Lord Moncton has articulated the basic threat to the United States:
The present administration, therefore, represents an existential threat to the United States.
And the reason this administration is an existential threat to the Republic is that it is driving Americans to destruction with debt. Romney has declined to establish this as the predicate for all the rest of his criticisms against Obama. I note only that Paul Ryan has come closest to seeing this reality.
It does not matter if a tax cut to the highest bracket is unfair if the country will cease to exist. It does not matter whether people with pre-existing conditions cannot get health insurance without Obama care if the entire economy disintegrates and there is no functioning American health delivery system. It does not matter that college graduates are saddled with unconscionable tuition debt if they cannot find a job. None of Obama's cynical race or class war tactics will have traction if the listener already believes that the country is crashing.
That understanding should be the predicate for the entire Romney campaign.
Second, Lord Moncton's remarks illustrate a great mistake committed by the Republicans in campaigns against Obama which is to shrink from exposing the rank unorthodoxies which animate Obama to put the country on a course toward destruction. In other words, Romney like McCain shrinks from the task of morally destroying Barack Obama. This reluctance extends beyond the person of Barack Obama to his policies.
If the listener hearing an attack on Obama's energy policies does not have this predicate in mind, the listener is not energized to get rid of Obama. Obama has, for example, put energy policies in place not to keep the world green but to turn the world red. We end up arguing endlessly over the propriety and reasonableness of EPA rulings, invariably losing in the courts, when the real battle should be over an attempt to circumvent the Constitution by running around left end. The average voter is therefore ambivalent about whether fracking is problematical and Republicans are losing too many arguments to emotional appeals about extinction of cuddly polar bears or flames coming out of sink faucets.
John McCain and Mitt Romney, each in his turn, have failed to explain to the American people that Obama is ruining the country because he is a leftist. This business of saying that Obama is incompetent is all right as far as it goes and there is certainly no rule that says that leftists cannot be incompetent, but the public is not thereby given to understand that Obama is not a nice guy, rather he is an ideologue. As such, there is no hope that he will ever change course to keep the country from going over the fiscal "Gulch"as Lord Moncton calls it.
In other words, the assault on Obama's ideology rather than his competence makes all of the failed policies of the Obama administration clear and explains why they have happened and why they will never be cured as long as Obama is in office. There is no epiphany with these half measures.
Lord Moncton says it this way:
the Republicans – dead from the neck up and from the neck down – appear altogether inadequate to meet the challenge posed by the impending outright destruction of the United States. Gov. Scott Walker is alive to the danger and is doing something about it in his State: but Mitt Romney is wholly out of his depth on this pressing issue. So, after the coming election, you will either have more Socialism under Obama or a failure to reverse Socialism and its expensive consequences under Romney
If this predicate had been properly installed into the American public, there is no reasonable probability that Bill Clinton could have been able to demagogue the economy and exculpate Barack Obama from guilt for the current mess as he did in his convention speech. The public would know that the fault is not George Bush's trickle-down economics but Barak Obama's take-down Marxism.
One last thought. It is easy for me to blame Romney for failing to attack Obama the way I have described but we all should keep in mind that when Romney advanced a thoroughly justified criticism about the tweet coming out of the Cairo embassy he was gang raped by the mainstream press. It is easy for me to criticize Romney for failing to do what will obviously bring him a mountain of grief from the same news agencies. I have no doubt that his advisers, armed with polling data and focus group analyses have told him that there are certain no go zones concerning criticism of Obama.
Nevertheless, if Obama is not repudiated in this election and if his ideology is not therefore also repudiated, the virus in the American body politic will only erupt again and probably kill the patient.
