After many months of campaigning, Mitt Romney has finally taken the lead in polling for the election.  But why has it taken so long for the American people to catch onto the Mittmentum?  It begins with two key events:  the Republican National Convention and the Presidential debates.  And interestingly, Hurricane Sandy also shows us some interesting insights about how the mainstream media has dealt with Barack Obama – The Man Who Never Was.

One of the seminal events of the election season was Clint Eastwood’s appearance at the RNC.  Granted, the Eastwood “speech” was a bit odd.  But something happened in those moments that had previously not been seen by most Americans:  the mocking of Barack Obama.  Prior to that moment, the American media had a slobbering lovefest with the President and has consistently and steadfastly refused to expose his weaknesses.  But the appearance of Eastwood at the biggest political event to date was something they could not ignore.  And Eastwood delivered a stunning blow to the media’s narrative.  He depicted Obama as “the empty chair“.

So I — so I’ve got Mr. Obama sitting here. And he’s – I just was going to ask him a couple of questions. But, you know about, I remember three and a half years ago, when Mr. Obama won the election. And though I wasn’t a big supporter, I was watching that night when he was having that thing and they were talking about hope and change and they were talking about, yes we can, and it was dark outdoors, and it was nice, and people were lighting candles. And they were saying, you know, I just thought, this is great. Everybody’s crying. Oprah was crying.

I was even crying. And then finally – I haven’t cried that hard since I found out that there’s 23 million unemployed people in this country.

Now that is something to cry for because that is a disgrace, a national disgrace, and we haven’t done enough, obviously – this administration hasn’t done enough to cure that. Whatever interest they have is not strong enough, and I think possibly now it may be time for somebody else to come along and solve the problem.

So, so, Mr. President, how do you, how do you handle, how do you handle promises that you’ve made when you were running for election and how do you handle, how do you handle it?

I mean, what do you say to people? Do you just — you know — I know — people were wondering. You don’t? You don’t handle it.

Well, I know even some of the people in your own party were very disappointed when you didn’t close Gitmo. And I thought, well closing Gitmo — why close that, we spent so much money on it. But, I thought maybe as an excuse.

Oh, What do you mean shut up?

OK, I thought it was just because somebody had the stupid idea of trying terrorists in downtown New York City. Maybe that was it.

Prior to Eastwood’s Obama “interview”, had we seen that kind of public ridicule of Barack Obama?  Of course the MSM did their sworn duty and tried to write it off as Eastwood being crazy and senile.  But people heard it.  They were watching the convention to see the mystery guest.  And he delivered. The press couldn’t bury this one on page C6. It was front and center, in front of millions of voters.

And then came the debates.  In that memorable first debate, Mitt Romney didn’t mock Obama.  Obama did it to himself.  The Empty Chair showed the world that Eastwood wasn’t just kidding.  He was an empty suit that night, not an empty chair.  Tens of millions of debate viewers finally saw the truth of Barack Obama, and the truth about Mitt Romney.  Romney wasn’t the evil extremist painted by the MSM.  He was presidential.  And the President of the United States – was not.  And in the final three debates, both Crazy Joe Biden and Obama showed themselves to be childish and petulant.  Their behavior was rude, crude and socially unacceptable.  Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan were the adults and the current occupants of the highest offices in the USA were boorish.  Romney and Ryan looked like President and VP.  Not Obama and Biden.  Again – America saw the unfiltered truth about who Barack Obama is.  And they didn’t like what they saw.

The press has spent 4+ years hiding the truth about Barack Obama, who, as Tony Blankley of the Washington Times pointed out  in 2008, strongly resembles the Man Who Never Was.  He’s an empty suit with a persona created by the adoring groupies of the press.  Blankley wrote:

The image of Barack Obama that the press has presented is not a fair approximation of the real man. They have consciously ignored whole years in his life, and showed a lack of curiosity about such gaps that bespeaks a lack of journalistic instinct. Thus, the public image of Mr. Obama is of a “Man who never was.” I take that phrase from a 1956 movie about a real life WWII British intelligence operation to trick the Germans into thinking the Allies were going to invade Greece, rather than Italy, in 1943. Operation “Mincemeat” involved the acquisition of a human corpse dressed as a Maj. William Martin, R.M. and put into the sea near Spain. Attached to the corpse was a brief-case containing fake letters suggesting that the Allied attack would be against Sardinia and Greece.

To make the operation credible, British intelligence created a fictional life for the corpse — a letter from a lover, tickets to a London theater, all the details of a life — but not the actual life of the dead young man whose corpse was being used. So, too, the man the media has presented to the nation as Mr. Obama is not the real man.

The mainstream media ruthlessly and endlessly repeats any McCain gaffes, while ignoring Obama gaffes. You have to go to weird little Internet sites to see all the stammering and stuttering that Mr. Obama needs before getting out a sentence fragment or two. But all you see on the networks is an eventual one or two clear sentences from Mr. Obama. Nor do you see Mr. Obama’s ludicrous gaffe that Iran is a tiny country and no threat to us. Nor his 57 American states gaffe. Nor his forgetting, if he ever knew, that Russia has a veto in the United Nations. Nor his whining and puerile “come on” when he is being challenged. This is the kind of editing one would expect from Goebbels’ disciples, not Cronkite’s.

You could easily replace “McCain” in those paragraphs with “Romney” and get the exact same picture of the press’s treatment of Obama and Romney in 2012.

And finally, we come to Hurricane Sandy, which has disrupted the campaign schedules of both candidates.  On this morning’s “ABC’s This Week”, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said of Obama’s cancellation:

The bigger issue is whether it’s unemployment or it is what’s happened in Benghazi where we’ve had this strange story over the weekend that the Secretary of Defense apparently refused to obey the President’s order if the President is telling the truth and he actually instructed his assistants to get aid to Benghazi. We’re now being told that the Secretary of Defense canceled that. And I think these kinds of things all drag down the Obama campaign.

You’ll notice he’s canceling his trips over the hurricane. He did not cancel his trips over Benghazi. And so you have to wonder between Benghazi, the price of gasoline, and unemployment just how much burden the President’s going to carry into this last week.

Erick Erickson pointed out Gingrich’s comments via his Twitter/Facebook feed.  One of Erick’s FB commenters made a keen observation:  “Because you can’t hide the hurricane, its going to be happening to people and the press can’t conceal it.   Benghazi simply never happened”  Like the Eastwood talk, like the debates: you can’t hide a hurricane.  Unfortunately, the press has hidden Benghazi.  Now it’s up to us to turn Obama’s despicable response to that event into the hurricane it should be…and my colleagues have done a stellar job in doing just that.

But you know, in fairness to the mainstream media, we probably shouldn’t expect them to behave any differently.  It’s just what they are.

Thankfully, certain events are beyond the media’s control.  Some events are political (or real) hurricanes.  Let’s hope the storm on November 6th blows Mitt Romney into the White House and Barack Obama permanently back to Chicago.