Politics isn't only stupid, it's boring. The Obama show ratings are dropping like a stone.

A while back, I suggested that it was time for everyone to cool it a bit on linking to the craziest, least thought-through, most over-the-top writing coming from the margins of cultural conservatism. My point was that during the previous presidential administration, those figures were important to criticize because they had substantial intellectual or political access to actual policy-makers, but that after November 2008, the best thing to do was to try and shove them off into the margins where they belonged.

If they continued to be the targets of regular links-for-deserved-abuse, I felt, there was the danger that those margins would continue to drive the national conversation about policy and politics. . .

A lot of folks back then disagreed with my point, saying that there was no surer way to check the influence of the fringes than to expose and mock their craziness. Can I just ask: how’s that working out for you all? There’s pretty wide mainstream consensus that the parents who didn’t want their precious children to hear the President’s radical, socialist message about working hard and staying in school are pretty much batshit crazy if they’re serious about believing the President was going to suck out the precious bodily fluids of the nation’s children and pretty much nihilistic saboteurs if they’re just trying to sandbag the current political leadership wherever and whenever they can by getting the batshit crazy folks worked up.

And yet here we are: the crazies and the saboteurs are driving the national conversation as reported in the MSM and masticated by the Sunday-morning TV pundits.

Perhaps this isn't an accurate account of events.

The White House officials are eager to avoid the perception that the president is directly engaging critics who appear to speak only for a vocal minority, and part of their strategy involves pushing material to liberal and progressive media outlets to steer the coverage in their direction, senior advisers said.

When critics lashed out at President Obama for scheduling a speech to public school students this month, accusing him of wanting to indoctrinate children to his politics, his advisers quickly scrubbed his planned comments for potentially problematic wording. They then reached out to progressive Web sites such as the Huffington Post, liberal bloggers and Democratic pundits to make their case to a friendly audience.

The controversy escalated, but by the time it was over, White House advisers thought they had emerged with the upper hand.

It may seem like clever politics, but is it good governance? The materials released before the speech and which raised objections differed from the cleaned up speech. Are these the sort of people that we want in high office? They are merely cheap political manipulators. It is no wonder that society is tuning out and Obama's ratings are tanking. It's not a interesting show, it's just cheap gimmicks.

There were times during the Bush years that I admired their rope-a-dope political maneuvers. I didn't agree with them, didn't like the policies (war, ethanol subsidies, wild spending etc.) but they were clever tactics. They didn't do cheap hustles like the Obama education materials/speech switcheroo, they played it straight, letting their opponents run wild down the wrong path with no opposition until they fell on their faces. The subtle finesse was to not impede the headlong rush to nowhere when they could have stood against them, and so balanced a forward leaning stance. Instead they stood aside and allowed the opposition to fall flat.

The call to ignore the political opponents of Obama rather than whipping the nut roots into a frenzy is tactically similar to the Bush style, but the Obama administration prefers the theatrics of deception rather than subtlety. Seen another way, the Bush team was up on its Boydian OODA, but Obama doesn't know what that's about. Boring as well as stupid.