Some readers have already noticed that we haven’t had an Obamateurism entry since Election Day. I’ve received a few e-mails wondering what happened to the daily feature, but viewers of the Ed Morrissey Show know that I had already decided to shut down the OOTD series after the election, regardless of the result. If Mitt Romney won, we wouldn’t need it any longer, and if Barack Obama won re-election, the point would be moot.
Dinesh D’Souza actually made the latter argument last night, apart from the context of the OOTDs:
Isn’t it time for conservatives & GOP to stop calling Obama an amateur & a bungler?He is highly successful in accomplishing his goals
— Dinesh D’Souza (@DineshDSouza) November 8, 2012
The election would be a pretty good argument for that.
To understand why I think the series has run its course, it helps to know why I started the OOTD feature in the first place. It wasn’t to make the point that Obama makes a lot of gaffes; he had done that during the 2007-8 campaign, too, and all politicians do it to some extent. It’s just human nature, especially apparent when every utterance gets committed to video or transcription. It was that the media strung together some George Bush gaffes as a narrative about his intellect, including Jacob Weisberg at Slate, who turned them into a “Bushisms†series and a few books — but no one in the media bothered to do the same with Obama.
This was my way of making a point about media narratives, and also have a fun way to point out Obama’s fumbles. Frankly, I didn’t think it would go on nearly this long. If I wanted a feature that would have lasted all during Obama’s first term, I probably would have focused on Joe Biden instead. After nearly four years, though, the point has been made and made and made. That doesn’t mean we won’t have some fun with Obama’s gaffes in his second term (we certainly have fun with Biden’s!), but I’m not going to catalog them on a daily basis any longer.
We won’t leave you hanging on this year’s OOTDs, though. Starting Sunday morning, we’ll begin running the OOTY preliminary polls, and we’ll add a poll at the end for the biggest overall Obamateurism in the last four years.
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So, this looks like the final word on the OOTD feature. I've tried posting this every weekday since the thread started in March, and this might well be the last post. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did.http://hotair.com/archives/2012/11/09/closing-down-the-ootds/
