Barack Obama: The Ron Popeil of politics *UPDATED*

I’ve been thinking about Barack Obama’s speech.  It was a peculiar speech, even by Obama standards.  Frantic in tone, pressed in pace, disorganized, hysterical in its demands, extreme in its promises, dishonest in its characterizations, with divisiveness and discord as its goal.  It was not a nice speech, in any way shape or form.  Nor did it have even the virtue of elegance to offset its mean spiritedness.  It was just bullying smack talk.

Not only was it weird, it was familiar.  And then it hit me.  Obama reminded me of Ron Popeil.  Watch this video.  You’ll see that Popeil is less shrill than Obama (and quite possibly much more honest), but there’s that same escalation of promises.  “But wait, there’s more!”

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zz1ZVg2RtTo[/youtube]

BUT, WAIT!  THERE’S MORE! (Or, as I used to call it, an UPDATE):  Thinking about it, the one last thing I wanted to add is that it severely diminished both the office of the president and the nature of Congress to use a Joint Sessions address for that mean-spirited pre-NFL warm-up talk.

BUT, WAIT!  THERE’S STILL MORE! If Ron Popeil isn’t your man, maybe Steve Martin is.