contradicts what you believe so fundamentally, and then he questions whether or not you believe it in front of the National Press Club, then that's enough. That's - that's a show of disrespect to me."