The Sound of a Preference Cascade.

Washington Post liberal columnist Richard Cohen outlines - gasp! - a character flaw of the Lightworker! Obama doesn't really care about anyone other than himself.

But somewhere between the campaign and the White House itself, Obama got lost. It turned out he had no cause at all. Expanding health insurance was Hillary Clinton’s longtime goal, and even after Obama adopted it, he never argued for it with any fervor. In an unfairly mocked campaign speech, he promised to slow the rise of the oceans and begin to heal the planet. But when he took office, climate change was abandoned — too much trouble, too much opposition. His eloquence, it turned out, was reserved for campaigning.

Obama never espoused a cause bigger than his own political survival. This is the gravamen of the indictment from the left, particularly certain African Americans. They are right. Young black men fill the jails and the morgues, yet Obama says nothing. Bobby Kennedy showed his anger, his impatience, his stunned incredulity at the state of black America. Obama shows nothing.

Cohen is still going to vote for Obama, but he says he will do so with regret.

Also, note this paragraph:

The crowd adored Obama, although not as much as I think he adored himself. Liberals were intolerant of anyone who had doubts. Obama was not a man, but a totem. A single critical column from me during the campaign triggered a fusillade of invective. The famous and esteemed told me off. I was the tool of right-wing haters, a dope of a dupe.

Notice how that works. Cohen goes off the reservation with a single column and gets a "fusillade of invective." So, he stays on the reservation thereafter. Until now, when it's safe to do so because other people are criticizing the Lightworker.

This comports with Glen Reynolds observation that "Americans of all political persuasions are now comfortable criticizing the president."

Post Debate 2 Gallup has Romney at +7.

Gallup: Romney 52% - Obama 47% among likely voters.

Preference Cascade, anyone?

He's not "defying gravity" anymore.

Reading the Tea Leaves.

Professor Jacobson points out that the unexpected rise in consumer confidence is correlated with Romney's rise in the polls.

Bill Quick thinks that we are watching a "preference cascade unfold in real time."

Is it the pitter-patter of a preference cascade?

The insiders at the Washington Post discovery that America's Greatest Communicator Ever is lousy at press conferences:

If you are president of the United States and you don’t have anything to say, don’t have a press conference to say it. If you’re the president of the United States and by Thursday it’s widely believed you’ve had one of the worst weeks of your presidency, take Friday off, and specifically avoid having a press conference.

Anytime you are president and you’re speaking in public at an ill-timed press conference after a bad week, try to have something to say, and do a good job in saying it. I watched the whole thing, but it’s not easy to think of one useful thing that he had to say. And what he said, he said very poorly. Was it just me, or did the president seem a little dazed and confused? He should have had a cup of coffee before the press conference.

And one more thing that’s a pet peeve. The president says “uhhh” too much. When I was a cable television news extra during the ‘90s and early 2000s, you learn early to purge your presentation of “uhhh.” Saying “uhhh” suggests uncertainty and is distracting. (And in my case, when it was accompanied by a Southern accent, it was even worse.) I don’t know what the president had in mind, but his own meandering, stuttering performance could not have done him any good with any audience. What was he, uhhh, thinking?

Perhaps the president and others are huddled in an after-action review meeting in the Oval Office right now. It appears no one at The White House wants to give the president bad news or an honest critique of his performance. Somebody should print this post and slide it under the Oval Office door immediately.

First, there's a reason that Obama has given fewer press conferences than past presidents, i.e,, Obama didn't give a press conference between 2009 and 2012. Why would we think he has any particular facility with that form of communication?

Second, telempropter dependence.

Hey, that emperor is naked.

A Quiet Preference cascade.

90% of Obama's 2008 small donors have decided not to donate to Obama this year.

Former donors’ complaints vary — healthcare, the economy, and Congressional deadlock rank high — but many of Obama’s once die-hard supporters share a disappointment born of high expectations. Indeed, Obama’s core supporters in the 2008 Democratic primary were liberals suspicious of Hillary Clinton’s association with a moderate “New Democrat” past and her support for the Iraq war. They backed the Illinois Democrat despite his own relatively centrist platform, but were disappointed when he stuck to it. Several cited Obama’s failure to include a single payer option in his health care bill, as well as general willingness to bend to Republican wishes as being central to their disappointment with the President.

The Buzzfeed story makes it sound as if the drop-off was among disappointed leftists, but you have to wonder if the real drop-off was among independents who view Obama as a too hard-left.

Developing and something to watch for...

...Is Obama about suffer a "preference cascade"?

Ed Driscoll explains:

A decade ago, Glenn Reynolds described a “preference cascade” as one of the reasons why “totalitarian regimes collapse so suddenly:”

Such regimes have little legitimacy, but they spend a lot of effort making sure that citizens don’t realize the extent to which their fellow-citizens dislike the regime. If the secret police and the censors are doing their job, 99% of the populace can hate the regime and be ready to revolt against it – but no revolt will occur because no one realizes that everyone else feels the same way.

This works until something breaks the spell, and the discontented realize that their feelings are widely shared, at which point the collapse of the regime may seem very sudden to outside observers – or even to the citizens themselves. Claims after the fact that many people who seemed like loyal apparatchiks really loathed the regime are often self-serving, of course. But they’re also often true: Even if one loathes the regime, few people have the force of will to stage one-man revolutions, and when preferences are sufficiently falsified, each dissident may feel that he or she is the only one, or at least part of a minority too small to make any difference.

If anyone is due for a "preference cascade" it is Barrack Obama. I recall people announcing for Obama in 2006, when he had been a Senator for less than two years and they knew nothing about him, usually in the context of showing that they were not racists. That kind of faith over fact approach can last for a long time, but at some point someone is going to announce that the "Emperor has no clothes" and then people are going to start saying, "Gee, you know, he does seem a little scantily dressed."

The thing keeping Obama aloft thus far is probably simply the totalitarian media. We've had recent examples of how people living in New York, and probably Los Angeles, Portland and Seattle, just aren't getting the unfiltered news. However, when left/lib opinion sources like Maureen Dowd start "putting down markers" for Obama's defeat, then people who want to be trendy, and what better describes the left/lib mindset?, will not want to be the last ones to miss the new bandwagon.