Real life is not the West Wing

Although there are times I wish it was. Fast talking super smart and competent people running the government; now that's fiction! [Link]

I bring this one up because I just wanted to make sure that the Online Left should see this event as being proof that, in point of fact, life is not an Aaron Sorkin television show*.  You can see how this could have played out in an episode, right?  President in a slump, ratings going south, every hand raised against him.  Then said President’s staff seizes upon the Gettysburg speech as a game changer; they convince their boss to go through with it, buck him up when it looks like he’s going to play it safe at the last second, and watch, teary-eyed, as the President speaks for three minutes on whatever universal liberal truth had Alan Sorkin’s bowels in an uproar that week.  Generic hosannas fly, angels descend from Heaven on union-supervised hoists, polls rebound with an audible “sproing.”

Riveting television.  Riveting.  Alas, this is the real world, and Barack Obama is not brave enough to stand where Abraham Lincoln stood and allow himself to be compared to his predecessor. As the article linked above notes, most of our Presidents have – it’s diagnostic that, say, Bill Clinton begged off, too – fully aware that they were not going to be able to outshine a man who is by now a mythological figure**. Most Presidents got over it, too.  But Barack Obama has tried to make himself a mythological figure in the flesh – and the last thing that a man pretending to be a myth ever wants to do is to invite too-honest a comparison with the real thing.