I admit the ‘word cloud’ technique is a pretty sketchy way to analyze a speech. Still, it can be fun. Zero Hedge gives us an example. From their analysis of a few speeches:

• Reagan 1981 [inaugural speech]: – ‘believe’, ‘freedom’, and ‘government’
• Schumer 2013: – ‘America’, ‘Today’, ‘Finished’, ‘People’
• Obama 2013 [inaugural speech]: “America People Must Believe”

Got it, America? You must believe!

But the main point, for me, is simply the prevalence of “must” in Obama’s speech. As others have remarked: In his vision of the world, no one who opposes him ever does so in good faith. Whatever he believes is an imperative.

UPDATE: A cloud on Hillary’s Benghazi hearing. “People think know committee SEC”… Huh? It sounds like they spent much of that hearing on the question of what people knew or thought when, but why would the SEC pop into it?

Well, that is what we would be hearing if there were a Republican President with this same war-mongering record of death.

Drone strikes dramatically increased after US President Barack Obama took office in 2009. There were only five drone strikes in 2007, but the number rose to 117 in 2010 before declining to 46 last year. Exact casualty figures are difficult to verify. Most of those killed are militants, but some civilians have also been killed.

More innocent children have been killed by the drones of Tyrant Boy-King Barack Hussein Obama than by the guns of Adam Lanza, Jared Loughner, James Holmes, Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris combined. By far.

-Bruce (@GayPatriot)

The decision that President Obama, the head of the federal government, made yesterday to wade into the politics in one state seemed a defining one.

Instead of being the postpartisan political healer he claimed to be in the 2008 election, he seems to feel that he just has to interject himself into contentious political issues, not as the mediator, but as the combatant.

He seems more interested in playing partisan politics than in working with the opposing party to effect a consensus.

RELATED:  Michigan Seems Like A Dream To Me Now. (Via Instapundit.)

ALSO SORT OF RELATED: Protesters to march on Michigan capitol over “right-to-work” vote  (Note how Yahoo!’s editors put right-to-work in quotation marks.  Did they ever so reference the “Affordable Care Act”?

UPDATE: How civil:  Democrats threaten violence on Michigan House floor.  The article includes this interesting factoid, “Michigan has both the highest unionization and unemployment rates in the Midwest.”

ADDENDUM:  I had meant this to be a longer post, addressing the frustration we Republicans feel in the wake of Obama’s victory that we’ll be subject to four more years of his divisive rhetoric, but by the time I got to this post, I had little energy to write.  I have been working a great deal on my fantasy epic and have now completed (and am busy editing) the second chapter of the epic and finding myself scribbling notes for the third chapter. (more…)

Although Barack Obama saw his support among twentysomethings decline from 2008 to 2012, he still won a solid majority of those voters.

Their support seems based more on a blind faith in the incumbent than in an appreciation for his accomplishments. “The overall unemployment rate for 18-29 year olds for November 2012 is 10.9 percent“, with one out of every eight young Hispanics out of work and nearly one in five young African-Americans out of work.

Obama did much better among young Hispanic- and African-Americans than he did among white Americans.

The study linked above showed that the unemployment rate for twentysomwethings “would rise to 16.4 percent” if nearly two million young voters hadn’t dropped out of the workforce:

The declining labor force participation rate has created an additional 1.7 million young adults that are not counted as “unemployed” by the U.S. Department of Labor because they are not in the labor force, meaning that those young people have given up looking for work due to the lack of jobs.

That the Democrat’s support slipped among young voters suggests that at least some have woken up to the reality of Hope and Change™.

Four years after Hope and Change™, we are, as a county, more divided than ever.  A liberal friend posted on my Facebook page that Mitt Romney makes her sick.  How did she come to gain that opinion of a good, decent and compassionate man?

Other friends have called him a “vulture capitalist” or repeated slurs about his faith.  Where do these slurs get started?  Have top Democrats differentiated themselves from such rhetoric?  Has Obama himself asked his supporters to tone it down and to focus on the issues?

No, instead, he tells them that “voting is the best revenge.”  For that Democrat, as Ed Morrissey puts it, Spite and revenge is the new hope and change:

. . . Obama’s “revenge” remarks are at least as revealing about this campaign, and of Obama’s approach to both this election and to public policy, as were Romney’s 47 percent statements. The president, in both his campaign and his administration, has gone fully populist, attempting to divide the country along class lines as a distraction from his record in his term in office. In fact, the best description of Obama’s politics since September 2011 is “the politics of revenge.”

Read the whole thing.  (Via Instapundit.)

ADDENDUM:  If you have friends on both sides of the political aisle, just take a gander at your Facebook feed, you’ll often wonder what happened to civil discourse.  Our side abandons civility too sometimes.  But, at least the GOP presidential nominee is not encouraging such rhetoric.

From his first appearance on the national stage, his key-note speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, Barack Obama has cast himself a post-partisan figure who could transcend the polarized politics of the past dozen years or so.  That image was central to his appeal in his 2008 bid for the White House — and likely caused many wavering centrist voters to shift their support to him in the campaign’s closing days.

They might not share his politics, but they did like him as a man, at least as the man he projected himself to be.  He has not governed as he campaigned, first pushing a “stimulus” bill crafted by Democratic legislators — without Republican input — in the back rooms of Capitol Hill.  When a Republican Senator questioned him about the bill, instead of meeting that challenge in a civil fashion, the Democrat retorted, “I won.”

This was the first of his many partisan retorts.  And the partisan pugnacity that defined his presidency would define his reelection campaign.  At least since August 2011, his campaign aides made clear that their reelection strategy would focus on destroying the then-likely (and now-current) Republican presidential nominee.

Obama is closing the campaign the same way he began it  – on a negative note.  Parts of his speeches sounds like they’ve been recycled from the 2008 campaign, as if he’s still running against George W. Bush, only he has sharpened his attacks. He attacks his opponent as a stand-in for the former president, strongly suggesting that, nearly four years after the Texas Republican left office, he’s still responsible for incomes which declined and deficits which increased under Obama’s watch.

And then yesterday, he asked his supporters to vote, not out of love for country but out of revenge.

“If Obama wins,” John Nolte writes, “I don’t know how he plans to govern after running the nastiest and most divisive presidential campaign in memory. He’s looked nothing like a president during this campaign and everything like a nasty, Chicago union thug.” (more…)

Earlier today, Bruce blogged about Mitt Romney’s “barnburner of a” closing argument.  It was a most upbeat speech.

By contrast, in his closing speech, President Obama said, “Voting is the best revenge.”

Which candidate is best qualified to unite the nation after this divisive campaign?

UPDATE:  The Weekly Standard John McCormack calls this revenge talk . . .

. . . strange rhetoric from any politician, especially one who sold himself to the country as the candiate of hope and change. In fact, before Obama’s remarks today, I had only ever heard one politician encourage people to vote out of revenge: failed 2009 congressional candidate Dede Scozzafava. 

UP-UPDATE: The winning argument?

UP-UP-UPDATE: John Hinderaker doubts that “Obama’s blunder” will “tip the scales with many voters, but in the closing days of the campaign it serves as a useful reminder of Obama’s dark side.”

UP-UP-UP-UPDATE: Obama campaign struggles to explain ‘revenge’ remark It’s not good to be playing defense in the closing days of a campaign.

UP-UP-UP-UP-UPDATE: “Revenge for what?” Jonah Goldberg asks. Read the whole thing. It’s short.

FROM THE COMMENTS: Our reader Kurt

. . . was thinking about Obama’s whole anger and revenge thing and what I earlier called the “divide and conquer” approach, but it occurred to me that the better term is really “divide and agitate” since he only seems to know how to make people angry, resentful and worked up. (more…)

I am always struck when Yahoo!, on its home page, links a story beneficial to Mitt Romney, this time offering a data point similar to observations made by prominent pundits:

“Romney’s message,” report Connie Cass and Jennifer Agiesta

a vote for Obama is a vote for more gridlock — seems to be getting through. An Associated Press-GfK poll shows that almost half of likely voters — some 47 percent — think the Republican challenger would be better at ending the logjam Thirty-seven percent say Obama would.

37%? That’s far fewer than the percentage supporting the president.  It seems even a good chunk of Obama’s supporters know that lacks the skills he, in his last campaign, claimed to possess. (more…)

A reader in Nevada reports hearing an ad that “went something like ‘what will you tell your friends if you don’t vote and they lose their healthcare, etc., etc.’”  Reading about his ad, I was reminded of the creepy “Future Children Project” ad.  When you read the lyrics, you can see just how much it, like the Nevada ad, plays on people’s fears, not their hopes.

Both were about the parades of horribles that Democrats imagine happening should Mitt Romney win next week.

More evidence that Barack Obama is not the Democrats’ Ronald Reagan.

This is how they Gipper wanted to be remembered:

Whatever else history may say about me when I am gone, I hope it will record that I appealed to your best hopes, not your worst fears, to your confidence, rather than your doubts.

Go back and read the Gipper’s speeches from the 1984 campaign.  Watch his campaign commercials.  You’ll see that he wanted to be remembered the way that he governed, the way that he appealed to the American people.

He didn’t campaign on the parade of horribles that he imagined taking place if he lost.  He campaigned on how America would improve if he won.

UPDATE:  Contrast Reagan’s campaign commercials with this recent one from Obama.

“On September 11, 2012,” blogs William Kristol,

Rasmussen Reports had President Obama’s job approval at 52 percent approve, 47 percent disapprove. Today, October 27, the numbers have reversed—47 percent approve, 52 percent disapprove. The economic news over these past six weeks has been on the whole a bit better than expected, so it’s hard to believe that’s the cause of the change. The campaign and the debates could of course have played a role. But the main real-world event that might have affected voters’ approval or disapproval of President Obama’s job performance is Libya.

Maybe Kristol’s right.  Maybe it is Libya.

Or, perhaps, it’s something else.  Perhaps, it’s that then on September 11, barely a week after the Democratic National Convention, a good number of Americans saw Obama as the legacy media covered the Democratic convention.

They saw an upbeat Obama.  And they liked that image of the incumbent.  Only, in the next month, with the trickling out of news from Libya, accompanied by his first languid and listless, then his angry and accusatory, debate performances. they saw how how much their idealized image of the incumbent differed from the reality of the man.

The campaign/media created image of Barack Obama has always been more palatable to Americans than the reality of his administration.

In a blog post titled, Closing (Negative) Argument, left-of-center reporter/commentator Mark Halperin observes that a

. . . new Obama TV spot, which the campaign says will run in four states, will annoy some Romney supporters, but the upper echelon in Boston will surely say it shows the incumbent knows he’s losing.

Via HotAir headlines.

UPDATE: Even Yahoo! is picking up on the negativity:

UP-UPDATE: Even creepier than the Lena Dunham video?

UP-UP-UPDATE: Crowley to Axe: Hey, Uh, Isn’t Your Closing Argument Supposed to Be Positive?

This headline from Yahoo! Finance says pretty much all you need to know about today’s job growth figures: Stronger Than Expected 3Q Growth Weak By Historical Standards. Obama and some liberals on Facebook (and on twitter, as I understand) are trying to spin this as a positive sign, but the first two paragraphs of the article (from a usually Obama-friendly source) should dispel any notion that this is great news:

The U.S. economy picked up some steam in the third quarter. The Commerce Department reported that GDP grew at a 2% annualized rate from July to September. That’s an improvement from the sluggish 1.3% pace in the second quarter but nothing to get excited about, says David Rosenberg, chief economist and strategist at Gluskin Sheff.

The higher growth in the third quarter was due to increased government spending, which is unsustainable, he tells The Daily Ticker. Factoring that out means growth was 1.3% in the private sector, virtually unchanged from the previous quarter, says Rosenberg.

On Facebook, Bruce shared this chart:
So, while Obama may boast that the economy is growing, the bigger issue is that it’s not growing as fast as the Democrat promised, particularly when he sold the nation on his $800-billion “stimulus.”

Growth, in short, “is less than half of what the White House projected growth would be this year” — providing further evidence that we can’t put too much stock in Obama’s economic forecasts — or his policies.

Earlier today, I linked a Yahoo! piece noting the increasingly snarky tone of the president’s campaign and observing how most incumbent presidents leave the personal attacks to their surrogates.

Unbeknownst to me then, the story of the president’s very unpresidential would only get bigger today.  Now, comes word that Mr. Obama described his opponent as, well, here’s the quote:  [LANGUAGE WARNING after the "more" link] (more…)

Even the legacy media is beginning to take notice of Barack Obama’s, well, less-than-uplifting rhetoric of late, as Russell Goldman reports:

If you’re President Obama, you know you pushed the sarcasm envelope at Monday night’s debate when even Rachel Maddow describes the way you spoke to Mitt Romney as being in “very, very overtly patronizing terms.”

Maddow probably meant it as a compliment, but there have been plenty of other observers who were critical of the president’s use of Seinfeldian set-ups and snarky punch lines to score points about military spending and the state of U.S.-Russia relations.

Time’s Mark Halperin described the president’s style as “belittling.” Mike Allen at Politico called it “snide derision.”

(H/t:  Reader Kurt.)  Candidates, to borrow Goldman’s expression, tend to leave “most of the snark to their staffs and surrogates”, but Mr. Obama seems to relish making snide remarks himself.   (more…)

Mitt Romney and Megan McArdle are not alone.  A number of bloggers, reporters and pundits have been asking just what Barack Obama has planned for his second term.  Some of my conservative friends and correspondents think that the Democrat does indeed have a plan, it’s just that he doesn’t dare make it public because it would show that he’s clearly not the moderate he claims to be.

Even supporters who attended the Democrat’s recent campaign rally in Manchester, New Hampshire, with one saying Obama hadn’t really “done a good job describing his vision for a second term“.  And over at the Hill, Niall Stanage & Amie Parnes report that he’s under pressure to do just that — spell out plans for his second term.

And when pressed, his campaign team offers only banalties:

Campaign spokesman Adam Fetcher disputed the charge that Obama isn’t talking details, noting he has promised to double exports, cut oil imports in half and hire 100,000 new math and science teachers, among other second-term priorities.

And just how is he going to do that?  Where’s he going to find the money to pay for 100,000 new math and science teachers?  What specific policies will he put in place to allow businesses to manufacture products for export?  What will he do to reduce our dependency on foreign oil?

Seems he’d rather attack Mr. Romney than put forward some ideas of his own.

Yesterday, Glenn Reynolds linked a post that I first read on my iPhone, then read again after I had returned to LA (when a reader e-mailed me the piece as it fit in nicely with a conversation we were having.

That piece is Stacy McCain’s reflection on Chris Cilizza’s piece asking whether Obama is overrated as a candidate where the Washington Post reporter duly notes that “Four years ago, that question would have been unimaginable.”  ”That the question ‘would have been unimaginable’ in 2008″, Stacy offers

. . . is likely a result of Cillizza having his head inside the liberal media echo chamber where never was heard a discouraging word about Obama. Democrats were pumped up and eager for action after eight years of Bush, and having a completely untested candidate allowed them to project onto Obama whatever they wished to see there. If you bought into that hype (as Cillizza evidently did), then it was easy to imagine Obama the Light-Bringer riding to glory astride a flying unicorn, eating Magic Peace Flakes for breakfast and farting rainbows all day long.

Read the whole thing.  It is fascinating to see so many folks in the legacy media saying what conservatives have been saying at least since Obama started racking up victories in Democratic primaries and cauci in 2008.  Our reader Kurt shared with me this image that Dr. Sanity posted on February 14, 2008:

Yesterday, releasing this clever ad, contrasting Obama’s lofty rhetoric with his real record, on Facebook, Rightchange was trying “to reach 160 million adult Facebook users in one day across the country.”   (more…)

Barack Obama, wrote David Corn earlier this week, repeating a Democratic talking point, should, in his speech tonight, “Castigate GOP Obstructionism“.

The real story, however, is not one of Republican obstructionism, but of Democratic obstinance.  The Obama team decided early, reports ABC News’s Rich Klein, in his piece about Bob Woodward’s forthcoming book, The Price of Politics,  decided to “to forego bipartisanship for the sake of speed around the stimulus bill was encapsulated by his then-chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel: ‘We have the votes. F— ‘em,’ he’s quoted in the book as saying.”

The day after Democrats celebrate Bill Clinton, Klein reminds us how the current Democratic president differs from his partisan predecessor:

“Obama doesn’t really have the joy of the game. Clinton basically loved negotiating with a bunch of pols, about anything,” [former Clinton Treasury Secretary and Obama economic advisor Larry] Summers said. “Whereas, Obama, he really didn’t like these guys.”

Obama simply put didn’t make the effort to hammer out deals with Republicans as had Clinton.  He even, according to Woodward, had problems working with fellow Democrats.

No wonder he was, as Jennifer Rubin reports in her commentary on the Woodward excerpts, the real obstacle to progress:

The retelling of the debt-ceiling negotiations, and of Obama’s decision to up the ante by $400 billion on taxes, reminds us that Obama, in essence, spiked the deal. He simply did not get the job done. From Woodward’s book: “It is a fact that President Obama was handed a miserable, faltering economy and faced a recalcitrant Republican opposition. . . . But presidents work their will — or should work their will — on important matters of national business. . . . Obama has not.” Or, as Republicans say, he has not lead. (more…)

So speculates David Gelernter in the National Review, writing:

No president has seemed this dead to moral imperatives since Nixon at the height of Watergate.  . . . .

Those death-dealing leaks regarding U.S. military and intelligence operations made Obama furious — furious at accusations that top-level White House sources were responsible. “The notion that my White House would purposely release classified national-security information is offensive,” he said in June. He seemed much less bothered by the leaks themselves. What could be more characteristic of the man than his comment that this toxic high-level leakage “makes my job tougher”? He could easily have said “I am boiling mad at these disgraceful acts, and have directed the attorney general to spare no effort to find the culprits and bring them to justice.” He could have, but didn’t. Instead he used a routine cliché: “zero tolerance” for leaks in the Obama White House. What do we conclude about this man and his moral equipment?

Emphasis added.  The president was more offended that his White House was accused of leaking that about the nature of the leaks?  Read the whole thing.

In a nice reflection on Ryan’s speech, Roger Kimball considers the candidate’s critique of the incumbent president and concludes:

Last time around, Barack Obama campaigned on his own charisma and his opponents’ failures. He’s trying it again but the charisma has worn and the failures are now his own. Obama assumed office nearly four years, Paul Ryan observed. Isn’t it time he assumed responsibility?

Read the whole thing. (Via Instapundit.)