Politico's Ben Smith: Gee, Obama's Hard to Mock

Is vanity hard to mock? Failure? Addiction to a teleprompter? How about the need to use the word “I”?

Urging Congress to pass a bill now that hasn’t been written yet is kind of stupid, no? And so is “jobs saved,” “corpse-man,” Attack Watch, and this:

Ben Smith is on Twitter where I can assure you no one has any trouble whatsoever mocking the man he laughingly calls “the leading expert on the complicated, delicate politics of race.” If by that Smith means, the leading expert on calling people racist to cover up your failures, we agree.

Ben Smith:

Tellingly, as Jodi Kantor pointed out, there isn’t even a memorable depiction of Obama on Saturday Night Live. Obama may be harder to parody than his predecessors because there’s no easy stereotype for him — Will Farrell’s George W. Bush was a dimwitted, lucky frat boy; Darrell Hammond’s Bill Clinton was Bubba, with extra sleaze and charisma; Dana Carvey was the patrician George H.W. Bush, failing to connect.

But there’s another factor as well. Obama’s persona is always a little bit in on the joke. He comments on which stories make it “above the fold” and on the deeper meanings of cable news. He wrote his own memoir before anybody had ever heard of him, and is himself the country’s leading expert on the complicated, delicate politics of race. He projects a kind of self-conscious, sometimes ironic detachment that makes him harder to mock, but maybe also harder to depict and even to like.

Of course Smith’s argument is absurd, especially the part about our notoriously thin-skinned and humorless president being in on the joke. Obama’s better at creating jobs than self-deprecation. Hey, here’s some mockery fodder… I see a bumbling, hapless President who wears a bike helmet in the Oval Office, is starved to death by his Food-Nazi wife (she sneaks french fries, he sneaks smokes), gets an uncontrollable facial tic every time the word “jobs” is mentioned, and won’t speak to anyone without a teleprompter leading the way.

Imagine a skit where the letter “i” breaks on the teleprompter. Oh the hilarity.

How hard was that, Ben?

Mocking Obama is actually fish-in-a-barrel if you’re not enamored with the man. Love is blind, after all.

Obviously, Obama’s easy to ridicule but unfortunately our most famous “satirists” are actually left-wing partisans disguised as satirists who understand the power of their art and refuse to turn it on Obama for fear of damaging his re-election chances.

Which is something they have in common with mainstream media outlets like Politico.