Mitt Romney was too smooth. He hit all the right messages, but the very precision that made him so successful in business — combined with his record as a politician — seems to have left people unsure of his convictions and put his campaign near an end.
In stark contrast, Barack Obama’s smoothness and empty platitudes serve to make his deeply held liberal/progressive/statist convictions more palatable. As Jon Ham wrote last night at Right Angles, there is not much substance to Obama’s talk, but it is clear that he believes in something. He seems less to be hiding his beliefs than to be expressing the common core he shares with others. What some of us find unreadable in his book or unbearable in his speeches is exactly what makes him appealing to Oprah.
