What has Barack Obama ever done to prove his character?

An interesting comparison of the two candidates, which displays an obvious difference in the ways that liberals and conservatives define a fair competition.

Michael Lewis: Obama’s Way | Vanity Fair
---
Obama was 20 or more years older than most of them, and probably not as physically gifted, though it was hard to say because of the age differences. No one held back, no one deferred. Guys on his team dribbled past him and ignored the fact he was wide open. When he drives through the streets, crowds part, but when he drives to the basket large, hostile men slide over to cut him off. It’s revealing that he would seek out a game like this but even more that others would give it to him: no one watching would have been able to guess which guy was president. As a player on the other team, who must have outweighed Obama by a hundred pounds, backed the president of the United States down and knocked the crap out of him, all for the sake of a single layup, I leaned over to the former Florida State point guard.

“No one seems to be taking it easy on him,” I said.

“If you take it easy on him, you’re not invited back,” he explained.
---

US elections 2012: candidate's family set for 'Romney Olympics' - Telegraph
---
At a minimum, all adult members of the clan are expected to take part in a mini-triathlon of running, biking and swimming. But after nearly losing to a daughter-in-law who had given birth just two months before, the 65-year-old Mr Romney expanded the games in an effort to compensate for his advancing age.

The family now competes to hammer the most nails into a board in two minutes, saw the most logs and hang onto a pole for the longest time before losing their grip, according to the Washington Post.

"We added some things I excel at so I don't come in last every year," Mr Romney said.
---
 
Volumes.

Spoken.

Indeed. It reveals how little you know of the sport. Anyways, that's such a good article, let's read some more snippets from it. I don't want to violate fair use by posting too much, so I suggest reading the whole original, which is very long, just to understand how fortunate we are to have this guy in office.

Michael Lewis: Obama's Way | Vanity Fair

---
Obama could find a perfectly respectable game with his equals in which he could shoot and score and star, but this is the game he wants to play. It’s ridiculously challenging, and he has very little space to maneuver, but he appears happy. He’s actually just good enough to be useful to his team, as it turns out. Not flashy, but he slides in to take charges, passes well, and does a lot of little things well. The only risk he takes is his shot, but he shoots so seldom, and so carefully, that it actually isn’t much of a risk at all. (He smiles when he misses; when he makes one, he looks even more serious.) “Spacing is big. He knows where to go,” said one of the other players as we watched. “And unlike a lot of lefties, he can go to his right.”

And he chattered constantly. “You can’t leave him open like that!” … “Money!” … “Take that shot!” His team jumped ahead, mainly because it took fewer stupid shots. When I threw one up I discovered the reason for this. When you are on the president’s basketball team and you take a stupid shot, the president of the United States screams at you. “Don’t be looking to the sidelines all sheepish,” he hollered at me. “You got to get back and play D!”

...

Back on October 9, 2009, Obama had been woken up in the middle of the night to be informed that he’d been given the Nobel Peace Prize. He half thought it might be a prank. “It’s one of the most shocking things that has happened in all of this,” he says. “And I immediately anticipated that it would cause me problems.” The Nobel Prize Committee had just made it a tiny bit harder for him to do the job he’d just been elected to do, as he could not at once be commander in chief of the most powerful force on earth and the face of pacifism. When he sat down some weeks later with Ben Rhodes and another speechwriter, Jon Favreau, to discuss what he wanted to say, he told them he intended to use the acceptance speech to make the case for war. “I need to make sure I was addressing a European audience that had recoiled so badly from the Iraq war, and that may have been viewing the conferring of the Nobel Prize as a vindication of inaction.”

...

The next morning Obama called Medvedev to make sure that the Russians would not block his U.N. resolution. There was no obvious reason why Russia should want to see Qaddafi murder a city of Libyans, but in the president’s foreign dealings the Russians play the role that Republicans currently more or less play in his domestic affairs. The Russians’ view of the world tends to be zero-sum: if an American president is for it, they are, by definition, against it. Obama thought that he had made more progress with the Russians than he had with the Republicans; Medvedev had come to trust him, he felt, and believed him when he said the United States had no intention of moving into Libya for the long term. A senior American official at the United Nations thought that perhaps the Russians let Obama have his resolution only because they thought it would end in disaster for the United States.
---
 

Forum List

Back
Top