Thursday, August 16, 2012

Four More Beers

I think we finally have proof that President Obama is not Muslim.


Yes, that is a draft beer and a pork chop, according to eyewitness accounts at the Iowa state fair.

 Back in 2008, the slow-sipping Obama found himself on the losing side of the beer-drinking battle, since Hillary Clinton knocked them back with gusto, sometimes with a shot of whiskey. The President was forced to pretend that beer didn’t matter. “Around election time, the candidates can’t do enough. They’ll promise you anything, give you a long list of proposals and even come around, with TV crews in tow, to throw back a shot and a beer,” he told crowds then, trying to undercut Clinton’s chugging advantage.

Yes, Obama has learned quite a bit since the arugula 'scandal'.

In 2012, however, Obama is determined to win the beer vote, a task made easier by the fact that his opponent, Mitt Romney, never drinks as a matter of religious principle. On his three-day trip through Iowa, beer was Obama’s ubiquitous prop, repeatedly offered up by the president and his aides as proof of his relatability—and more indirectly an attempt at reinforcing the otherness of Romney for regular folks.

The president didn’t just order beer before cameras, which he did at two different stops. He traveled across the state with a bus stocked with White House-brewed beer, and even handed out a bottle to a patron at a coffee shop in Knoxville. His campaign press secretary briefed reporters on the beer consumption of senior staff at the Iowa state fair—two Bud Lights apiece. A press gaggle detailed some of the attributes of the White House brewery. And Obama talked about brews, over and again.

By the time he made it to Waterloo Tuesday night, after another stop at a Cedar Falls pub for a 7 p.m. Bud Light, the strategy bordered on self-parody. “Yesterday, I went to the State Fair and I had a pork chop and a beer. And it was good,” Obama said, by way of introduction. “Today I just had a beer. I didn’t get the pork chop.  But the beer was good, too.”

Even with scant evidence that the president was actually drinking any of the many beers he was seen ordering, holding, and handing out from his home-brewed stash, the optics are still very much in his favor. Especially when Mitt Romney is having a campaign event at a Miami juice bar -- no alcoholic or caffeinated options on the menu -- owned by a convicted cocaine dealer.

I remember a time in the recent past when Republicans were pretty good at these presidential campaigns. Karl Rove must be cringing in agony.

5 comments:

Greg said...

Remember -- the 9/11 jihadis went out for an evening of drinks and strippers the night before they murdered Americans in the name of Muhammad and Allah. So much for your theory.

PDiddie said...

The only reason I posted that, Greg, is so that we could all take turns laughing at you.

Nat-Wu said...

I don't know about you, but I have to question the values of a man who goes to a state fair and has anything besides either a corn dog or sausage on a stick.

Greg said...

Odd that you would find a comment that does nothing but cite documented facts to be something to laugh at? Do you dispute those facts, or are you just ignorant of them?

By the way, I'm long on record regarding Obama's religion -- if he says he is a Christian, I accept it.

PDiddie said...

I suppose I should feel bad for you for not getting the joke, but that stretches my empathy too far.

Let's just say that if you are pointing out the hypocrisy of the piety of the 9/11 terrorists in an attempt to conflate it with Obama's alleged -- but only by the deranged -- religion (a premise you just admitted you don't accept yourself) then there's just no hope that you'll ever understand why this so funny.