Race

The emerging White House strategy is to repeat and repeat the canard that anyone who criticizes the president and his agenda is a racist, probably a Klansman and maybe even a conservative. If the canard is repeated often enough, some people will believe it, even if they’re mostly people who believe it already.

A long season of rage, recriminations and name-calling lies ahead before the president finally gets the cabinet he wants. The Senate is charged by the Constitution – quaint document, that – to closely examine his nominees, to ask them sharp and even unpleasant questions, and then to decide whether they’re fit to be in the cabinet. The president proposes and the Senate disposes. It’s called “advise and consent,” not “shut up and cheer.”

The giants of the media are having a little trouble with this, too. Bob Schieffer, pretending to be younger than he really is, told Sen. John McCain on “Face the Nation” that he “couldn’t remember a time” when the opposing party has so sharply questioned a president’s cabinet choices. Bob can’t figure out why the senator from Arizona isn’t wild about Chuck Hagel.

“He would seem to be your kind of guy, a veteran, a guy who’s been shot at,” he told the senator in gentle rebuke. It’s true, Mr. Hagel is a “guy guy,” and he’s a veteran and he has been shot at. But that’s not necessarily all a president looks for in a secretary of defense. If it were, almost anyone from the Chicago streets would qualify.

Colin Powell, heretofore admired and even revered by many on the right, insists he’s still a Republican, but he’s an “Obama Republican” who disagrees with just about everything Republicans believe. Unless they become more like him, the Republicans are doomed, and deserve to be.

Mr. Powell told an NBC-TV interviewer that he sees “a dark vein of intolerance” running through the party, and unless the party elders are aggressively intolerant of intolerance, as Mr. Powell and his friends define intolerance, “they are going to be in trouble.”

He cites Sarah Palin as one of the intolerant for her use of the street slang “shuck and jive.” So, too, the chorus of voices, not all of them Republican, who described Mr. Obama as “lazy” in his disastrous performance in the first presidential debate. Only a racist would call a lazy black man lazy, even if, as Mr. Obama has done, he once described himself as “lazy.”

Or not. Mr. Powell is a man of a certain sophistication, having served in enough high positions to have come across expressions and language used well beyond the precincts such language originated. The actual phrase Mrs. Palin used in the 2008 campaign was “shuck and jive schtick,” combining a black expression with a Yiddish word used by vaudeville performers, many of them Jewish, to describe a practiced comic turn. Mr. Powell did not say whether he imagines use of the word “shtick” reflects a dark vein of intolerance of Jews.

One of the gifts of the diversity of America is that immigrants and even visitors contribute to the richness of the American language. We pick up slang, some of it colorful and some of it even vulgar, from each other. We feel free to use it at will. That’s why our dictionary is thicker than most. Colin Powell, who was born in Harlem (a name stolen from the not-so-colorful Dutch), knows this better than most. Andrew Cuomo, the governor of New York, used what we must call “the S&J words” when he campaigned for Hillary Rodham Clinton, calling her a straight-shooter (no offense intended to cowboys and gunfighters) in 2008: “You can’t shuck and jive at a press conference. All those moves you can make with the press don’t work when you’re in someone’s living room.” If a New York politician -- and a Democrat to boot -- thinks it’s OK to use “the S&J words” without giving offense, surely a politician from Alaska deserves a break, too.

Nobody gets through a turn in Washington without hearing a recital of his faults, usually at high decibel. If you want a friend in Washington, as Harry Truman famously said, get a dog. That goes double for presidents.

Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times.

“Can you honestly say,” the Face the Nation host asked the governor, “that people are better off today than they were four years ago?”

“No,” Mr. O’Malley replied, “but, uh, that’s not the question of this election. The question, without a doubt, we are not as well off as we were before George Bush brought us . . .” Blah, blah, blah . . .

Mr. Schieffer interrupted him with a reminder as unexpected as a burst of gunfire through the propeller of the Sopwith Camel that is the favorite pursuit plane of the Gaffe Patrol: “George Bush is not on the ballot.”

The governor apparently bailed out as his own plane went down somewhere over the Eastern Shore. He was not injured, and the next morning he was back on the air with “context” and a “clarification.” Everybody is “clearly better off,” he said, but what he meant was that Americans “have not recovered all that we lost in the Bush recession.”

What is actually clear is that this is the question that terrifies Barack Obama and his campaign. This is the question famously posed by Ronald Reagan in 1980 in his final debate with Jimmy Carter, and the question destroyed the peanut farmer from Plains. Mr. Carter, the president who President Obama so closely resembles, had no answer. The Obama campaign has no answer now.

The best they can come up with is that the question is not the question, and besides, it’s all George W. Bush’s fault. Joe Biden tried this Monday in Detroit, and said he could recite a lot of good things Mr. Obama has done “if it weren’t so hot.”

The president and his faithful minions must move earth (heaven can wait) to prevent consideration of the question. They could expand their campaign against George W. FDR and the Democrats, even as late as Harry Truman, similarly campaigned against Herbert Hoover.

Once upon a time, we called our recessions and depressions “great panics,” as in the Panic of 1837 (Andrew Jackson), Panic of 1873 (U.S. Grant), Panic of 1893 (Grover Cleveland) and if Mr. Obama wants to go farther back than that, there was the Panic of 1819 (James Monroe). Some of the Great Panics occurred in administrations of Democrats, but President Obama could tie them to the Republicans, anyway, since few would know the difference. Monroe was even something called “Democrat-Republican.” Anything to keep the subject on George W. Bush.

The biggest gaffe this week in Charlotte was committed by whoever, probably Mr. Obama himself, thought it would be a nifty idea to invite Bill Clinton to make the nominating speech. Barack Obama reckons himself to be the greatest orator since Demosthenes (and probably better even than the honey-tongued Greek), but Bill Clinton will remind the convention of happier days than these. Bubba had his faults, but better a loose zipper than a tight economy. His speech, which will likely be all about Bubba, will be the only wow! moment of the week.

Bubba has occasionally been the target of the Gaffe Patrol himself. Only this week, New Yorker magazine recalls that he is said to have once remarked to Teddy Kennedy that “only a few years ago [Barack Obama] would have been the guy carrying our bags.” This is only history, as Bubba’s generation lived it, but a remark like that could get a Republican pol neutered for life.

You can’t blame the Democrats for trying to change the conversation to George W., or even to Herbert Hoover and Grover Cleveland, come to that. You never want to talk about rope, as FDR reminded us, in the home of a man recently on the gallows. Barack Obama thinks he can wax golden on any subject, but he knows to keep some things out of the message.

He can unpack those famous Corinthian columns of plaster of Paris that he used as backdrop in Denver, but he doesn’t want to talk about the Barack Obama of 2008, The man of hope and change is finally recognized as a delusion, a national hallucination made up of fog, mist and swamp gas. We’re all awake now.

Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times.

Even The Washington Post, now in full-battle dress to protect Democratic interests, thinks it’s OK to pick on ol’ Joe. Writes Post blogger Alexandra Petri: “He inspires the sort of discomfort one feels upon introducing one’s fiancé to Grandpa after he has had a Scotch too many.”

One’s fiancé should just grin and bear it. But one never knows, as Fats Waller famously asked, do one? A lot of Joe’s malapropisms, blurts and boners – the remarks the press, eager to display a foreign language skill, inevitably calls “gaffes” – are just the sort of thing that endears Joe to a lot of other grandpas. The vice president, after all, is constitutionally harmless, like a wart in an embarrassing place on the body politic.

It’s certainly true, though, that Joe has overdrawn the unlimited checking account Barack Obama gave him on inauguration day. The president’s dilemma, and it is a true dilemma, is what to do about the second banana. He knows he couldn’t trust Joe at the funeral of the president of Volta, upper or lower, and foreign funerals are the default preserve of veeps. But he can’t indulge himself by bouncing Joe off the ticket, either.

The suggestion from some Republican worthies that the Democratic ticket could be cured of foot-in-mouth disease by recruiting Hillary Clinton is an indulgence of mischief, meant to needle the president. (As if on cue, the White House rose to the bait, firing back at Sarah Palin.) The last presidential candidate who blinked was George McGovern, who relieved Tom Eagleton in 1972 in the wake of revelations that Mr. Eagleton had once submitted to electric shock treatments to clear the fog between his ears.

President Obama’s defense of Joe this week, that he’s only guilty of something called “phrasing distractions,” was no doubt meant to be mild scolding, and Joe should button his lip when he feels the urge to spill and splurge. Joe has been around long enough to know that a politician, Democrat or Republican, liberal or conservative, never gets a pass to mention race without genuflecting first toward Al and Jesse, and maybe Maxine Waters, too. “Slavery is nothing to joke about,” says Doug Wilder, the former Democratic governor of Virginia.

Joe just can’t quit talking about slavery, perhaps a reflection of Delaware’s curious Civil War history. Delaware flirted mildly with secession before its legislature voted unanimously to stay in the union, and it contributed troops to both union and Confederate regiments. Delaware’s congressmen needled Abraham Lincoln mercilessly throughout the war. The Emancipation Proclamation didn’t apply to Delaware and the four northern slave states and the legislature didn’t get around to freeing its slaves until it adopted the 13th Amendment eight months after Appomattox. Joe, a native Pennsylvanian, has continued the Delaware tradition of ambivalence (or at least inadvertence).

He once told Fox News Sunday that “my state was a slave state, my state is a border state." And he curried South Carolina favor reminding an audience in Charleston that Delaware was "a slave state that fought beside the north. That’s only because we couldn’t figure out how to get to the South. There were a couple of states in the way.” Well, only Maryland, actually, but Joe’s point is clear enough.

Joe has been mostly harmless and nearly always entertaining, like Yogi Berra but without Yogi’s shrewd philosophical insights. He once told a Democratic caucus that “if we do everything right, if we do it with absolute certainty, there’s still a 30 percent chance we’re going to get it wrong.” Borrowing the essence of Teddy Roosevelt’s most famous remark, he assured skeptics of Barack Obama that “I promise you, this president has a big stick.” He described Barack Obama as “the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.”

Joe usually means well, even if he doesn’t show it. He’s not as smart as Paul Ryan, but he’ll help the Republican ticket, too. So a little compassion is in order. Rudy Giuliani says Joe may not have the “mental capacity” to be president, but even if true he wouldn’t be the first prospective bumbler in chief in the office that John Nance Garner called “not worth a warm pitcher of spit.”

It’s important to keep first things in mind. “To err is human, to forgive divine,” as the 17th-century poet Alexander Pope reminds us. Or maybe the 20th-century philosopher Mae West said it better for our times: “To err is human, but it feels divine.”

Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times.

But not always. Mitt Romney showed up this week in Houston to speak to the annual convention of the National Association of Colored People. Some people thought he was brave, others that he was merely foolish, and was wasting his time.

The stage was set for a Republican calamity. Earlier in the week, Atty. Gen. Eric Holder delivered a race-baiting speech that would have done a Demoractic pol in the Old South proud. He put the crowd surging into the aisles, howling their appreciation. He defended the Justice Department efforts to block laws in more than 30 states to require voters to show some sort of identification before getting a ballot. “The arc of American history has always moved toward expanding the electorate. It is what has made this nation exceptional.” More rafter-raising cheers from the delegates (who were required, by the way, to show ID to get into the hall).

The attorney general likened voter-identification requirements, enacted to prevent unqualified voters from stuffing ballot boxes with illegal votes, to the Jim Crow-era requirement in most Southern states to pay a poll tax (usually a dollar) to cast a ballot. Mr. Holder, a lawyer, was clearly basing his comparison on hearsay evidence. Voter-ID is required in many states a long way from Dixie, and it’s nothing like a poll tax. The usual forms of identification – a driver’s license, an employer’s identification – is all that is required in states with voter-ID laws, and, as in Texas, where the Justice Department is at the moment in court attacking the requirement, the states provide, free, an identification card. If the right to vote is, as the attorney general says, a citizen’s “most precious right,” it ought to be precious enough to take the trouble to get free and proper identification. Anyone who wants to drive a car, cash a check or buy a bottle of beer has to be prepared to go to such trouble.

Mitt Romney obviously knew he wouldn’t raise the rafters with anything approximating cheers, but showed up, anyway, to do what politicians, editorial writers and civics teachers say we all should do – address respectful arguments to those who disagree with us. Didn’t someone say that’s the American way? He paid the crowd the compliment of addressing them as grown-ups in a speech that was direct, assertive and dispassionate. He told them that he, not Barack Obama, was really the one they have been waiting for.

“If you want a president who will make things better in the African American community, you are looking at him.” No cheers, but when the scattered booing subsided, he said: “You take a look.”

He repeated his promise to repeal Obamacare, citing its threat to the economy and taking note of the 14 percent black unemployment rate, using the shorthand nearly everyone uses to describe the Affordable Care Act. He appeared surprised by some of the boos that rained down on him. He would learn later, from pundits, bloggers and other busybodies on the left, that the term “Obamacare” is racist. No one explained how and why that could be.

Right on cue, Nancy Pelosi, fresh from Barney Frank’s wedding reception where she scandalized the guests by dancing with . . . a man, accused Mitt Romney of arranging the derision and contempt he got in Houston. “I think it was a calculated move on his part to get booed at the NAACP convention.”

Others in the media chorus quickly picked up the theme. Lawrence O’Donnell of cable-channel MSNBC called the Romney speech part of a “Southern strategy” to appeal to “racial and racist voting.” One of the O’Donnell guests accused Mr. Romney of being “culturally ignorant” for describing a black colleague as having served in his “kitchen cabinet,” or inner circle of advisers, when he was the governor of Massachusetts. “To talk about being in the kitchen and not talk about an African-American actually being in your cabinet is really not a good metaphor to use with African-Americans.”

Vice President Joe Biden, who once boasted to a Virginia audience that Delaware was a slave state, too, arrived just before closing time in Houston, and, as if auditioning for a post-Obama job as a stand-up comic, told a packed house of delegates successfully disguised as empty seats that all their fears would come true if they didn’t vote for Barack Obama.

The president campaigned in 2008 as the post-racial candidate. But that was a long, long time ago.

Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times.

This opportunity could give them the chance to clean up America and make a little money at it. Adidas and Nike, the ugly shoe giants, have given Americans the ugliest (and stinkiest) feet in the world, even though the rest of the world is swiftly catching up as the American culture envelops the globe.

Tennis shoes were once the modest province of the gym, but now they’re worn by millions whose idea of exercise is hoisting a few at the end of the day. Anyone who has had to sit next to Ugly Feet on bus, train or plane, and watch in horror as he (or she) slips out of his or her shoes to get comfortable, knows what it is to sit helplessly at risk of agonizing death from the toxic odor of feet that have not been washed since the previous millennium.

Nike is on a mission to uglify college football teams with garish uniforms that the girls on the softball team would be ashamed to wear. The college administrators and athletic directors are delighted to conspire with Nike, not only because Nike makes it financially rewarding to coaches and administrators, but because it might give coaches a leg up in recruiting the “student-athletes” (in the popular sports-page cliche) who stop briefly on campus en route to the NFL or state prison.

Now comes Adidas, the other major perpetrator of the uglification of the republic, soon to introduce something one commentator calls a “slave shoe,” an oversized tennis shoe with attached shackles in bright orange, similar in appearance to the shackles worn by slaves in an earlier benighted era in the nation’s history. An Adidas advertisement asks innocently: “Got a game so hot you lock your kicks to your ankles?"

Dr. Boyce Watkins, a professor at Syracuse University, obviously gets no kick from the game, hot or not. “Shackles [are] the stuff that our ancestors wore for 400 years while experiencing the most horrific atrocities imaginable,” he writes for “Your Black World,” an online journal. “Most of [the atrocities] which were never documented in the history books [were] kept away from you in the educational system, all so you’d be willing to put shackles on your ankles today and not be so sensitive about it. There’s always a group of Negroes who are more than happy to resubmit themselves to slavery.”

The professor overstates things, but only to degree. The atrocities of slavery, first among them the very fact of one man owning another, were so well documented that the atrocities of slavery were among the causes that led to the great civil war that echoes across the years even today. He even likens the shoes to something he calls “the prison industrial complex, which is the most genocidal thing to happen to the black family since slavery itself.” We take the professor’s point without swallowing the purple ink.

The “slave shoes” by Adidas are not, in fact, the first prison phenomenon to move into “the free-world culture.” The fashionable droopy drawers, worn by “student-athletes” and NBA millionaires alike, trace their origins to prisons, where belts are forbidden and prisoners keep their pants up in other ways. Kids wore their own pants low on the crack in tribute to their fathers, uncles and brothers behind bars. The colleges and pros soon followed the schoolyard example.

Nike stepped on its marketing plan earlier this year with a $100 shoe called “the Black and Tan,” to commemorate the enthusiastic swilling of green beer on St. Patrick’s Day. The Royal Irish Constabulary Reserve Force was dispatched to Ireland to suppress revolt in the 1920s in the black wool and khaki cotton that gave them their name. Nike adopted the name with a remarkable ignorance of history, and advertised the shoe with the message: “’tis the season for Irish beer and why not celebrate with Nike?” The shoe fetishists soon apologized.

No apologies yet from Adidas, but no doubt they’re coming soon. Nobody is taught much about history now, but expensive lessons are often learned in law and economics.

Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times.

A “new paper,” that ultimate authority in academic and media circles, purports to show that only prejudice stands between President Obama and a second term.

Americans who cheered Mr. Obama’s success four years ago as evidence of a new day in America were living in the kingdom of the dumb, and remain there today. “If my results are correct,” writes a Harvard doctoral candidate in the New York Times, “racial animus cost Mr. Obama many more votes that we may have realized.” Such bigotry deprived the president, who won decisively with 53 percent of the popular vote in 2008, of his due. But for the bigots the president would have won up to 58 percent of the popular vote, a landslide.

Seth Stephens-Davidowitz peppers his paper with lots of learned graduate-school jargon and jive – “rational-choice theory,” “reverse causation,” “regression analysis” – but it boils down to the same old stuff Mr. Obama and his designated hitters peddled in 2008.

“Can we really quantify racial prejudice in different parts of the country?” asks Dr.-to-be Stephens-Davidowitz. “Not perfectly, but remarkably well.” Or at least good enough for the op-ed page.

He concedes that quantifying the effects of racial prejudice on voting is “notoriously problematic.” Indeed, people lie about unpopular beliefs and politically incorrect convictions almost as often as they lie about sex (which is always).

But Mr. Stephens-Davidowitz employs a mechanism above and beyond skepticism, the Google search engine, to find stuff on the Internet. If you get it from the Internet everyone knows it’s absolutely, positively good and unerringly true. He used Google to find “racially charged material,” using a new Google tool called Google Insights to pin down the parts of the country whence that material comes. Since the typical racist works hunched over a keyboard in the wee small hours of the morning with nobody looking over his shoulder, he will type outrageous words – lots of n-words – into a Google search field.

“You may have typed things into Google that you would hesitate to admit in polite company,” says Mr. Stephens-Davidowitz. “I certainly have. The majority of Americans have as well. We Google the word ‘porn’ more often than the word ‘weather.’” Ah, the lonely lives of Harvard doctoral candidates. (He offers neither explanation nor citation for his assertion that a “majority of Americans” make such nocturnal submissions.

He cites West Virginia, western Pennsylvania, eastern Ohio, upstate New York and southern Mississippi as the source of most racist inquiries. Once he figured out where the baddest Americans live, he could predict, using the vote for John Kerry in 2004 as benchmark and allowing for growth in number of voters, just how many votes the president should have received in 2008.

What renders all this as malarkey and moonshine is that mining Google rants and raves doesn’t reveal who actually voted, or why, or who is likely to vote again this year. Many, perhaps most, ranters are satisfied with the raving, and never bother to vote.

“If my findings are correct, race could very well prove decisive against Mr. Obama in 2012,” he writes. A big If. But he concedes, grudgingly, the possibility that "racial prejudice will play a smaller role in 2012 than it did in 2008, now that the country is familiar with a black president.”

The most virulent conceit working in politics today is that America is a nation of racists – except, of course, the pious and righteous liberals who harbor the conceit. In this warped view, time has not moved an inch or an hour since the era of angry Klansmen, lynch mobs and burnt-out black churches. Even Bill Clinton, who knew better and had to apologize for his libel, told whoppers about remembering burnt-out churches in his native Arkansas. (There was never even one.)

Rarely in human history has a nation turned itself inside-out and bottom side-up to make amends for racial injustice. It’s the essence of authentic bigotry to ascribe evil motives this year to those who, with ample cause, prefer someone other than Barack Obama for president. Many Democrats and their toadies in the media insist that we must shield Mr. Obama from the consequences of his incompetence simply because he’s black. So who are the racists?

Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times.

Barack Obama and his friends in the mainstream media, so called, can’t believe that anyone could vote against someone as wonderful as he is (and they are). Only a bigot would vote against such a wonderful president. We’re getting a scary preview of the wrath to come in the reaction to this week’s presidential primary results in Arkansas and Kentucky.

No one has ever suggested that “as Arkansas goes, so goes the nation,” but you might think the 42 percent of the Arkansas primary vote that Mr. Obama didn’t get has rocked the foundations of the republic. That 42 percent in Arkansas is similar – indeed, almost identical – to the vote against Mr. Obama in Kentucky and earlier in West Virginia. Donna Brazile, a Democratic strategist, says it’s the result of “race, resentment and fear.” The Klan is coming! The Klan is coming! With tar, feathers and rope.

The anybody-but-Obama voters had a real-live alternative in Arkansas in the person of a Tennessee lawyer named John Wolfe. He actually carried nearly half of the state’s 75 counties. Unhappy Kentuckians settled for an apparition named “Uncommitted.” Earlier in West Virginia the anybody-but-Obama candidate was a convicted felon in a federal pokey in Texas. So it must be about race when voters prefer a lawyer to a man of color. It’s an article of Democratic faith that such bigots have to be Republicans, despite the inconvenient fact that so far the only voters who have voted against the president are Democrats.

Sixteen states have offered Democratic voters an alternative to Barack Obama, either an actual candidate, “Uncommitted,” or an opportunity to write in someone’s name. So far 15 percent of those Democratic voters have done so. In five states where there has been an actual opponent, 27 percent voted against the president. In New Hampshire, 1 Democrat in 10 wrote in an alternative. Twenty percent of North Carolina Democrats voted for “Uncommitted.” That’s a lot of “bigots”.

Tuesday’s vote against Mr. Obama is actually a protest against the party’s further slide to the left. Not so long ago Arkansas was the most loyal Democratic state, having never voted Republican. Then came the likes of George McGovern, Michael Dukakis and John Kerry, white men all. Loyal Democrats swallowed hard, voted Republican, and waited for Grandpa to climb out of his grave, dusting off his Confederate uniform and looking for a hickory switch. But silence reigned in the graveyards, and old-line Democrats continued to swallow hard and vote Republican.

Some Democrats understand this. “It’s just that [some] voters are down on national Democrats generally,” Martin Frost, a former Texas congressman, tells The Washington Post, “and I don’t believe it’s due to race.”

The Chattanooga lawyer who won the 42 percent in Arkansas with no mention of race goes Tuesday to Texas and another primary. He’s likely to get enough votes to inflict further heartburn at the White House. Unless you’re an FDR or a Ronald Reagan this is what unpopular incumbent president, black or white, can expect. Lyndon B. Johnson was driven out of his race for re-election in 1968 when Gene McCarthy won 42 percent of the vote in the New Hampshire primary.

“After 43 primaries and caucuses,” he told a boisterous crowd in Manchester, N.H., where the marathon began, “after many long days and more than a few long nights, I can say with confidence and gratitude that you have given me a great honor and solemn responsibility.

“To all of the thousands of good and decent Americans I’ve met who want nothing more than a better chance, a fighting chance, I have a simple message: Hold on a little longer. A better America begins tonight.”

The state of Florida says George Zimmerman is guilty of second-degree murder for the killing of Trayvon Martin. Mr. Zimmerman says he shot the boy in fear of his life. Now the court, and a jury if it gets that far, must shut their ears to the shriek and clatter of the circus, listen to cold facts, and decide.

This won’t be easy. The suspect made his first appearance in court Friday, arraigned on the second-degree murder charge, and his lawyer in his best judgment declined to ask for bail, citing “fervor” outside the courthouse.

The court would take an “unprecedented, extraordinary step” if it overturns his health-care scheme because it was enacted by “a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress,” the president declared. Obamacare actually cleared the House by only seven votes, 219 to 212, and on their face the president’s remarks betray an astonishing ignorance of the Constitution and how the republic works.

But Barack Obama is neither dumb nor ignorant. The man praised as the greatest orator since Demosthenes celebrated hope and change in ancient Greece knows better than to bandy words foolishly. So why would he say something so foolish and dumb?