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Politics : American Presidential Politics and foreign affairs -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: LLCF who wrote (57657)	10/25/2012 10:14:38 AM
From: Peter Dierks	1 Recommendation Respond to of 71588

Obama’s Aura of Defeat by New York Times Blogger Ross Douthat October 24, 2012, 4:21 In an argument that was echoed and amplified around the liberal twittersphere yesterday, New York’s Jonathan Chait made the case that the Romney campaign has bluffed the press into covering the last two weeks of the campaign as though Obama’s losing. Like George W. Bush in 2000, who famously (and probably foolishly) campaigned in California to lend himself an air of inevitability in the closing days of the campaign, Team Romney’s current brash confidence is designed to persuade the media to overlook the underlying numbers that still point to an advantage for the incumbent.(ROTFLOL - liberal denial) And it’s working, Chait argues: The “widespread perception that Romney is pulling ahead,” he writes, “is Romney’s campaign suckering the press corps with a confidence game.” (More likely he is showing them truth where they are used to being buffaloed by liberals) I agree with Chait that the (skewed pro democrat) numbers still show Obama with a slightly clearer path than Romney to an electoral college victory. But if you’re looking for a reason (besides, of course, the national polling showing a Romney edge) why the media narrative has tilted less against Republicans over the last week or so, I think the Romney campaign’s guarantee of victory has mattered much less than the Obama campaign’s recent aura of defeat. Losing campaigns have a certain feel to them: They go negative hard, try out new messaging very late in the game, hype issues that only their core supporters are focused on, and try to turn non-gaffes and minor slip-ups by their opponents into massive, election-turning scandals. Think of John McCain’s desperate hope that elevating Joe the Plumber would change the shape of the 2008 race, and you have the template for how tin-eared and desperate a losing presidential campaign often sounds — and ever since the first debate cost Obama his mojo, he and his surrogates have sounded more like McCain did with Joe the Plumber than like a typical incumbent president on his way to re-election. A winning presidential campaign would not normally be hyping non-issues like Big Bird and “binders full of women” in its quest for a closing argument, or rolling out a new spin on its second-term agenda with just two weeks left in the race, or pushing so many advertising chips into dishonest attacks on its rival’s position on abortion. A winning presidential campaign would typically be talking about the issues that voters cite as most important — jobs, the economy, the deficit — rather than trying to bring up Planned Parenthood and PBS at every opportunity. A winning presidential campaign would not typically have coined the term “Romnesia,” let alone worked it into their candidate’s speeches. Now this is not a normal re-election campaign. When incumbent president win, they usually expand their original majorities, but barring a completely unexpected polling shift, Obama’s 2008 majority will shrink no matter what. He’s been running a heavily negative campaign from the beginning, and the late-game approach has only accentuated aspects of the White House’s strategy (the focus on social issues, the quest for “shiny objects” — hey, bayonets! — to change the subject from the economy, etc.) that have been present all along. What the press has read as signs of “Joe the Plumber”-esque desperation over the last few weeks may not be signs of an impending defeat; it may just be the way that Obama has to win, if win he does. But if so, it won’t look like the winning re-election campaigns we’ve seen in the recent past, and that reporters have grown accustomed to covering. douthat.blogs.nytimes.com

To: LLCF who wrote (57657)	10/26/2012 9:21:56 AM
From: Peter Dierks	2 Recommendations Respond to of 71588

From Hope & Change to Fearmonger-in-Chief The candidate of hope has become the candidate of fear: How Obama's campaign is just about attacking Romney who he claims will turn the clock back 50 years for immigrants, women and gays By Toby Harnden PUBLISHED: 16:55 EST, 25 October 2012 \| UPDATED: 05:48 EST, 26 October 2012 Four years after he was elected as a self-described 'hopemonger' promising a new post-partisan era, President Barack Obama is trying to claw his way to re-election with an ugly, divisive campaign in which he is playing the role of fearmonger-in-chief. On a chilling Wednesday evening in a Las Vegas park, Obama spoke to a raucous gathering of some 13,000 – more than twice the number his opponent Mitt Romney had attracted a few days earlier but a far cry from the crowds of 2008 when he was swept into office with a seven-point victory over Senator John McCain. With his own star power fading, Obama had enlisted the help of teen heartthrob Katy Perry to sing before he appeared. Resplendent in a black-and-white latex dress emblazoned with a ballot paper, she delivered five of her pop hits to screams and squeals from the younger attendees. When Obama finally took to the stage, he began with light-hearted quips about Perry’s 91-year-old grandmother getting lipstick on his cheek and nearly getting him in hot water with his wife Michele. ‘I’m just telling you - you might get me in trouble!’ Right on cue, and just like 2008, a woman shouted out: ‘We love you, Obama!’ He responded, just as he always has: ‘I love you back!’ But the mood quickly darkened and it was at this point that any comparisons with 2008 evaporated. Obama – who was reading his remarks from two teleprompters flanking the stage – launched into a exhaustive and exhausting diatribe about Romney. There was all the standard stump stuff about ‘Romnesia’ – a term dreamt up in the bowels of the Left-wing blogosphere and adopted by the Obama campaign this month as part of its closing argument in this election. The word is a cute enough campaign term, though perhaps not quite something you would expect from a President of the United States who has been hailed for the world historical significance and beauty of his rhetoric. Certainly, Romney is rightly vulnerable on the issue of shifting policy positions. But ‘Romnesia’ , as Obama aides have made clear, is about saying that Romney cannot be trusted. It’s about calling the former Massachusetts governor a liar. That's standard-fare political hardball. But then Obama went a step further. After describing himself as ‘steady and strong’ – words used by his apparatchiks in the post-debate spin room in Florida on Monday - he told the crowd that a vote for Romney would plunge Americans back to the early 1960s. ‘You can choose to turn the clock back 50 years for women and immigrants and gays,’ he said. ‘Or in this election you can stand up for the principle that America includes everybody. We're all created equal - black, white, Hispanic, Asian, Native American, gay, straight, abled, disabled - no matter who you are, no matter what you look like, no matter where you come from or who you love, in America you can make it if you try.’ Leave aside for a moment that 50 years ago was 1962, when President John F. Kennedy was in office and it seemed like America was entering a new dawn. What Obama meant was that Romney wanted to take away the rights of women and every minority group in the country. He did not say it explicitly – Obama is too clever a politician for that, and the remarks has been carefully prepared before being loaded onto the teleprompters – but he was suggesting that Romney is a dangerous extremist and very possibly a racist. Exactly four years ago today in Las Vegas, Obama that ‘things can get ugly sometimes’ in election campaigns and that ‘say anything, do nothing, do anything’ politics can take over. Obama continued: ‘The ugly phone calls, the misleading mail and TV ads, the careless, outrageous comments, all aimed at keeping us from working together, all aimed at stopping change. ‘Well, you know what? This is not what we need right now. The American people don’t want to hear politicians attack each other. You want to hear about how we’re going to attack the challenges facing the middle class all over the country.’ After resisting for months calls to draw up a plan for a second term, this week Obama tore down a small rainforest by printing 3.5 million copies of a 20-page booklet entitled ‘A Plan for Jobs and Middle-Class Security. dailymail.co.uk Note: Obama's 'plan' booklet is notably empty on anything new. Mostly is is recycled failed policies.