Posted on 09/08/2012 11:10:15 AM PDT by Qbert
Overall, the Democrats put on an effective show. With the possible exception of the McGovern convention, this was the most left-leaning Democratic gathering in memory. Some of that may have been counterproductive, particularly on social issues. To the extent that Republicans dismiss this convention as either a failure or relatively meaningless, however, I think we’re fooling ourselves.
This election could go either way. If Obama squeaks by, he will have done so with the help of a Democratic party that has taken a large, open, and disturbingly leftist turn. I think we’re missing the significance of that. It is completely accurate to say that the Democrats are pushing a bogus reformulation of the American way of life — slapping a bunch of flags on their Julia ad and turning classic conceptions of civic and religious community into covers for a cradle-to-grave welfare state. Unfortunately, this way of thinking is becoming the new normal in this country, and Obama and his convention have only helped to cement the change.
Conservatives can puncture these arguments all we like, but we can’t cut through the media filter. More than that, the conservative case can’t break through the left-controlled education system that has profoundly shaped the Millennials. True, youth unemployment is giving many second thoughts about Obama, yet it’s been more a matter of sapping Millennial enthusiasm than of changing attitudes and ideas.
Do demographics doom the expansive liberal welfare state, regardless? In some sense, they do. Yet if Obama is in the driver’s seat as our fiscal woes mount, he will use the crisis to further his restructuring. California is our advance guard — our Greece — yet their budget crisis is two months away from prompting one of the boldest redistributionist transformations this country has seen in years (even if barely anyone knows it yet).
Only the Romney campaign can cut through the cultural, educational, and media filters and force a debate over the Obama Democrats’ bogus redefinition of the American dream. The media can ignore what conservatives say, but they still have to cover the candidate. With the exception of his welfare ads, however, the Romney campaign has avoided an assault on Obama’s ideology. Romney’s entirely plausible strategy is to downplay the ideological battle (Ryan nomination notwithstanding).
As the Romney campaign sees it, the tiny sliver of remaining undecided voters consists of mildly disillusioned former Obama supporters, or at least voters who personally like Obama. Coaxing these folks to “break up” with their erstwhile beau means not making them feel like they were fools to buy into Obama’s vision to begin with. That cuts against any effort to unmask the president’s overweening leftist ambitions. Let’s just say that the president’s a nice guy who’s in over his head instead.
Okay, but Michelle Obama did a very effective job of pressing undecideds to give her nice-guy another try. And the convention as a whole did a better job of redefining government as nice-guyism writ large than Republicans would like to admit. Charles Krauthammer says that the counter to all this is exposing Obama as “a deeply committed social democrat” using his presidential power to enact the same “ambitious left-wing agenda” he “developed in his youth.” Well, yes. So far as I can tell, however, this sort of argument is the last thing the Romney campaign wants to make right now. Don’t want to drive away that tiny sliver of Obama’s wavering admirers.
I can’t say for certain that Romney’s strategy is wrong. But I do think it’s far riskier than we realize. Treating Obama as a nice guy in over his head, rather than a smart leftist who knows exactly what he’s doing, leaves the Democrats’ bogus narrative about government unanswered. America is changing, and Republicans are naive to rely on the public to simply recognize the problems in the Democrats’ claims without significant help from our nominee.
Republicans won big in 2010 by defining Obama as an overweening ideologue. Yet that was the Tea Party’s doing, not the Republican establishment. In those days, Romney even jumped on the tea-party bandwagon with some surprisingly cutting observations about Obama’s leftism. Obama may not have pivoted after the 2010 election, but Republicans did. They toned down their attacks on the president’s ideology, and to some extent helped to build up the very wall of “likeability” they now fear to scale, even as the president rejected the Clintonian way and stayed to the left. Were Republicans smart to hold their fire? Romney did try out the argument that Obama is moving us toward European-style social democracy during the primaries, but he’s dropped that now in favor of the kinder and gentler “break up” approach.
Republican reticence on these issues has been going on for a while. Beginning with John McCain in 2008, the party establishment has done a weak job of challenging the core Democratic narrative of the causes of the financial crisis. Clinton laid the foundations of the subprime meltdown, and Obama himself was in on the ground floor of the fiasco. If the public is willing to cut Obama some slack for the economic problems he inherited, that is partly because we’ve allowed him to define the problem to begin with.
I don’t have access to the Romney campaign’s focus-group and survey data. Maybe they’re right to try to pry away those erstwhile Obama supporters in only the gentlest of ways. Yet I worry that the Romneyites are fooling themselves. Technocrats and fixers from a state where liberals dominate, they are neither inclined or prepared to show how the Obama Democrats are slowly redefining American exceptionalism into the European social democratic dream. Romney may squeak by on bad unemployment numbers and gentle coaxing of undecideds, but patriotic veneer the Democrats have managed to slap on their leftism is worrisome. If Obama wins, it will be because we allowed him to get away with it.
"Republicans won big in 2010 by defining Obama as an overweening ideologue. Yet that was the Tea Party’s doing, not the Republican establishment....Romney may squeak by on bad unemployment numbers and gentle coaxing of undecideds, but patriotic veneer the Democrats have managed to slap on their leftism is worrisome. If Obama wins, it will be because we allowed him to get away with it."...
Exactly as I was saying in the Reuters poll thread. You can attack his ideology (i.e. hard left liberal) without attacking him personally.
The country is center-right, and it’s about to re-elect the most radical leftwing prez in history, with the worst economic record in history. It does not jive.
Matt Rhoades will forever be known as the clown who lost a gimmee. He’s making the nitwit Schmidt look good at this point.
Response: Yes, especially conservative Republicans. We are a decided minority in the process of being successfully marginalized. Long ago the left successfully captured control of important institutions such as schools, the press, churches etc. etc.
This is extremely true. The group of GOP choices has been poor for years. Virginia went with a worthless George Allen. Picking phony conservatives is not the answer.
Stanley Kurtz was one of the few journalists to expose Zero for what he was in 2008. He's now laid out the ideological fault lines of this campaign for all to see.
I hope the Romney people are paying attention. But I doubt it.
bttt
"The country is center-right, and it’s about to re-elect the most radical leftwing prez in history, with the worst economic record in history. It does not jive."
Yep. When we run Conservative campaigns (1980, 1984, 1994, 2010), we win in landslides- when we don't we either lose, or barely squeak by. Not that difficult...
Yes you might be right, they have everything we don’t BUT they don’t have the most important element....GOD! They have rejected God, and we have opened our arms to Him...God is our only source and he will help us.....MARK IT!! Romney WILL WIN and the evil RATS will be STUNNED and SHOCK! God WILL NEVER turn it’s back of Israel or His children....NEVER! I believe with all my heart and I’m putting my faith on Jesus on the line here by saying....ROMNEY IS GOING TO WIN...believe me!!
"Response: Yes, especially conservative Republicans. We are a decided minority in the process of being successfully marginalized. Long ago the left successfully captured control of important institutions such as schools, the press, churches etc. etc."
That's a myth. If that were true, then why did the Tea Party win in the biggest landslide in eighty years?
I hope you are right!
I’m sure we’re in for two months of BS on top of BS and it all boils down to the old adage. “It’s the economy stupid.” He’s toast. Period.
You’re going wobbly. “About to re-elect” . . . ???
Snap out of it-it’s contagious.
The majority of Americans think the country is going the wrong direction.
It’s up to Romney to tell them, clearly, why: The democratic party platform will enslave current and future generations to debt and economic destruction.
Ronald Regan never hesitated for a moment to challenge his opponents’ ideologies. In his mind, every speech was an opportunity to teach the American people, and he did it with charm, grace, humor, and nuclear strength reasoning, which exposed his opponents as the collectivist clowns they were.
Luntz: Ads about disappointed Obama voters work best with swing voters.
Americans for Prosperity may be cutting through the clutter most effectively with its relatively low-key attacks on President Obama.
Almost everyone in the group said they voted for Obama in 2008, but they were about evenly split between Obama and Mitt Romney in the 2012 race, with several still undecided.
This approach may also have the benefit of closing the Romney-Obama likeability gap. A Gallup poll on attack ads this week found that 44 percent of Americans think Obama’s attacking Romney unfairly while only 40 percent believe Romney’s attacking Obama unfairly. Among independents, the number who think Obama’s attacking unfairly rises to 46 percent while Romney’s number falls to 38 percent. Up against a guy with Obama’s charisma cachet and media protection, this is an encouraging sign.
No doubt. Obama will be re-elected and only re-elected if unemployment is 4% on election day, gasoline is 1.70/gal and home prices recover to 1998 levels. The deficit is halved. Gov’t spending is 18% of GDP.
I don’t think he can do it but he has 60 days to make the above happen. If not, he’s retired.
Maybe the Romney campaign can, certainly Ryan can... but not Romney. He does not have conservatism in his bones, and cannot articulate that he is (as much as he severely states that he is). Without an effective and articulate conservative voice, the indies cannot be educated about what made this country great at least from Romney himself. I can only hope and pray that the campaign recognizes Romney's shortfalls, and makes up for it with alternate effective speakers.
"The best defense against usurpatory government is an assertive citizenry" - William F. Buckley, J
Once Bill started adding syllables he just couldn't stop, LOL!
I think we have to toss away the premise that America is a center-right country. Center-right countries would not let the likes of Barack Obama near the White House in the first go-round, much less the second one. Unemployment rages along at >8% for the 43rd month in a row, and record numbers of people are on food stamps and other forms of government aid. Three decades ago, these conditions would`ve pushed people into the streets demanding change, and that change would`ve come. Nowadays Americans by ever increasing numbers, view these conditions as “the new normal.”
We conservatives view the DNC as a laughably disorganized exercise in tired and empty rhetoric. It makes me sick to have to admit it, but much of the electorate renewed its bond (and let`s not deny it`s a very tight emotional one) with 0bama when they watched the speeches by Michelle Obama, Bill Clinton, and Obama himself. We can pan them all day long and for good reason, but Americans somehow heard something in those speeches they liked.
America was center-right during the Reagan Administration. It isn`t now. Roughly center with a slight leftward tilt is a more apt description. It`s time we come to grips with that reality.
Oh, horse feathers.
The election is about the economy. And as was re-confirmed yesterday with the jobs report, the economy sucks. It’s not getting better, and is more than likely getting worse.
How is Michelle Obama’s “touching” speech going to sway undecided voters? So what if Obama had to pick through dumpsters to find his furniture? He rides in a limo now - and meanwhile, there are 22 million people out of work, and probably even more worried about losing their jobs.
There was a striking difference between Michelle Obama’s speech and the one Ann Romney gave. Michelle’s speech talked about what Obama did for Obama - pulling himself up. Ann’s speech talked about what Mitt did for others.
All we need is a big turnout, because I believe the independents are with us.
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