Obama Camp To Run On Campaign Of ‘Fear’May 29th, 2012
From New York Magazine (of all places):
Hope: The SequelFor Obama & Co., this time around it’s all about fear.
By John Heilemann
Published May 27, 2012
… “The Obama effort at disqualifying Romney will go beyond painting him as excessively conservative … It will aim to cast him as an avatar of revanchism [revenge]. ‘He’s the fifties, he is retro, he is backward, and we are forward — that’s the basic construct,’ says a top Obama strategist. ‘If you’re a woman, you’re Hispanic, you’re young, or you’ve gotten left out, you look at Romney and say, “This fucking guy is gonna take us back to the way it always was, and guess what? I’ve never been part of that.”’
Isn’t that a campaign of uplift? Isn’t that unifying? Remember, Mr. Obama is supposed to be the President of the entire United States.
“Thus, to a very real degree, 2008’s candidate of hope stands poised to become 2012’s candidate of fear. For many Democrats, this is just fine and dandy, for they believe that in the Romney-Republican agenda there is plenty to be scared of. For others in the party in both politics and business, however, the new Obama posture is cause for concern. From the gay-marriage decision to the onslaught on Bain, they see the president and his team as coming across as too divisive, too conventional, and too nakedly political, putting at risk Obama’s greatest asset — his likability — with the voters in the middle of the electorate who will ultimately decide his fate.
Really. How come we have never heard how Obama’s rabid partisanship will drive away the precious ‘Independents’ until now?
Whichever side is right, one thing is undeniable. For anyone still starry-eyed about Obama, the months ahead will provide a bracing revelation about what he truly is: not a savior, not a saint, not a man above the fray, but a brass-knuckled, pipe-hitting, red-in-tooth-and-claw brawler determined to do what is necessary to stay in power — in other words, a politician…
Obama is worse even than the run of the mill Democrat politicians. He is a Democrat Chicago Machine politician. Which is enough to make Tammany Hall blush.
“[T]he Obamans shifted the frame into which they wish to cram Romney: from coreless to, as [White House senior adviser David] Plouffe put it to the New York Times, ‘the most conservative nominee [Republicans] have had going back to [Barry] Goldwater.’
Which is another great endorsement of Mitt Romney. If only it were true.
To some, the two lines of attack seemed inconsistent … Privately, the Obamans [sic] admit that the first label was partly a matter of expedience. ‘It’s not like we could have said, “Hey, he’s the most right-wing guy ever’ during the primary,” says one operative…
But Plouffe, recalling George W. Bush’s effective double-barreled attack on John Kerry as both a flip-flopping phony and a liberal extremist, maintains that the two threads will be merged into a single yarn: ‘When Romney tries to Etch-a-Sketch, we’re not just gonna say, “Oh, there goes old Mitt Romney again! Who knows where he stands?” We’re gonna say, “He is once again showing he’ll say anything — he has no core.” But we’re also gonna say, “We know where he stands; he’s way off to the right on abortion, contraception, immigration, and gay rights,” and hold him to those positions.’
“For Chicago, that task – ‘freezing him like a bug in amber at the end of the dinosaur era,’ as another of the president’s people puts it — is one of the campaign’s paramount strategic imperatives.
Doesn’t that sound like is right out of Saul Alinsky? Probably because it is.
Another is continuing to remind women, Hispanics, and young voters of Obama’s fealty to them, as he’s been doing tirelessly in the past few weeks, from the campus of Barnard to the set of The View.’ …
Are the Obamans nervous? Healthily so, but they are also buoyed by a firm conviction. As Plouffe puts it, ‘This is going to be a very close race, but I’d rather be us than them.’ …
Who says that the age of great statesmen is dead? |
