That’s my paraphrase. But it’s his argument, even if he’d tell you otherwise:
In the days after his Washington lecture, Mr. Obama took a shorter version of his SOTU speech on the road—to Colorado, Michigan, Iowa, Nevada and Arizona, states he needs in November. On the White House website, you can see him give this campaign tuneup speech at the new, $5 billion Intel chip-fabrication plant in Chandler, Ariz. It’s worth watching and pondering. You’d think the best and the brightest would be beyond Mr. Obama’s crude populist pitch. You of course would be wrong.
About 6,000 Intel employees—young, well-educated technology sophisticates—applauded and cheered Mr. Obama from start to finish. Even when he ripped into those awful American companies with factories overseas, such as their own employer. “An America where we build stuff and make stuff and sell stuff all over the world.” (Applause.)
A speech that flopped among Washington’s policy sophisticates is soaring out in the country. Republicans had better figure out why.
Reading through the White House’s text of “An Economy Built to Last,” any half-awake citizen will notice the words that fail to appear: Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, entitlements and the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. The deficit is in the document’s last paragraph, three sentences long.
Gilda Radner’s Emily Litella famously said “Never mind,” and you would too if you had to run on this economy. Thus, the Obama solution: Run against the economy. This effectively means Mr. Obama is running against himself, but . . . never mind.
He will marginalize his opponents as the bloodless Numbers People.
Mr. Obama may not know much about the private economy, but he knows a lot about the uses of human anxiety. Proposing to replace his own bad economy with a virtual substitute “built to last” allows Mr. Obama to place himself outside the White House and on the street making common cause with the genuine economic anxieties of the American people. It also lets this president put in motion what he thinks he knows best—empathy. In “The Audacity of Hope” he put empathy “at the heart of my moral code.” Practice makes perfect.
It is beyond audacious. How can a president simultaneously hammer real job creation with the Keystone XL pipeline decision, then go into the country and claim kinship with the anxieties of the jobless? No problem. Just do it.
It could work. If we know nothing else about Barack Obama it is that he can play “hope” like a Stradivarius. The version of “An Economy Built to Last” that he performed at Intel is his concerto for re-election.
The Obama-Axelrod-Plouffe team knows that the Republicans instinctively will respond by quoting, endlessly, the poor economic data of the Obama years. They plan to turn this reality on its head as well. In a down economy, Barack Obama is going to position his GOP critics as economic determinists. The bloodless Numbers People. The tea party, by its own admission, obsesses over “the deficit”—numbers. Mr. Obama’s likely opponent has self-defined as a competent manager, a numbers guy. That false Obama demagoguery about rules-free GOP Darwinians is just one piece of this unflattering portrait.
In Arizona he said, “An economy built to last also means we’ve got to renew American values: fair play, shared responsibility.” Wild applause. For those who think they have facts on their side, it will be maddening and enraging to watch other Obama audiences across the country cheer and applaud “An Economy Built to Last.” Get used to it.
The GOP is appealing, as its candidates so often do, to the American brain. Barack Obama is happy to be left by himself, going for their hearts. If he wins, the Republican will wail at the unfairness, irrationality and illogic of what beat them.
Rick Santorum, in his Tuesday night also-ran speech to what looked like a roomful of about 35 people at a Nevada Days Inn, spoke of couples “sitting around a kitchen table” to figure out what comes next. Whatever his campaign’s shortcomings, Mr. Santorum is the one man running who understands the Obama strategy to marginalize Republicans. At some point after the inevitable end of the nomination campaign, Mitt Romney should ask Rick Santorum to sit down with him to discuss the inner melodies of life in America these days. Barack Obama is the maestro of this music, and without it, you can’t win a presidency.
Ironic, isn’t it? As much as Romney can court the “moderates” by laying claim to any number of positions shared with the “pragmatic” Obama, his undoing may be in that area in which he differs significantly from the Obama campaigning persona: Romney is a technocrat, a big government manager, a groomed, establishment pol, and as such, he lacks bedrock ideological principles. He is out of touch; a Wall Street money mover; a man who lacks empathy; and so he can be easily pigeon-holed as part of the 1% (a reduction and re-framing of the American individual that Romney has already accepted as legitimate).
Obama, though he sells himself as a pragmatist, does not lack for bedrock principles: he’s a leftist ideologue, and so he is able to draw on all that entails to frame his populist pitch, from emotional appeals to a deeply embedded belief in class warfare and radical, outcome-based egalitarianism.
So by putting the most moderate Republican up against Obama, the GOP will lose many of the policy position battles (Obama and Romney share many positions — they just disagree on who should be running them and how), and as a bonus, might just lose the battle for empathy, for hope, as well.
This is the danger of advancing a candidate who you believe will appeal to the moderates. You betray your base, and at the same time, you turn the election into a battle for Personality-in-Chief.
Santorum has provided the electoral blueprint for beating Obama: take away his populist panders and win back over the Reagan Democrats and blue collar manufacturing workers. But alas, Santorum, a conservative, can’t seem to get traction in the GOP primaries.
The irony of that being that I believe he would be most able to beat Obama — and he’d do so while simultaneously promoting and espousing actual conservative principles, and without the baggage of supporting an individual mandate, TARP, the stimulus, cap and trade, and on and on and on.
Which is why, as I always say, the ends don’t justify the means. It matters how you get there.
Something we’ll have 3-years to talk over before the next election, when we once again forget all that and start falling in line behind the next turd the establishment pushes before us and tells us to embrace.
(h/t TerryH)
The article suggests a mistake so many on the right make with Obama.
He’s very much pro-private sector when its like the very heavily subsidized Intel plant in Chandler, Az. (via artificially low state and local taxes via rebates, deep-discounts on water and electricity costs, and assuredly some public infrastructure assistance), where employment goals have been quietly but very, very firmly negotiated in return for all of the above.
So the POTUS is quite happy with this sort of marketplace. It’s just when it comes to most of the rest of the economy, that doesn’t have the scale to attract such public commitment, where he runs into perception problems.
That economy and those ‘actors” have to navigate a dog’s breakfast of accounting rules, a 39% top tax rate and a legal system that appears to have been constructed between the devil and someone with a profound learning disability.
He is, in other words, a partisan of the European method, in which the State partners with corporations to enact policy goals (such as the ridiculously misguided “full employment” doctorine.) These corporations are inevitably large enough to absorb the multi-dimensional spider webs of regulations and mandates these governments throw off by the long ton; in return, they get flatly preferential treatment and input into policy.
it’s capitalists, who have their own money at risk at all times, that the POTUS could do without. They have too much at risk, too little connection to the government and a distrust of anyone who doesn’t understand the above to be anything but a problem for this model. So they are ignored and shunted to the side on the belief that they’ll never organise well enough to pose a threat.
It’s quite brilliant, actually, at least as a governing paradigm. As pertains to the U.S. tradition of being left to pursue your private happiness, it is altogether something else.
Gee, I think there’s a word for that… starts with “fasc”…
But it would be unhelpful to bring that up, I guess.
Tyranny is brilliant then Roddy? Seems kinda dumb to me.
I keep reading about how beloved Obama is in Europe. Maybe he should go rule over there and leave us alone.
It’s brilliant in the sense of “hey, I like business! I like people making money! All that stuff about me being an anti-market socialist? crazy talk” sense, sdferr.
Hannah Arendt wrote a nifty essay published in The New Yorker in 1967 (accessible online for you subscribers), and re-published in her essay compilation book Between Past and Future, titled Truth and Politics. It’s a good-un.
Want to thank all of you, for your Powerfull stand against Oboma & His Corrupted political partners.
But there is so much more we can do. Being aggressive and focusing on the facts and truth is only the first step.
We musT follow Up with more details standing by our convictions and dont back down.
Oboma has NOT brought CHANGE, In fact ~! ~ THE ONLY real THING needing CHANGE !….Was Barack Hussein Obama II.
HIMSELF
Barack Hussein Obama II (
Who hates American Values ) who is A ” SELF PROCLAIMED Enemy” ~of responsible, Morally Conscious HARD WORKING Americans.
oBOMAS Irresponsible & DRUG MAFIA and reckless supporters KNOW~ that Barack Hussein Obama II, WILL FORCE YOU to paY THEM, out of your PockeT .{ FOR all of their UNCHECKED Vices and THRILLS/
{ All on YOU
| / At
your COST & Sacrifice. …This UN~CHANGABLE fraud, has done His VERY BEST to Inspire VIOLENCE.
THESE ARE OBAMAS OWN WORDS.. saying ……To his supporters.Saying “Get ready for hand-to-hand combat with your Fellow Americans” – Obama has ALSO DECLARED to his Supporters. “I want all Americans to get in each others faces!– Obama Demands !
“You bring a knife to a fight pal, we’ll bring a gun” –
THESE ARE OBAMAS OWN WORDS.. ANGER VIOLENCE And more taxes….. THIS IS OBAMAS Change for america /“Hit Back Twice As Hard”. He commands ! *Obama on the private sector: ~~ “We talk To these folks…~ / so I know whose a*$ to KICK.“ OBOMA wants to KICK your a*$ /“`
Shouting THAT Republican victory would mean ~ “hand to hand combat” and HE IS EXPECTING people to be on Edge and ON BORDERLINE killing MODE, “ VIOLENT / and STAND and STOMP and MOB for their immoral CAUSES and THIS IS WHAT HE LIVES FOR ./ ./ ./ THESE ARE OBAMAS OWN WORDS.. !* Obama Tells democrats: “ I’m itching for a fight.” !
….PLEASE…. go to reXes NEW WebsiTe ~ ! Oboma *( Just like Adolf Hitler~~oBOMA~~~ Demands ! — [ THE FINAL SOLUTION – for Un~Wanted Children
Barak Obama is A MURDERER .~Torturing UNWANTED babys on DEATH ROE.
CLICK HERE http://obomlnation.webstarts.com/index.html
OBAMA TAKES a little NEW BORN innocent child, BORN ALIVE sTabS it iN the head and SUCKs ITS BRAINS OUT.
This is just too wrong and horrible. Please stand for Loving Children and the USA.
Respectfully and Thankfully Thank you ALL for your Time.
To see HORRIBLE HONOR Killings~` HATE CRIMES ]`~ ! eXecuted by the CLINTON,RENO and ATF Media WHO COMMITTED H0NOR KILLINGs [
SLAUGHTERING }] 21 LITTLE Helpless Children at Waco.
Click Here http://obomlnation.webstarts.com/partly_born_totally_murdered.html
I think your capslock is sticking.
5. Ernst is correct. It’s a densely woven beard.
Remember how in old-time Hollywood, when Monty Clift–a frigging great-looking guy– was at every party with absolute A-list, drop-dead gorgeous starlets who happily made sure to always have one boob touching him? For 20 years those girls went home dissapointed and slept by themselves, in their favorite nightgowns. Because Monty liked Cabana boys from the Beverly Hills hotel.
Only a couple of dozen people during his prime in the 50s knew that Clift was gay and they said nothing because he was a well-paid star who needed to perceived as straight and virile and that’s how that went.
It’s a beard like that. The signs are there, but few are piecing together what it really is.
Wow. That there’s some goooooood crazy.
#10 directed at #7. Not Roddy.
Only children believe what it really is can be made to disappear. This is the tyrant’s trouble, and why, in any honest estimation, he can only be thought stupid (this, he will often enough understand himself, which is in turn, why he fears the wise).
I just hope laying out the Sclerotic Statist tendencies of these sorts in broad daylight is enough. Government should set a rational framework for business and then strictly enforce the borders and boundaries, whatever they may be.
Leave the chips to the guys in the wafer fabs and the bond-trading to that lot.
We’d be much better off.
Don’t think I agree that “government” should set the framework, Roddy, but I agree with your overall statement.
Off topic, who would love to see somebody walk up behind Holder and give him a wedgie? I’m talking a waistband-over-the-forehead wedgie. It would make for great C-SPAN.
I’ve been on record about wanting more bench-clearing brawls in congress.
If it’s good enough for Japan, it should be good enough for us.
#7 looks like a SQL statement mixed with php. (php not pcp. Although the person who wrote it might be on pcp)
Is that one of those spammy things like “Learn how to make $750 a week from your home!”?
Someone’s letting the cat out of the bag about Mr. Inevitable.
Make sure the #justWINbaby! crowd knows about it motionview.
#7: ERROR: DOES NOT PARSE
#7 The username is reXteryalizeriXerpawrex, the password is Bob.
Permit me an observation, if I may:
Were this to happen, which it’s unlikely to, it wouldn’t work. Santorum could teach him the melody and he could recite it back, but Romney doesn’t feel it. He’s tone-deaf.
And it shows.
sdferr, last week you referred to Locke on the dissolution of government. After reading, I felt a sudden kinship with our Founders.
*
RI Red, such circumstances happen now and again, and pose for us one of the tougher challenges to our equipoise. Political life is, for the most part, not a matter of the extreme moments entailed in such motions, yet, we’re still called to account betimes. It’s a thing. Earlier today, I started to post this bit (to follow), but thought better of it at the time. Now, however, it looks somehow more fit:
“That’s a bad time, which, for now, thanks be, doesn’t appear on the visible horizon.”
I fear that we may be revisiting this discussion come summertime,when the OWS crowd is pressed into service by the king. On a little black and white TV, I watched the ’68 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Can you imagine watching those riots in full color on a large flatscreen, said riots reinforced by social media?
I’m not sure if PW took a look at this, but the comparison between 1776 and 2012 is striking: When in the Course of Human Events. Use of OWS, as I suspect will happen, can be added to the list of abuses and usurpations.
Heh.
link
The hell you (and the author) say NR. #JustWINbaby! We have to get Obama outta there or we’re doomed DOOMED I say!
Stupid fucking hairy-footed Visigoths! Don’t they know that if they don’t shut up and get aboard the Inevitabity Express, Obama is going to WIN and then we’re DOOMED!
/sarc
(n.b. that wasn’t directed at anyone in particular. Unless you think it was directed at you.
In which case, it was.)
Hayward: The Gulf in the Gulf: Fact and Fiction on Offshore Drilling
I think the bolded above is at the crux of what divides proggs from conservatives. Shared responsibilities are not an American value, personal responsibility is. The difference is the slight of hand of a talented magician. I mean, isn’t shared responsibilities a sort of oxymoron? It’s what gives rise to all sorts of government license, from the progressive tax system and class warfare, to the health care individual mandate.
I really think the whole motivation for those implementing and following after Utopianism is the seduction of a life free of responsibility. This is what Obama offers, it’s what the OWies demand, and what the Republican establishment are reluctant to contest.
Personal liberty is dependent on personal responsibility, and I’m afraid too many of our fellow citizens are all too willing to trade their freedom for not just security, but also licence.
“shared responsibility.”
like its my fault baracky ran up $5,000,000,000,000 in debt in 3 years.
Paul Ryan just did an interview with Levin, touring the budgetary and political landscape in the coming year. He’s still pining for a “stark options” election, though I hate to tell him, it isn’t looking too plausible just now.
sdferr, when he was talkin about Mitt, it was “stock options”, not “stark options”.
heh
On the seriouser side, seriouserly, Ryan kinda pisses me off on these grounds (and others who share his vision of the danger), namely that, if the circumstances are such as he lays out, how can he (and they) not have moved off the sidelines to pick a candidate who best represents the chances of getting the “stark options” contest they claim to desire? Surely, he (and they) can see as well as I that neither Romney nor Gingrich can get us there?
“Romney is a technocratic, a big government manager, a groomed, establishment pol, and as such, he lacks bedrock ideological principles.”
Sadly true.
Half the time Romney speaks CSL: Conservativism as a Second Language. He’s fluent in it, but it’s not who he is. He’s learned to mouth the proper words most of the time but he doesn’t believe in it. The rest of the time he speaks his center-left political patter.
Weak, weak.
So we’re screwed if Ozero wins and we’re mostly screwed if Romney wins.
From a certain perspective I can see Ryan and others (Palin, Daniels, etc) as not wanting to be driving when the bus hits the wall – you’re the first one to go, after all. Perhaps they want to still be around to clean up the wreckage and think they can be more useful in the EMT capacity.
I’ve often thought that it would take at least three elections of leaders willing to sacrifice their political careers for us to turn this around.
Who is Mitt Romney? Really, who is he?
He uses that soft-spoken mortician’s voice part of the time with the reassuring hand on your shoulder as he looks you in the eye and promises to attend to all the final details. Don’t you worry about a thing, he says. The other part of the time he acts like a car salesman who is desperate to make his quota before they close out the books for the month. Sweaty, gesturing too much, rattled, talking too fast and looking around for a helping hand from someone else on his crew. You just know he’s lying to you.
Why does he want to be president? Is he yet another guy who is working out his daddy issues by trying to grab the brass ring that did never got?
We’re doomed.
voting for Romney is ok to do and I figured out why… what these post-modern campaign things are mostest sensitive to is… you guessed it – monies
the way to register your disapproval with Rpmney’s manifold inadequacies is to vote for him but not to donate any monies
this way when he sits down at his spreadsheet to figure out his ratio of voters to donors, he’ll get a humbling number that tells him all he needs to know about the for reals appeal of his message
he’ll say to himself – what do I needs to do to appeal to people more better?
And an epiphany is sure to follow.
*Romney’s* manifold inadequacies
But I hate him. He makes me cringe, happy.
I really hate him too my mom would’ve said he’s a drip I think
but this obama feller isn’t messing around and his re-election is dangerous in the fullest sense of that word
we’ll not soon recover what is lost, and we still have much to lose
Thing about Romney is…. will he make any real difference to our national debt? Is he really going to reel in the government?
The answer appears to be no, to me at least. So I don’t even know why we are having an election. Because it’s “his turn” to handle the reins of this pony cart to hell? Because Obama is a bigger piece of crap?
MissFixit – Romney is sure to be disappointing, but he’ll not be as noxious as a second Obama term
these things Obama does have lasting consequences what we’ve yet to fully appreciate
it has to stop
There’s still time for people to wake from their nightmare (coma?) and pick someone other than Romney.
I suppose that’s possible but it seems less than probable Mr. sdferr
and Gingrich has not exactly done much to inspire confidence since South Carolina
his value proposition is confuzzled
Sometimes it’s best to ignore the probable and go on about our proper business. Like, with the rescuers entering the great burning Towers, we should do what we have to do.
but also sometimes if it were done when tis done then twere well it were done quickly
No. First he’ll tell himself he’d better give the money people everything they want so that the money keeps comings. Next he’ll use some of that money to hire him some more campaign consultants and image people to help him to more better connect with the rubes. Finally, he’ll cut as many deals as he has to with the Democrats to keep the media off his ass and his popularity numbers high.
You’re trading the wintery clutches of rape and fail for an early spring. Spring blizzards are the worst. Especially when they involve rape and fail.
“There’s still time for people to wake from their nightmare (coma?) and pick someone other than Romney.”
Yeah and Jeff is probably right that Ricky is the best of all possible choices, but i just can’t shake the urge to punch Santorum in the mouth, and i’m not a violent guy, but there is just something about him i don’t like, and it has little to do with his religious beliefs.
leigh@15: Taiwan is the place known for the brawls in their Parliament. The Japanese are not, as far as I know, anywhere near as feisty in their Diet.
Thanks, Richard. I knew it was an Asian country. Those brawls are epic.
speaking of diet did you know that a chicken fajita pita from Jack in the Box only has 230 or so calories if you get it without the cheese? They want like $4 dollars something for them though and you’d probably need two so it’s not like a super great value, but still that’s a tasty healthy lunch