{"id":27767,"date":"2012-05-07T05:08:56","date_gmt":"2012-05-07T10:08:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=27767"},"modified":"2012-05-06T07:28:18","modified_gmt":"2012-05-06T12:28:18","slug":"beginning-the-long-good-bye","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=27767","title":{"rendered":"Beginning The Long Good-Bye?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Obama\u00a0launches re-election bid in a half-empty arena<\/a>:<\/p>\n

During the speech, Obama ripped into the presumptive GOP nominee and discussed nation building at home, but the most newsworthy item of the day was not the talking points Obama delivered: it was the crowd… or lack thereof. \u00a0According to ABC News, the Obama campaign had expected an “overflow” of people. \u00a0Instead, the arena looked half-empty.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

I listened to a little of the speech itself. \u00a0I’m biased, of course – I never really bought into the supposed brilliance of Obama as an orator, although he has certainly been a capable-enough speaker – but he sounded strained and shrill, like Paul Wellstone with a rounder tone.<\/p>\n

\u00a0The Columbus Dispatch\u00a0reports that\u00a0Obama\u00a0organizers\u00a0even had people move from the seats to the floor of the gym in order to project a larger crowd on television.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Oh, my. \u00a0Not so good, for a “light worker”.<\/p>\n

Might be even worse than that, though:<\/p>\n

The official Barack Obama Tumblr boasts a figure from ThinkProgress that 14,000 attended the event–70% of the stadium’s seating capacity.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And we all know how lefties count crowds. \u00a0If they claim 14,000, it may well have been somewhere between 140 and 1,400.<\/p>\n

It’s a campaign faux pas to hold an event in a room that isn’t full; to promise the media a more-than-capacity crowd then fall this far short of that promise is utter incompetence.\u00a0 In 2008, Obama ran a near-flawless campaign, buoyed by enthusiasm and effective organizing. \u00a0But it’s not 2008 any more, and on day one of the 2012 campaign, Team Obama has already made an\u00a0embarrassing\u00a0blunder.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I’m hoping for change.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Obama\u00a0launches re-election bid in a half-empty arena: During the speech, Obama ripped into the presumptive GOP nominee and discussed nation building at home, but the most newsworthy item of the day was not the talking points Obama delivered: it was the crowd… or lack thereof. \u00a0According to ABC News, the Obama campaign had expected an […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-27767","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-campaign-12"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27767","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=27767"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27767\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":27770,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27767\/revisions\/27770"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=27767"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=27767"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=27767"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}