On his radio show today, Dennis Prager said: This president will say or do anything he can get away with to retain the presidency.
I did not believe that about Bill Clinton.
JOE EMAILS LUKE: Romney seems to be running the “are you better off than you were four years ago” shtick. I don’t think it works, because four years ago, the world was about to go into freefall.
I think his angle must be, will you be better off in four more years. And you will be under him, because he is about success. Not hope, not change, but results.
I know of very few “pro” Obama people who say that the road ahead with obama is brighter, just that it is better than the GOP grass on the other side. Obama has no agenda other than to raise taxes.
At this point, Obama and his supporters are all about making Romney and the GOP look like racists, misogynists, bigots, and corporatists, with only Obama standing in the way. Even if that is true, and it mostly is, you do not generate excitement by hating the other side. Obama in 2008 was completely new in American politics, something not seen since at least 1980 with Reagan, a true vision – a guy who would say stupid shit like “I will close Guantanamo”, “I will talk to Iran,” “I will bring affordable health care” against a backdrop of a country already conditioned to hate the GOP. The media did not call him on any of this because he was black. The last time that happened was 1992, when the country turned against the GOP, but Clinton still needed the assistance of Perot to split the white vote away from George H.W. Bush. And the media did call him on his healthcare shenanigans. Reagan was the last president to have a vision of America that was different.
Now, Obama is targeting pure identity voters – the rational voters who put him in the white house in a realignment fashion cannot possibly be for him, so he has to get his base going by targeting Romney. With that base energized, he can maybe cobble together a post-white vote centric popular majority with a squeaker in the electoral college.
The key for Romney is to say, look, I have a future for you. Obama, promised one, and did not deliver, he cannot be trusted with the future. I can be, I have a vision, I succeeded as a governor of a liberal state, I brought affordable health care at the state level and would never be foolish enough to do it nationally, I am all about success. Obama is not.
It is hard for Obama to demonize someone selling a brighter future of success. Romney’s mantra should be “four better years”.
