Peggy trashes all. Obama tired and stale. good sign? [View all]

[Laura PourMeADrink]

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390443686004577636443448520330.html?KEYWORDS=peggy+noonan

Barack Obama is deeply overexposed and often boring. He never seems to be saying what he's thinking. His speech Thursday was weirdly anticlimactic. There's too much buildup, the crowd was tired, it all felt flat. He was somber, and his message was essentially banal: We've done better than you think. Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?

There were many straw men. There were phrases like "the shadow of a shuttered steel mill," which he considers writerly. But they sound empty and practiced now, like something you've heard in a commercial or an advertising campaign.

It was stale and empty. He's out of juice.

His daughters have grown beautiful.

As for Joe Biden, I love him and will hear nothing against him. He's like Democrats the way they used to be, and by that I do not mean idiotic, I mean normal—manipulative only to a normal degree, roughly aware of the facts of normal life, alert to and even respecting of such normal things as religious faith. I wish he did not insist on referring to his wife as "Dr. Jill Biden." I'm sure she has many doctorates, but so do half the unemployed in Manhattan.

much more trashing at link