I bet he actually hugs the teleprompters

John McCain and President Bush were often berated for their inabilitiy to comfortably read teleprompters. They usually sounded stiff, unrhythmic and disinterested. Clearly they didn't practice enough.

But Obama - whoa can that man read a teleprompter! On his campaign swing through Elkhart, Indiana it was vintage, on-the-stump Obama whipping his head back and forth in perfect rhythm telling the great unwashed of that job depressed town that he would bring them back to life and he'd blacktop I31 and fix the bridges down on South street if that's what it took to get more people to work. Nothing reads on a teleprompter like chicken-in-every pot rhetoric. The man's a glib genius.

And in last night's press conference, the staged portion, that is the telepromptered portion, Obama was on message. Head turning, subtle eyebrow raises, tiny smirks and solid fear mongering rhetoric poured out like honey on the assembled adoring press. The message - I inherited a deficit that George Bush doubled in his eight year stint and my plan to fix it is to double it again in my first 3 weeks in office.

But then they had to turn the teleprompters off. Clearly, Obama must have felt like Cap't Sully when the engines went dead. The feeling in the pit of his stomach had to be similar. A panic set in, you could see it in his eyes, and not only did he not make a safe water landing but the good ship Obama crashed hard and didn't come to a stop until the reporter from the Washing ton Post changed things up with a question about baseball and steroids.

Obama's answers were rambling, unsteady and mostly empty of content. It really did seem like a robot whose wires got short circuited and he was spinning around delivering truncated phrases from Jonny Favreau's talking points memos.

The one thing about telling the truth all the time is you never have to remember what you said.

Didn't matter though. The Democrats-only government will respond with a flow of fake money into the economy like we've never seen and they will save us from a "catastrophe". Of course, nothing works like fear and as Rahm Emmanuel says "never let a good crisis go to waste".