And so at last we reach the “Puppet Show and Barack Obama” stage of his presidency.

What’s weirder? That people would wait hours for a glimpse of O, only to hit the road 10 minutes after he started speaking? Or that his friends in the media would feel obliged to note it even though there’s no hard (i.e. video) evidence that it happened? For O-bots, this is like Beatles fans lining up for a concert and then bugging out after the first chord of “A Hard Day’s Night” — and then having the fan-club newsletter lead with that fact.

Most candidates from his party have been wary of appearing with him during their election races because of his sagging popularity.

Not so Lieutenant Governor Anthony Brown of Maryland, who is running for governor, and Governor Pat Quinn of Illinois, who is running for re-election. Obama plans to appear at an event for Quinn later in the evening.

“You’ve got to vote,” Obama repeated over and over at a rally for Brown in Upper Marlboro, Maryland, near Washington…

A steady stream of people walked out of the auditorium while he spoke, however, and a heckler interrupted his remarks.

Politico says most of the crowd stayed put but it too observed people “by the dozen” heading for the hills with The One at the podium, a spectacle sufficiently embarrassing that Maryland Democrats took to Twitter later to spin it. (The event was held at a school right up the road from Barack Obama Elementary School.) What happened? Was it just a timing thing? If you hold a political rally mid-day Sunday during football season, I guess you shouldn’t be surprised if some attendees decide they have better things to do once they’ve got their I-was-there souvenir smartphone photo. Or is this proof that even core Democratic voters, the sort of people who’d queue up to get into a campaign event, can only take so much Hopenchange shtick at this point? Six years on and with his job approval stuck in the low 40s, his speeches nowadays are less a Beatles concert than a Ringo concert. If you watch, you watch simply to see a figure of historic import in action. No need to actually sit through that 25-minute version of “It Don’t Come Easy.”

Here’s a snippet from the speech, in which a guy whose party has been running against the Kochtopus and a phony “war on women,” who spent the last midterm campaign accusing the Chamber of Commerce of laundering illegal donations from shadowy foreigners with no evidence whatsoever, smacks the GOP for peddling fear.