Itz News to Me

The problem with Barack Obama isn’t the color of his skin: it’s the thinness of it.

The real reason for stacking townhalls only with his supporters and for staged questions at press conferences is very simple: Barack Obama, is not now and never has been, capable of dealing with hostile questions. He has always gotten testy whenever challenged, and if there’s one thing a president cannot be it is short-tempered. It’s the reason the media has treated him with kid gloves throughout his time on the national stage: they know how he will react if they ask a question that is too “in his face” and they have a vest interest in making sure the public that they fooled into voting for him never actually gets to see what’s behind the mask.

Dan Balz got quite the scoop when he his hands on an Axelrod memo which points out just how obvious a character flaw this is:

Axelrod also warned that Obama’s confessions of youthful drug use, described in his memoir, “Dreams From My Father,” would be used against him. “This is more than an unpleasant inconvenience,” he wrote. “It goes to your willingness and ability to put up with something you have never experienced on a sustained basis: criticism. At the risk of triggering the very reaction that concerns me, I don’t know if you are Muhammad Ali or Floyd Patterson when it comes to taking a punch. You care far too much what is written and said about you. You don’t relish combat when it becomes personal and nasty. When the largely irrelevant Alan Keyes attacked you, you flinched,” he said of Obama’s 2004 Senate opponent.

Emphasis mine. Even Axelrod must admit that Obama “flinched.” And, as I have long told those around me, as soon as his net approval goes negative we are going to see more and more of this testy defensiveness from Obama. Look for him to severely dial back his public appearances and willingness to take questions, not for fear of overexposure, but because his handlers are going to want to limit the opportunities for him to commit the gaffe of saying what he really thinks in a moment of anger – as he did in the Gates-Crowley incident.