Bob Shrum, one of the great contrary indicators in the world of political punditry, thinks Obama is on course to an easy reelection. This ought to worry Axelrod and the gang, given Shrum’s track record.
But what’s really notable about Shrum’s column in The Week is that he seems not to know that the Faux Faulkner Contest (along with the Imitation Hemingway Competition, sadly) is out of business, and hence he’s wasting prose like this:
But Weiner’s moment will pass, just as he soon will, even as the juvenilia of his tweeted private parts and pecs linger uncomfortably in memory and irrepressibly among the late night comics. This wasn’t tragedy, but farce: Not someone great brought down by a Shakespearean flaw, but an avatar of ambition and opportunism undone by cyberspaced perversion. The cable celebrity became the internet incarnation of the dirty middle-aged man in a raincoat desperate to expose himself. Weiner apparently was determined to prove that nomenclature is destiny.
Then there’s this gem: “Even from NYU’s campus in Florence, Italy, I could feel the gears of political prognosis shifting back home.” Someone ought to tell Harry’s Bar to cut him off.
Maybe we should start an Imitation Shrum Contest? Winner gets a copy of The Quotable Kofi Annan (an actual book).