Sunday, August 19, 2012

The Lemonade Stand Metaphor

I watched some of the talking head Sunday shows today.  What is Stephanie Cutter's strategy here?  If you lie and you stick with that lie no matter the proof to the contrary, people will eventually believe you?



I think it's a losing strategy.  She is going to have a difficult time retaining any credibility.

Not to make too much of a small thing, but I thought this piece by Andrew Malcolm was interesting.  It's just one example of a growing number of signs that the Obama campaign isn't living up to 2008 expectations.  Malcolm writes about Obama's Iowa trip last week:

Obama's experienced advance team had a bunch of flubs. That farm family with all the windmills that President Quixote loves to laud turns out to be Republicans and informed reporters after Obama's visit that he sure wasn't getting their votes this time. 
There was the state fair beer tent where Obama bought a round of Bud Lights for everyone, except the guy with the Mitt Romney sign. Great summertime photo op. Except it turns out the Secret Service closed down the guy's tent long before Obama's arrival and the small business owner lost thousands in sales. 
Then there was the caterer who wore a "Government Didn't Build My Business" T-shirt to work the president's event. 
I don't think that trip went exactly as planned.  But, more telling, according to Malcolm's piece,  was Team Obama lumbering past a little girl's lemonade stand in Marshalltown.  The big, black armored bus drove right past the child who "fell to her knees" as Obama drove by.

As Malcolm notes, "spontaneous" stops are often very coordinated, and an important president does have a schedule to keep, but imagine the photo op that would have been.

The story is more a metaphor, it seems to me, of a campaign and a man that is oblivious to real America.

The Romney/Ryan campaign, by contrast, seems the polar opposite of the Obama campaign.  On one side we have demagoguery and negative attacks and on the other side, Romney/Ryan seem to offer the optimism that we can "turn this thing around" as Ryan likes to say.  To be sure, Romney will get his share of attacks in on Obama, but it seems that the Obama campaign is particularly aggressive awfully early.

Shannen Coffin at NRO pointed out that so far Romney has been accused of:
...complicity in the death of a cancer victim, failure to pay taxes owed the United States, wanting to return the American populace to shackles, poisoning the common man with e coli, and, generally, being a very mean white guy who mistreats animals. With his selection of Paul Ryan as vice president, we are reminded that Ryan relaxes by throwing grandmothers in wheelchairs off of cliffs. 
Arguments on policy are one thing, but character attacks are another.  I've never been a fan of that approach.  Love her or hate her, what the media did to Sarah Palin in 2008 was unconscionable.  Don't remember that?  A refresher course from Professor Jacobson is here.

Mark Steyn points out that the addition of Ryan to the Republican ticket has already raised the level of the Obama campaign in that we're no talking about Joe Soptic's wife now, but about Medicare:
Underneath the poseur narcissism, the half-wit demagoguery, and the 13-figure innumeracy is bleak reality: a flatline economy, underwater property, declining social mobility, half the population getting a check each month from the government and with minimum-wage service jobs as the only alternative to long-term dependency. 
If you seriously think this election is about gay marriage or affordable contraception, you’re about to do to America what Gavrilo Princip did to the Habsburg Empire. 

The truth is, nobody cares about Mitt Romney's tax returns, his dog, or his wife's horse.  It's clear that the Obama campaign can't run on his record and so demagoguery is all they have.

I think the American people will see through that.  I think in a debate on the issues, Obama will lose.

3 comments:

Kartman said...

It is against the law for most people to refuse to pay taxes. I know that doesn,t apply to some of Obama,s folks like Tim Geithner but generally some of us are held accountable. If Romney did not pay his taxes, I'm sure that Obama would have had him arrested a long time ago. Other than lies, there is nothing for the dems to say that would help them. I hope most people do not believe those lies.

Rann said...

Er...sorry...I usually agree with most everything on this blog, but Sarah Palin, the cheerleader governor who lacked the integrity to complete her term as such, and serve her electorate...was & is a card-carrying moron. She was a huge part of the reason Obama was "elected." But the real culprit was King George II, who was undeniably THE WORST President in US History...until the one we're stuck with now. If GW had said "Nu-Q-ler" just one more time...

RightinFlorida said...

Two simple words...I agree.