Dog breeders know this well: You can’t breed a dog that will hunt, herd sheep without hurting them, guard your house, and also feels good on your lap. If you try, you often get a dog that kills sheep, barks at your children, is too big and too rough-feeling for any lap, and that won’t hunt. The Leftist Kaballa that invented Pres. Obama several years ago tried to do more or less that. They went one step or two steps too far. Their dog won’t hunt.

The President is telegenic; he has a wonderful-looking family with daughters of exactly the right luminous age to win hearts (two years later, they would be another set of embarrassed teenagers fidgeting with their bras). He has an attractive smile. He enunciates correctly (most of the time: Don’t ask him to say: “Navy corpsman”). He has the right educational credentials (if you don’t scratch the surface. And it’s a fact that I can’t get many liberals to share my condemnation of his locked-away grades.) And lo, and behold, in spite of these many virtues, he is black! It’s as if America’s slaving, racist past did not really happen, was just a bad dream.

Well, he is sort of black; he has no slave blood flowing through his vein, as Rev. Jackson commented during his first campaign. In fact, he is likely to have slaver blood racing through his veins as I pointed out viciously in an old posting. Not that it would matter to me. Ancestry matters to liberals though: Just look at Dr Elisabeth Warren and her 32th Indian ancestry!

Yesterday’s first presidential debate of the 2012 campaign was between someone and nobody. Gracelessness and utter lack of charisma notwithstanding. Mr Romney talked intelligently and clearly about current and pressing issues: joblessness and the government’s addiction to debt. Pres. Obama had nothing to say except for misstatements of simple facts and half-remembered fragments of his 2008 speeches. That did not surprise me. There was no one facing Romney.

As I have tirelessly pointed out on this blog, Mr Obama is not evil. He is not an apprentice dictator. He is not a “socialist.” It’s just that there is no one there. He never accomplished anything as state senator, as a US Senator, as a community organizer, or as the editor of an important law review. He did not accomplish anything in 3 and 4/5 years as a president either. He failed those who elected him at every turn, his partisans, I mean. His only signal accomplishment -“Obamacare” – was not his but that of the Evil Witch Nancy Pelosi. And we already knew that he can’t really speak at any length without a prompter.

Remarkably, for the first time I can remember, Mr Romney spoke like a conservative. This may be a turning point. It’s worth mentioning because, inexplicably, there are many dinosaurs in the Republican Party who seem to believe that you can beat your adversary by pretending to be him. Romney may have turned a corner in that respect: The Obama liberal agenda turns out to be a disaster. Time to try a different approach. That’s one of the practical merits of democracy; it’s got a plan B.

None of this means that Pres. Obama will lose the election. First, as someone who has lectured thousands of time I will testify that a bad night’s sleep may reduce you to nothing, or altitude. He may pick himself up off the ground and do very well in the next debate.

Second, I have commented before on the curious unresponsiveness to fact of some, mostly young Obama supporters. (“My Obamist Friends…” Sept. 7) One I know well told me in essence that it was a matter of style, that he couldn’t possibly vote for a Mormon who looks like a Mormon. Another, called Pres Obama “pro-woman” and couldn’t give any evidence in support. Her impression stayed untouched by her dearth of facts. An old, old-style liberal came to her help on this blog and whispered answers but this only reinforces my point: We have generations of young people who were reared off thin narratives as in the “Survivor” series. Other Obama supporters are union members enjoying extraordinary unearned privileges who simply have nowhere else to go to preserve them in the face of rising public indignation. And then, there are the hereditary Democrats who will shoot themselves in both feet if they have to, out of faithfulness. That includes Jewish Americans who will again overwhelmingly cast a ballot for the first president publicly to throw Israel under the bus.

The debate was especially impressive in its effectiveness given that both candidates kept referring to a large fictitious entity, “the middle class.” Who the hell is this? Is it the people who are neither on welfare nor billionaires? Silly thought!

And one more thing: Don’t blame the media for its liberal bias. Media people are a tribe with its own culture. It’s not a conspiracy. One, as Rush Limbaugh often points out, they want to keep being invited to the same cocktail parties. Second, they are in love and love makes you stupid. (The reason I feel so sure of my assertions in this respect is that media people are like college professors, a group I know well. I have written on this blog about brilliant academics routinely acting stupid out of love.)