WaPo’s Chris Cillizza wonders: Is Candidate Obama … overrated?

Ed Morrissey @ Hot Air:

It’s amazing what happens when the emperor is exposed as having no clothes, eh?  Suddenly, the media begin asking questions that everyone else asked four years ago about a man who hadn’t even completed one term as Senator and who had no executive experience, running in a distinctly anti-Republican political environment.  Chris Cillizza at the Washington Post wonders whether Barack Obama has always been as mediocre a candidate as he was last Wednesday night in the debate:

Obama’s debate performance also raised a bigger question: Is he overrated as a candidate?

Four years ago, that question would have been unimaginable. After all, this was a man who in his first run for national office not only outmaneuvered the Clinton family to win the Democratic presidential nomination but also went on to claim a 365-electoral-vote general-election landslide against Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz). And, oh by the way, Obama did all that while raising $750 million (including $500 million online) — a sum that shattered all fundraising records.

Well, we’re finding out more about how Team Obama shattered those fundraising records, too.  But Cillizza is wrong about the question being “unimaginable”; plenty of us “imagined” it at the time, and not just about Obama as a candidate.  He was easily the least-experienced major-party nominee in decades, with no military, business, or executive experience prior to his candidacy.  The only elections he won were in a heavily Democratic region — Chicago — and against Alan Keyes in his one statewide race in 2004.  Obama had never distinguished himself as a legislative leader. His only real claim to fame was that he wrote two memoirs and gave a great speech at the 2004 Democratic convention.

In fact, not only were many of us “imagining” that question, we were pointing out Obama’s flaws and foibles on the campaign trail, most of which the press ignored in favor of the Obama narrative of Hope and Change.  Cillizza tacitly acknowledges the warning signs in 2008:

And yet, even in that campaign, there was some evidence that candidate Obama had flaws — the most notable of which was that while he delivered solid performances in the debates against McCain, he was far from the champion performer that many expected. (The coverage largely glossed over that fact because a) the race had already heavily tilted in Obama’s favor by that point, making the debates less meaningful, and b) McCain was a decent debater at best, which made Obama’s performance seem stronger in comparison.)

The narrative has changed this year, or perhaps it’s better to say that Obama has forced the narrative to change:

Read more