After watching the debates and seeing the consequent poll results of the Romney win in debate one (a huge surge) and the subsequent Obama wins (stopping the bleeding but not surging back) I'm starting to wonder if the President's poor performance in the first debate was less important than it seemed to be at the time. Here's what I mean:
Romney campaigned right up until the first debate on the hard right, picking Paul Ryan as VP after continually tacking right to fend off Gingrich, Perry, Santorum, et al during primary season. This wasn't working, as polls showed pretty clearly. At the start of the debates, Obama seemed to be pulling away toward a comfortable win and we were talking about how the Tea Party types were going to blame Romney for not being right wing enough to win the election when the truth was going to be the exact opposite. We also predicted that the base wouldn't allow Romney to tack to the center, as they feared his moderate past.
But then Romney did tack to the center in the first debate. This caught Obama flat-footed, but I wonder now if that was less important than the fact that when low-information voters started paying attention, they were introduced to this very reasonable-sounding guy, and couldn't understand what all the Romney-bashing had been about. Even a strong Obama performance in that debate would not have changed this dynamic- Mitt introduced himself to low-info undecideds, and they liked him. Heck, he hasn't sounded that bad to me in the debates- if that guy were running things I might not fear for the future of the Republic (except for the tax plan- that's still crazy).
And of course the party base has decided to give Mitt a complete pass on the toned-down chest-thumping, as their own terror about another Obama term is definitely worse than a moderate Republican- or they just figure he's lying now so they don't care what he says.
But Romney still may lose the election, and if he does I'm guessing that the far right people who are now ascendent in the GOP are going to blame his moderation for the loss. But that will be exactly the opposite of reality, which is that running far right was sending him down to a pretty convincing defeat, while running as a moderate is the source of his recent resurgence. I don't know how to see it any other way.
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A Brief History of Obama
ReplyDeleteHow sarcasm and insult took over the Democratic Party
When historians look back at the presidency of Barack Obama, they will look at the dismal record of the first term. That's when the Democratic president had to account for the failures of his own term, Obama’s appeal faded, too. He was reduced to his core. He was simply an antiwar academic liberal, similar to the intellectuals who write our newspapers and magazines and produce our news and comedy shows. He was an isolated man of the left. The criticism of Bush, of Bush Republicans, and of the war took on a specific character. The spokesmen of movement progressivism—Keith Olbermann, Rachel Maddow, Jon Stewart, and Stephen Colbert—spoke in tones of irony, sarcasm, knowing disbelief, glibness, and snark. Liberal bloggers and op-ed writers used the same voice. A television clip of a conservative would be played, a quotation cited, and the liberal would mug for his audience, whether on screen or on the page. Their basic attitude was: Can you believe this? These people don’t even believe in science! The fools! Derisive and smug laughter would ensue.
The untold story of the last four years is President Obama’s squandering of that good will. There’s no need to go into every detail here. Part of it was the spending. Part of it was not abandoning his unpopular health care law after Scott Brown’s shock election to the Senate in January 2010. Part of it was the failure of his economic policies to produce a durable recovery in line with historical norms. But the most important part of the story is the gradual unmasking of Obama—not as a Kenyan Marxist, but as a thoroughly typical liberal Democrat who believes there is no trouble in the world not created by George W. Bush.
Obama has been president almost for four years. Unemployment is higher than on the day he was inaugurated, economic growth is paltry, and incomes are stagnant. The cost of food and fuel and health insurance continues to rise. The deficit is double what it was in 2008 and if Obama is reelected it is not going to fall any time soon. Americans continue to tell pollsters that they see the country moving in the wrong direction.
The Obama coalition, piece by piece, has been disassembled. All that remains is the antiwar, anti-Republican core of the Democratic Party. There are more registered Democrats than Republicans, so Obama could still squeak out a second term. But he has forsaken independents and whites, the groups that swung to him definitively and significantly in 2008. He is losing independents, in some polls by double-digits. His opponent Mitt Romney is “winning the white vote by more than any GOP candidate since Ronald Reagan,” according to the Washington Post. If the 2012 electorate resembles the 2008 one, it is possible for Obama to win reelection. But if the electorate turns out to be more like the electorate in 2004 or, God help him, like in 2010, Obama will lose.
Even a narrow win for Obama, though, would not reestablish anything like the mandate and amity the president enjoyed on his Inauguration Day. The reason is that, as the Obama coalition diminished, Obama no longer disguised the prejudices, inflections, outlook, and approach of the progressive movement. The Democrats allowed the progressive movement’s hatred of Bush to take over their old and storied political party. That party and movement found a champion and a path to power in Obama, but the electoral forces on which his power relied were unstable. In 2008, he satisfied the left and won the middle. Once in power, though, he kept the left satisfied and lost the middle and right.
In 2012, there is just the left. The Democrats are back where they started eight years ago. And this time, Barack Obama cannot save them.
The headline:
ReplyDeleteNew debt forecasts dash Greece hopes.
Question for Democrats hoping for a second term for Obama. Unless he does a 180 or the Tea Party Congress does a 180, Debt will grow at the same $1 Trillion plus per year.
Does adding another $4 Trillion in Debt move us toward a Greek Tragedy or away from it?
We both know the answer to that one, don't we.
The difference is, I don't like it and will fight it,,Democrats might choose to ignore it like the guy ignores stories about his wife cheating on him,,only to get burned when he is served divorce papers.
Is denying the obvious a Liberal thing? Do you guys really think Obama will cut Entitlements or Tea Party Congressmen will allow the massive Tax Hikes needed to address the Deficit? Stalemate is a Greek Tragety! Ignore it at your peril.