http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2010/11/ ... s-hillary/

Opinion
Now It's Obama Who Is 'Bitter' and Clinging to Something

By Dan Hill

Published November 10, 2010
FoxNews.com
Reuters

Look at President Obama’s face during his White House press conference following last week’s post-midterm election debacle, and what do you see? You may not be a facial coding expert like I am, but anybody can recognize –and maybe even be shocked by—the degree to which Barack Obama has gone from the ebullient campaigner of 2008 to a very bitter, frustrated man. The pressed lips and especially the bulge beneath the lower lip betray anger, disgust and sadness, with the last of those emotions accentuated by the narrow, lowered eyes that also reveal disappointment.

How, beyond the ghastly specter of partisan sniping and gridlock over pressing national issues, did it come to this point? Why has the president’s originally attractive cool confidence begun to strike many (especially independent) voters as aloof arrogance worth rejecting instead?

To answer that question, let me back up to the two most decisive impressions I got of Barack Obama during the Democratic debates of 2008. Both came in Philadelphia, with the first on October 30, 2007, when Hillary Clinton was caught by the late Tim Russert in a lie about whether she truly wanted to seek the release of Bill Clinton’s presidential papers, as a way to validate her White House experience. When Russert held up a copy of a letter from the Clintons asking for the papers withheld until 2013, first John Edwards pounced, and then by degrees Barack Obama weighed in.

In Obama’s case, he did so with all the bumbling earnestness of his very best impersonation of Jimmy Stewart in "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington." Seizing on Hillary Clinton’s dishonesty and linking it to George W. Bush’s secrecy, Obama established himself as the authentic alternative and I immediately changed my odds of Obama upstaging her for the Democratic nomination to no better than 2-to-1 in favor of Hillary.

The final Democratic debate of 2008 also took place in Philadelphia, on April 16. By then Obama was the front-runner, but under siege, having just made a huge, revealing goof. At a private fundraiser in San Francisco days earlier, he’d infamously said:


“You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone for twenty five years and nothing’s replaced them. So it’s not surprising then that [people there] get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.â€