The President Tweeted 'Present'

A great read, from James Taranto, at the Wall Street Journal, "We Are the 119% - MSNBC: My Schadenfreude Now Blankets Cable":

Last night we got home from a dinner and discovered something wonderful when we switched on the television. There's an entire cable network called MSNBC devoted to the entertainment of conservatives. Apparently all they have on this station is disconsolate lefties 24/7. We assume it's part of the Fox empire. Roger Ailes is a genius, isn't he?

A guy named Lawrence O'Donnell hosts a show called "The Last Word," a misleading name, since here we are getting in a latter word. Even so, the show is awesome. O'Donnell cracked us up when he opened yesterday's show: "Tonight, the really big winner in Wisconsin's recall election is--President Obama." Later he had one of his fellow hosts, Rachel Maddow, on as a guest, and she agreed: "It's going to be hard to see this as a bad night for Obama," she declared, citing the president's "11-point margin of theoretical victory . . . over Mitt Romney." (Charlie Spiering has a video montage.)

Theoretically, Obama was on the side of the government employee unions that were behind the unsuccessful attempt to oust Gov. Scott Walker, who last year signed legislation abolishing most of their corrupt "collective bargaining" arrangements. "Understand this," the future president declared in 2007: "If American workers are being denied their right to organize and collectively bargain when I'm in the White House, I'll put on a comfortable pair of shoes myself, I'll walk on that picket line with you as president of the United States of America. Because workers deserve to know that somebody is standing in their corner."

In practice, Obama tweeted "present": "It's Election Day in Wisconsin tomorrow, and I'm standing by Tom Barrett. He'd make an outstanding governor." But he was only theoretically present. Not only was he standing, not walking; he was standing someplace far from Wisconsin. In fact, for all we know he was sitting at the time. We can't be sure he was even wearing shoes.

Even the sad clowns of MSNBC couldn't deny the election was a big loss for the man who was standing nowhere near Obama. Milwaukee's Mayor Tom Barrett received just 46% of the vote to Walker's 53%, slightly widening Walker's margin of victory over Barrett in 2010, the year that Middle America gave Republicans their biggest landslide perhaps in living memory.

This despite what the Boston Globe's Derrick Z. Jackson calls "huge turnout in Wisconsin's liberal strongholds," especially Milwaukee and Dane counties. The latter includes Madison, the ultralefty capital, where turnout was as high as 119% by some accounts...

More at that top link.

I was watching, for a little while at least. See: "Public Unions Dealt Costly Blow in Wisconsin."