Obama, the naked emperor

I often participate in the Sky News poll which they regularly run on the issue of the moment on their website. I have never seen the final results of these polls and don’t know what they do with them. Maybe they throw them out? Usually the results, when I participate, tend to have the majority view favouring whatever is the conservative position. This encourages me. It shouldn’t really. Probably those who view the Sky News site are unrepresentative of the population at large. (Strangely, perhaps, they are also clearly to the right of your average Sky News TV commentator.)

Mind you, there is usually a hard-core minority in the polls who favour whatever is the left-leaning position, however crack-potted it is. The latest poll asks who won the Obama – Romney debate. When Democrat tragics like Chris Mathews of MSNBC and Bill Maher think that Romney won, it would be passing strange if he hadn’t. Yet one third of those surveyed think that Obama won. My own view is that these people are probably made up. They don’t actually exist as functioning, thinking, human beings. Maybe their so-called opinions are churned out, on order, by a computer paid for by one of those conscience-wracked left-wing billionaires intent on saving the world from capitalism.

I don’t know this for sure. What I do know for sure is that Romney won the debate and will win the next two. He won the debate because he casually swatted away every joust by Obama while Obama was simply a punching bag, painfully absorbing to the abdomen every joust by Romney.

When you’re the president and you are told that you don’t know what you are talking about (on companies getting tax breaks for shipping jobs offshore); are lectured on telling the truth (on Romney’s tax plan); corrected on the amount and incidence of tax breaks going to oil companies; and reminded at the same time that the $2.8 billion of tax breaks compares with $90 billion wasted on green energy companies (and there were lots more examples like this) and make no counter argument, never mind effective ones, what on earth are you doing occupying the position of president? Through what accident of history did you ever get there?

Insightfully (?), Al Gore blamed Obama’s poor performance on the altitude in Colorado. It’s relatively high up there. Gore is an expert on the deleterious effects of the climate on human beings and polar bears so we need to take account of his theory. According to this theory, Obama was suffering from a lack of oxygen to the brain, which presumably caused a general malaise; clouding an otherwise steel-trap mind. This is one theory.

Another is that Obama suffers from a lack of experience, talent, and depth hidden by having a sonorous voice, a teleprompter and speechwriters adept at making tendentious drivel sound profound. There are historical precedents. (E.g.:“To the people of poor nations, we pledge to make your farms flourish and let clean water flow…we will harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories”, and any amount of other delusional rubbish).

For those of you with any knowledge of European soccer, this first debate was like Barcelona versus Doncaster Rovers. Barcelona won convincingly yet some people harbour the delusion that the next two matches will be different. No they won’t, because Barcelona is quite simply a class act and much too good for Doncaster Rovers.

When the three debates are completed, Romney will be on his way to winning the presidency. The only thing in his way will be voter fraud. Witness the desperate resistance among Democrats to the efforts by some states to require photo ID before voting. As Stalin was reputed to have said, it’s not the voting that counts but who counts the votes.

But I am being paranoid. There will be more than sufficient genuine votes to give Romney a comfortable win. Anything else would be unthinkable – sort of like a Gillard win.

Peter Smith, a frequent Quadrant Online contributor, is the author of Bad Economics