Busting Cokie's chops

BarackO, the skinny guy, a lightweight? McWrinkly Guy wants to have his own wife enter a topless beauty pageant in front of 50 thousand bikers because she was such a successful cheer leader in high school. But BHO supposedly lacks substance or gravitas of the political kind even though he definitively beat the crack Clinton machine in the primary. Does this feat not demonstrate good organizational skills, discipline, a solid business plan, tenacity and chutzpah? Did anyone put money, back then, on the unknown black guy with the funny name and a grandmother living in Kenya to beat Bubba’s wife, the former two term first lady and 2nd term Senator from New York with a formidable fund raising machine and a world wide face? I think not.

What, anygate, was Barack thinking back then? Maybe to get on the ticket if he finished well enough ahead of Kucinich and Mike Gravel. It’s hard to think now who might have really had a chance in that whole field and yet some in that field are being considered for the skinny guy’s veep. After Iowa, none of the other boys in the race could touch the lad.

So where do the punditocracy get off saying he doesn’t have what it takes and not enough heft. PJ Buchannan keeps saying “he can’t close the deal,” but he broke a bunch of barriers like not giving out “walking around money” in Philly and still winning despite Boo Cannon saying that the young man has a lot to learn if he thinks he’s going up against the old school pols. BarackO has also kept the campaign pretty clean by not initiating negative attack ads but, rather cleverly parrying the funny, if fatuous, kind of ads that Steve “the Bullet” Schmidt keeps lobbing into the cable news types so they won’t have to talk about the economy. And BTW, who you callin’ “stupid”?

The malarkey spewed by both sides that these ads keep the candidate from talking about “the issues” is exactly what they want. The minute either one opens their mouth on any serious subject the other side is researching everything they have said, or anyone else has said, and new ads come out about “flip-flopping,” although that shop worn phrase seems to have lost some of its zing of late.

I can’t help thinking that the “white haired dude” is going to be thinking fondly of his former interrogators as he approaches the first debate. And BHO is probably spending his matutinal hour and a half in the gym sharpening his foot work and pounding the light and heavy bags instead of “dunking three shotters,” as the otherwise capable Jonathan Capeheart of the Post would have it. (Even spell-check just asked: how black is Capeheart that he doesn’t know common basket ball terms?)

And now the big O has the audacity to hope he can get away with going to visit his grandmother in Hawaii which he will combine with a family vacay. Cokie Roberts said yesterday, “I know it’s a state and not some exotic foreign place, but…” But what? She thinks he should probably have gone to a more quotidian shore, like “Myrtle Beach in NC.” Cokie, usually pretty astute and thoughtful, wants our boy to try to pull the wool over his future voters eyes by staying in a motel a couple of blocks from the beach (lotta presuming here) and sending out to Dominoes in order to parry the opinion that he is elitist. I say, go back and see some of your old school mates and the grandmother who has to be pretty danged old since he’s 47. It could be the last time.