Will the Heat Be Turned Up on Obama's "Cool"? (candidacy, Barack Obama)

[2nd trick op]

Is Obama "the next Nixon"?

Many presidents have been vilified during a lackluster term in office, and the national polarization which has been growing since at least 1988 hasn't helped. But no sitting President in this century faced more direct animosity than Richard Nixon, probably due to the steady development of the media, along several fronts, during the time leading up to Watergate.

But Barack Obama, precisely because of his non-typical origins, his limited time in the higher echelons of realpolitik, and his association with a "media-manufactured" candidacy is probably identified more as a "packaged-and-sold" President than any of his predecessors.

We all recognize the skilled use of coalition politics which put Obama in the White House. And I think it's generally understood that while he has also generated a very large faction who oppose him, the willingness of those various factions to coalesce in a single bloc, as well as the loyalty of that portion of the electorate not driven by ideology, remains untested.

So I look for Obama's detractors to do everything in their power to shatter the facade of Obama's supposedly-nonplussed image. The purported reliance on a teleprompter is likely a phony issue -- his single biggest gaffe was probably his comments on rural voters during the 2008 Pennsylvania primary, But I look for a very concerted effort to provoke similar case of "truth coming out at the wrong time".

The only example of complete frankness I can think up is that the man readily admitted to rooting for only one baseball team during an All-Star Game broadcast back in 2009. The rest is window dressing; and windows can be broken.