Obama might lose the debate because you’re not smart enough to understand him.

The Obama campaign is in heavy “downplay” mode, trying their best to lower expectations for the President in this week’s debate, either because they’re legitimately concerned that he’ll lose to Romney, or they’re hoping by pretending he’s practically retarded, they can consider any coherent response to a question a “win.”

For Jen Psaki, the Obama spokeswoman they send out when Stephanie Cutter is temporarily unavailable due to reprogramming, the real key to understanding why Obama’s debate loss is inevitable lies not in their candidate, who is so amazingly smart that his invisible contributions to the human race have yet to be quantified for their existence, let alone their values, but in the beer-swilling, couch-sitting, gun-toting bitter clingers who normally make up the audience for such pedestrian displays of candidate plumage.

“[W]hat the American [people] are looking for is not just a professorial list of facts or accomplishments or even goals,” Obama campaign spokeswoman Jen Psaki said yesterday as part of her ongoing, almost-comical attempt to lower expectations going into the debates. She then lamented that Obama “has a tendency to give longer, substantive answers.”

…Psaki explained that Obama’s debate advisers “pointed out to him that he needs to work on tightening and shortening his answers.”

It is unknown whether this occurred before or after his advisers petitioned the networks to remove the more meddlesome questions on such unimportant-to-the-American-people subjects such as facts, accomplishments and goals, and replace them with questions that required more contemplative answers, such as “if you were a tree, what kind of tree would you be?” and “mustard on hot dogs, or ketchup?