Posted by
skep41 on Sunday, October 24, 2010 1:09:30 PM
Its
been cloudy in LA recently. Light drizzle a lot of the time. Its only
the end of October and there's already been nearly a half-inch of rain
since the 'rainy season' began at the end of
September. In a lot of places a half-inch of rain in a month or so
would be cause for celebration but here people wander around wringing
their hands asking 'when is this going to
end?'
But
Thursday's weather report showed a gap in the clouds for Friday! The
news warned of massive traffic jams downtown because Obama's coming to
town! Most of the time when the prez shows up we only get the traffic
jam but never get to see him. California is usually a safe Demo state
and the national parties use it as a cash cow. They do fundraisers here
and ship the cash to the battleground states. Not this year. California
is a battleground state this year. Both Babs Boxer and Jerry Brown are
long past their 'sell by' date and even in this commie state the
granola-eaters are off their feed and much less likely to vote than
they were two years ago.
So Obama and the Dems announce an
open-to-the-public presidential speech at USC, about fifteen miles from
my house. I decided to go and my daughter Emily and her boyfriend Nate
decided to come along. We didnt want to take a car into the predicted
jam so we drove into Hollywood, parked and took the subway and a
shuttle-bus to the event. We went through security in pretty good time.
The
crowd was mainly USC students. There were a few always-scowling union
types, all with t-shirts identifying the various groups they were
associated with. I had had the foresight to wear my union t-shirt which
caused puzzlement on a few faces. The Animation Guild Local 839 was a
bit of an anomaly amongst all those SEIU and ASCME shirts and even
though I could easily drop twenty five pounds as union t-shirt wearing
types go I was svelte and skinny. What is it about union membership
that makes you bloat? Maybe there's some money in the stimulus bill to
study why that happens.
We
tried to find a spot where we could see the podium. The event was in a
quad, an open square,and whoever put it together hadnt considered the
crowd at all. Apparently Obama can only be photographed from one angle,
straight on. It makes sense when you consider that he has the two
teleprompter screens that he turns back and forth to read from. What
this means is that unlike every other event like this that I've ever
been to the press stands were erected dead center in the quad. This
blocked the view from a large part of the area and squashed the crowd
into two packed groups along the sides. The podium was low on the steps
of the building behind it. A bunch of people with Hope and Change signs
were lined up behind the podium. Nice for the press, bad for the crowd.
We
tried to get close but that was impossible so we finally found a little
rise where we could get a view of the speakers through the heads in the
crowd. By that time the show had started. They always lead off with the
local activists. These people mistake shouting for oratory. The males
bellow and the females attack your eardrums with shrill, high-pitched
cliches that are so stupid that you're embarrassed to be in a crowd
that isnt jeering at these idiots.
But the crowd wasnt listening
enough to jeer or cheer. They were milling around, yakking, throwing
the free water bottles around or just staring stupidly at each other.
Not focused on the Center For Childrens Prosperity founder's heartfelt
plea for more money from those evil rich people. Apparently the
clueless evil rich people like the student body of US

C
who are paying $40k per annum to party in the groves of academe and who
are just fine with their parents getting a big fat tax hike to support
The Center For Childrens Prosperity and their ilk. They must have
suspended classes that day to get this apple-cheeked,
fashionably-dressed crowd of kiddies. Do universities still have
classes on Fridays? Its an awful burden on the professors to not have a
three day weekend to rest up from the grueling four-hour days they put
in during the week and the students need some home time to download
their term papers off the internet.
Then a local rock band came
on. Fat white guys who did rock, rap, reggae...a wide range of styles,
all of it bad. Emily and Nate, hardcore concert-goers, had their
fingers in their ears. In the old days these buffoons would have been
described as 'schleppers'; noisy, upbeat and
awful! But they opened the real event. as the pain in our ears from the 'music' subsided the big names came on.
The
first speaker was Kamila Harris, the Dem candidate for Attorney
General, a woman so left wing that she had worn out her welcome in
San Francisco.
Thats left-wing. Her one aim in the campaign is to keep the Blue
Staters focused on the 'D' next to her name and ignorant of her
appalling record. The crowd treated her flat nasal whining with the
contempt it deserved. No applause, no nothing.
Next was Jerry
The Jerk (Jerry Brown to you out-of-staters) who has the same problem
as Harris; anyone who knows what kind of a left-wing, incompetent,
egotistical moron he is will be voting for his somewhat less liberal,
possibly less incompetent but equally egotistical opponent. These USC
kiddies were conceived long after Brown's disastrous two terms as
governor and are too busy downloading free music to pay any attention
to politics. Real Hope And Change types, Brown's core constituency. A
couple of people clapped.

They
should have had Jerry introduce Barbara Boxer but couldnt resist
turning it over to another shouting nonentity, Hilda Solis, who
completely lost the crowd within two seconds. But Babs arrived at the
podium at last and began her
rousing
rhetoric. Babs is short. Too short for that venue and no one thought to
bring a box for her to stand on. She was invisible to most of the crowd
and her speaking style is monotonous and boring. Every so often she
rises to an atonal squawk at the end of a sentence. Every word was a
twenty-five year old potboiler progressivist cliche. The crowd was
lost. Nobody came here to see any of these doofuses, of course, but
even minimal courtesy was breaking down.
Finally Babs wrapped up
and introduced The Man. The crowd perked up like the ears on a doberman
when it hears the burglar jumping the fence. He's here! The first burst
of actual enthusiasm occurred as El Presidente took his place between
the teleprompters. People were climbing the trees in the quad and the
crowd compressed forward. The speech began.
How did this guy
ever get a reputation as a good orator? He has Jesse Jackson's policies
but I've heard Jackson speak and now I've heard Obama speak and believe
me there is
NO comparison.
The speech itself would have been a challenge to someone of Jackson's
talents and was lead in the mouth of a much lesser speaker.
It
turns out that the car is in the ditch and was so stuck there by the
Bushies that when Obama got there he didnt have time to get the car out
of the ditch but you see that when you want to move a car forward you
put it in 'D' and backwards you put it in 'R'. The college-educated
crowd was easily able to grasp this taut metaphor but by that point
they werent listening.
OK dont listen to Kamila Harris

or Jerry
or Babs, that's understandable. But hadnt these people come to see
Obama? The biggest cheer he got was when he arrived, always the sign of
a bad show. In this milling crowd I was thinking about the driving
metaphor...if the Republicans had driven the car forward into the ditch
wouldnt putting the car in 'D' make it go
deeper into the ditch? That seems to be the direction we're moving in with Obama. But I digress.
The most interesting thing
about this whole speech was the complete lack of attention by the
crowd. All the pleas to vote and tell all your friends to vote fell on
deaf ears. I had gone to the first Tea Party rally on April 15th, 2009
and that small crowd, faced with what we all knew was the coming
disaster, was focused and as enthused as it could be faced with the
situation we were in. This Obama rally was nothing like that. This was
a freak show. The crowd was here to see the Prez, not to listen to
boring speeches. They saw him. That made them happy. But applause line
after applause line got sparse applause; laugh line after laugh line
got no laughs. This reminded me of a speech by Bob Dole I saw in the
1996 campaign. It was that bad.
I know this is anecdotal, that
I'm often wrong, but I smell Dem disaster. The people at this rally
were not filled with a grim resolve to go out and vote to save the
Obamunist agenda. They didnt even have enough resolve even to
listen
to Obama when he was standing there right in front of them. There was
no big traffic jam; the vast majority of the audience were USC students
out for a

lark. Will they vote? Not like 2008, you can be sure of that. The magic
is gone, the dream has failed. The ADHD electorate barely remembers two
years ago and they can clearly see the current failure. Obama's excuse
that things were so bad when he arrived and that the Dems have made
lots of progress fixing it got no applause at all, even from this
crowd. They havent fixed anything. On November 2nd they will get
skunked. Brown and Boxer will lose. The non-political default Democrats
will not show up. They dont even want to think about whats going on
around them. Bye bye Babs!