I just read the transcript.

1) This guy knows the issues in depth. We may not agree on the optimal solution, but you can't say he hasn't mastered the problem domain. Compare to Bush. Or McCain. Or (shudders) Palin.

2) His choice of questioners was interesting. Yeah, he snubbed Fox, but he also snubbed WaPo and NYT, but did call on the Washington Times. It was a diverse mix. Re-emphasizing that he's not afraid of any question from anyone.

3) He's in charge of the room. He doesn't put anyone down, but there's no question he's the leader.

4) He stays on message -- tying answers into the themes previously established, and building on them.

5) One of his key themes is steady progress. Learning and adjusting as you go.

All in all I have to think that the average low information viewer -- the kind of person who watches prime time TV everynight but almost never visits cable news -- will have left that news conference feeling very reassured that the US has a strong, competent leader with a clear, effective vision.

For some reason the political junkies always want Obama to be something else -- more emotional, maybe, or more confrontational. But Obama is exactly what mainstream America wants in its leader. He's the person that mainstream America hoped Bush would be after 9/11 -- to the point of even pretending to themselves that Bush had all those qualities.

HE was still employed by the Rocky Mtn News????? After all these years!?!?!?!?!

Okay, that's all the info I need to understand why the Rocky Mtn News mgmt failed. If they kept that useless occupier of column space for that long they obviously haven't any clue.

Oh, let me guess. They kept him because he was "controversial". If by "controversial" you mean "column after column was such mindless drivel without a shred of a factoid of info you couldn't have found in the previous day's paper". Yes he got lots of hate mail, if that's your measure of a "good" columnist.

Lincicome is to Paul Zimmerman as anti-matter is to matter. Yeah, he's that bad.

But Limbaugh limped through the final half-hour, rambling and repeating points he had already covered.

I take it you haven't had the joy of listening to one of his radio programs?

Rush has maybe 2-3 points he wants to cover in any single day, and he repeats them over and over again. The reason it works is that his workday audience consists of people who have the radio on as background while they go about their workday, so it's necessary to repeat points several times to make sure his audience hears all of them. Also, his audience *likes* the repetition. While normal people will tune to a music station, or possibly business news or sports, dittoheads go for the thrill of having Rush soothingly tell them over and over again that the dittoheads are the good people and everyone else is evil. Repetition in this case is not bad ... it's equivalent to your mommy telling you "everything's going to be alright" over and over and over again.

The conservative talker with the self-professed "talent on loan from God" spoke incessantly in the first person: there were more "I's" in his CPAC address than in an Idaho potato field.

Yep, his radio show is like this too. Dittoheads, though they never will admit it, are desperate for Daddy figures who take charge, and this is perhaps the biggest reason that Rush continues to dominate conservative talk show ratings 20 years after he started. This is why dittoheads fooled themself into thinking Dubya was a cartoon version of Patton -- they *need* to think Daddy is taking care of them. When an evil Democrat holds the Presidency they *need* to hear Rush tell them that HE will take charge and protect them.

By the way, this is exactly why liberal talk radio doesn't work well. The Rush formula is DOA when dealing with liberals, centrists, or anyone but a dittohead. Liberals are more likely to be looking for analysis and solutions. Dittoheads just want to know who to blame and that they are safe and secure.

If you followed the Ron Paul campaign at all, he repeatedly stressed that if you want to eliminate the IRS (as he did), you need to scale back the role of government. That is why he talked about ending the empire and getting back to the role for the Federal Government prescribed by the Constitution.

I doubt anyone will read this far in the thread, but still I wanted to address this one little myth.

Ron Paul does talk like a real libertarian and this is why he attracted such a strong following during the presidential campaign. But it is telling that he endored the theocratic Constitution party over the Libertarian party after the Republican convention. Behind his speeches of the past 5 years there is a long history of siding with Christianists and white supremacists.

Paul has learned, like any good politician, to play to his audience. He says the things that his supporters agree with, and by downplaying his racist and Christianist views, he's won a lot of new supporters. But those views are still a big part of who he is.

There is a reason Paul was censored so effectively by Fox News and the rest of the media -- his message, in its entirety, is perfect for the Republican base. No taxes, almost no government, kill the queers and the abortionists (yes, libertarians -- he is is very "pro-life"), deport the brown people, and make segregation legal again.