In my piece yesterday, I noted the many ways that Barack Obama’s ad-libbed comments at his Jefferson-Jackson address deviated in tone and substance from his prepared text. I also should have noted that many of the comments Obama made that weren’t in the text, like the crack about Dick Cheney not being sufficiently cool to be an Obama family relation, were observations that he had made before. My point wasn’t that Obama had never said any of these things before, but rather that the carefully scripted, reliably uplifting Obama who usually shows up for nationally televised addresses drifted into completely different territory during the Jefferson/Jackson address. It’s also worth noting that he did this drifting while unmoored by a Teleprompter. The fact, as numerous annoyed lefties have pointed out, that he previously has railed against Karl Rove and Mike Brown only highlights the disparities between the two Obamas. The Obama who goes before national primetime audiences plays the conciliator, reaching out even to Republicans (of all people). The Obama who goes before audiences of Democrats tends to offer healthy servings of red meat to the angry left. Obama supporters (assuming they’re capable of skepticism or even passive inquiry) have to wonder, Which one is the real Obama? The rest of America, for that matter, has to ask the same question. When he deviated from his text on Saturday, Obama often did so to offer John Edwards-style shtick. That he has done this shtick before and with some regularity only further buttresses the notion that the Obama who plays the olive-branch offering peace-maker may be a carefully scripted ruse, and the real Obama may not be quite the post-partisan figure that his supporters claim him to be.
