Parody or Reality? Obama Should Be Winning ‘99 to 1’ Over the ‘Plutocrats’

A week ago this morning, St. Louis Post-Dispatch readers awoke to the newspaper’s presidential endorsement editorial, “Obama for president: A second term for a serious man.” Yet it was very hard to take the editorial seriously.

“Ideologically, the P-D is similar to the New York Times, but it’s so knuckleheaded that it almost makes the Times look sophisticated,” the Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto observed the next day, passing along how “we had some good laughs at the P-D’s editorial yesterday endorsing Obama’s re-election.”

The October 7 editorial maintained: “To expect Barack Obama to have repaired, in four years, what took 30 years to undermine, is simply absurd. He might have gotten further had he not been saddled with an opposition party, funded by plutocrats, that sneers at the word compromise.”

To which, Taranto, in his October 8 “Best of the Web Today,” ridiculed: “Thirty years, eh? They’re not satisfied with blaming George W. Bush; they want to blame Reagan, Bush père and Clinton, too!”

Taranto added: “If we were editing a parody of a liberal editorial, we’d cut ‘funded by plutocrats’ as too over the top to be believable.”

Also too ridiculous to be believed in a parody, this actual argument from the editorial: “If more Americans were paying attention, this election would not be close. Barack Obama would win going away, at least 53 to 47, perhaps even 99 to 1.”

The laughably juvenile editorial then concluded:

But the atmosphere has been polluted by lies, distortion, voter suppression and spending by desperate plutocrats who see the nation’s changing demographics and fear that their time is almost up. They’ve had the help of a partisan Supreme Court.

The question for voters is actually very simple. The nation has wrestled with it since its founding: Will this be government for the many or the few?

Choose the many. Choose Barack Obama.