By Dave Andrusko
As I mentioned earlier today, on Fridays we usually run two stories about the 2012 presidential contest. The first (“An Update on a ridiculously flawed Pew Poll”) pointed out how at least one publication that had uncritically reported a deeply biased poll now sort of grasped that sampling 32% Democrats but only 18% Republicans might “skew” the results. Geez!
Part Two will talk about something old and something new that is old. Writing for the Washington Post today, Chris Cillizza begins his commentary with “Amid the back and forth about Friday’s jobs report, one thing is abundantly clear: To win a second term on November 6, President Obama is going to have to defy history. Why?”
Because “no sitting president since World War II has been re-elected with the unemployment rate above 7.2 percent”–and it is now nearly certain that the unemployment rate will not drop below 8% by November.
The particular relevance for us is that (as Cillizza puts it oh-so-gently), President Obama has had more success “negatively defining former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney” than touting his own record. I would just ask you to look at the dirt and sludge and slanders and irrelevancies that have escaped the lips of people like pro-abortion Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nv.) and consider that it is only going to get worse.
Way back last November I quoted from a couple of stories from people who would never be confused with Republican partisans about the kind of campaign Obama would run. “Go negative, stay clean,” was the headline to a story by Ben Smith that appeared in POLITICO. Here’s what I wrote:
The stories take as their starting point that Obama’s campaign has taken a sledge hammer to former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, assuming that will be the Republican Party’s nominee. So, as Smith puts it, as the President’s team cranks up the assaults
“Obama faces one of the most difficult tests of his political career: to tear down Romney without getting a single smudge of dirt on his own shirtfront — a trick he has performed deftly in previous races.”
Pardon? Mr. Common Ground himself, the guy who promised to bring a “new politics” to Washington? Smith continues
“The early salvos are also familiar moves in a strategy that has worked in each of the four federal campaigns Obama has run: disqualifying character attacks from aides or outsiders, executed brutally as Obama himself floats above the fray.”
Smith elaborates on Obama’s “slash and burn” history:
“And while George Washington may be the last successful American politician to win the White House without going sharply negative, few have managed to attack with the stealth Obama has displayed, leaving in his wake bitter rivals who felt their complaints of foul play were falling on deaf ears as Obama moved forward not just as victor, but as avatar of a new politics of hope.
“’David Axelrod has always been skillful at creeping into your room in the middle of the night and slicing out your heart, somehow without leaving behind a single fingerprint or drop of blood that ties him or his candidate to the crime,’ said Obama biographer David Mendell of Obama’s top political aide.”
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Speaking of POLITICO, the paper ran a piece yesterday under the headline “Obama’s problems in the South.” I mention it for only one reason, and that is not that is cobbles together every existing cliché about how various people see the world.
Rather it is that the author bangs on a dangerous drum—that various ugly motives are the primary, if not only reason, any person could find the President and his policies unappealing.
That is not true—in fact, it is a bald-faced lie–and it does nothing to further an honest debate over the future of our nation.
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