We should think of Barack Obama as a very ugly stew of very toxic ideologies which lay claim to him from time to time and from issue to issue.
I believe the main point is that defining Obama as a Marxist anti-colonialist 'splains Obama and makes coherent an understanding of an otherwise incomprehensible administration which is not animated by any free-market or patriotic philosophy. It is a very great pity that the Rinos who control both Romney's campaign and the party apparatus up until the time Romney became the putative nominee, simply would not tolerate such an explanation of why Obama does the things he does. There is only one exception that I know of to this wall of studied ignorance erected by the Republican Party and that is Newt Gingrich.
Newt had the guts to step out and say that Obama was a neo-colonialist and he accepted the thesis of the movie, Obama 2016. Gingrich was pilloried, as expected, in the liberal press but he was also left unsupported by the Republican establishment.
Someone might offer up the explanation that the entire Republican apparatus became gun shy as a result of the reaction to the birthers. I have always said that the birther should be represented as a group who are patriotic and who deserve a fair hearing. The Republican Party should have taken the position that the birthers are not the ones who are behaving bizarrely but the candidate who spends nearly $3 million to keep his birth certificate secret. Today, they should be saying that there is now credible evidence that the birth significant is counterfeit. But all that aside, when we permit the Democrats, echoed by the media, to set the limits of debate, indeed to define that which is legitimately debatable, we have already lost the debate.
This failure to define Obama not as a nice guy who is incompetent but as an American hating, free-market hating, radical redistributionist explains why Romney is in such trouble in this race. The latter explanation makes sense for the electorate of everything that has transpired in the last four years. It could almost serve as an epiphany. Arguing incompetency, arguing Obama has an empty head but a white heart, leaves Romney open for countercharges and, as Charles Krauthammer says, confines Romney to playing small ball.
When you play small ball against Obama you are fighting money and you are fighting the media not just for the agreement of the electorate but for the the attention of the great mushy middle of American voters. Instead of arguing about whether Obama is trying to sell out America to Putin and adducing as evidence Obama's open mic gaffe, Romney is defending himself against charges that is a tax cheat, that he is rich, and that is business was unfair to employees after he left.
The opportunity to break through was probably lost and we conservatives ought to consider in future elections, if there are any, whether there will ever be a mindset in the Republican establishment which tolerates a full throated attack in support of conservative values?
