BLAME EARLY AND BLAME OFTEN: JAMES TARANTO
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“What’s welling up in America’s ruling Democrats is not yet a full-throated scream of desperation,” observes commentator Neil Macdonald, who is Canadian and therefore a neutral observer. “But as Samuel Johnson famously remarked, the prospect of being hanged in a fortnight concentrates the mind wonderfully.”
True, as Macdonald says, “for the most part, Barack Obama’s supporters are still clutching the cloak.” Mitt Romney is only slightly ahead in most national polls, Obama clings to a slender lead in Ohio (though Josh Jordan argues at National Review Online that those polls seem to overrepresent Obama supporters who say they’ve already voted), and the New York Times’s Nate Silver is still 1,000% (OK, 71%) behind Obama.
“Losing campaigns have a certain feel to them,” observes the Times’s Ross Douthat in a blog post. “They go negative hard, try out new messaging very late in the game, hype issues that only their core supporters are focused on, and try to turn non-gaffes and minor slip-ups by their opponents into massive, election-turning scandals.” Though Douthat concludes his post with a bizarre and convoluted caveat that amounts to an acknowledgment that there is a nontrivial chance of an Obama victory.
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We second that acknowledgment. It would be premature for the left to despair. This is a time for dread and denial. What also seems premature, although fun, is the rush to assign blame in advance for an Obama loss.
Matt Bai of the Times blames Bill Clinton, whose “expert advice about how to beat Mitt Romney is starting to look suspect”:
You may recall that last spring, just after Mr. Romney locked up the Republican nomination, Mr. Obama’s team abruptly switched its strategy for how to define him. Up to then, the White House had been portraying Mr. Romney much as George W. Bush had gone after John Kerry in 2004–as inauthentic and inconstant, a soulless climber who would say anything to get the job.
But it was Mr. Clinton who forcefully argued to Mr. Obama’s aides that the campaign had it wrong. The best way to go after Mr. Romney, the former president said, was to publicly grant that he was the “severe conservative” he claimed to be, and then hang that unpopular ideology around his neck.
On the surface, such advice is a head-scratcher. The idea that Romney was inconstant had at least some plausibility, although the comparison to Kerry was awfully far-fetched. The haughty, French-looking Massachusetts Democrat, who by the way served in Vietnam, didn’t just change his positions on this or that issue. He launched his political career by viciously slandering Vietnam veterans, then posed as a hero of that same war to run for president, and he seems to have been–and seems to this day–totally oblivious to the contradiction.
We expect we’d like Romney better if he were a “severe conservative,” but Obama and his followers seem to have taken Clinton’s advice to heart so deeply that they came to believe the story they were telling about their opponent. When Romney failed in the debates to conform to their caricature, they seemed genuinely outraged.
Why would Clinton give Obama such awful advice? It’s consistent with our “frenemy” theory, that Clinton doesn’t want Obama to win. Bai seems to believe that Clinton made these recommendations in earnest:
After all, if you’re Bill Clinton, you have to look at it this way: for your entire career as a candidate, other politicians tried to paint you as waffling and slippery, and not once did it actually work. . . .
Meanwhile, you won a couple of national elections by positioning yourself as the pragmatic bulwark against conservative extremism on one side and liberal excess on the other. So it would be natural to have learned that it makes more sense to exploit your opponent’s rigid ideology than his general squishiness.
But as Bai acknowledges, Clinton’s situation was quite different. Most importantly, he “really was a centrist deal-maker.” (Bai neglects to add that one of the 42nd president’s main foils, Newt Gingrich, makes a far more convincing right-wing monster than Romney, or at least did in those days.) “Mr. Obama may see himself in the same pragmatic vein,” but voters know better. Our guess is that Clinton also knows better.
EPABarack H. “The Claw” Obama in the third debate.
With his “Romnesia” shtick, Obama has tried wanly to resurrect the Romney-is-inauthentic argument. Some of his supporters in the media are joining in, with entertaining severity. Joan Walsh of Salon headlined her third-debate wrap-up “The Man Without a Soul.” Apparently in order for him to convince her that he had a soul, he would have had to threaten a bunch of new wars in the Middle East. Thank goodness he had the sense not to do that.
Paul Waldman of The American Prospect deems Romney “The Emptiest Candidate in Presidential Election History” and asserts: “He truly believes in nothing. It’s really quite remarkable that not only could he get so far, but that he has a real chance to become president of the United States.”
Barack Obama, meanwhile, is blaming his loss–or let’s say his difficult situation–on George W. Bush. Yeah, we know, what else is new. But Politico, quoting the president in an interview with Rolling Stone, calls our attention to a new variation:
The biggest challenge we’ve always had is that unlike FDR–who came into office when the economy had already bottomed out, so people understood that everything done subsequently to his election was making things better–I came in just as we were sliding. Because of the actions we took, we averted a Great Depression–but in the process, we also muddied up the political narrative, because it allowed somebody like Romney to somehow blame my policies for the mess that the previous administration created.
Apparently Bush was supposed to engineer a financial collapse in 2005 so that the country would have three years to get used to it and would know to give Obama a break.
Obama supporters are trying one other line of attack. Did you know Romney is Mormon? Or, as Andrew Sullivan of what’s left of Newsweek puts it: “Romney belonged to a white supremacist church for 31 years of his life”! Sullivan reminds us that Obama was faulted for choosing Jeremiah Wright as his “spiritual mentor” and thinks Romney should be too for having been born into a Mormon family before 1978, when his church changed its unfortunate racial doctrines.
Hey, we’d almost forgotten about Jeremiah Wright.
Then there’s Maureen Sullivan–no relation to Andrew as far as we know. Breitbart.com describes her as “an embittered leftie, a Huffington Post [sic] ‘Super User,’ and a vicious anti-Mormon bigot.” Apparently the candidate testified some 20 years ago in her divorce from a Romney colleague. She has joined forces with Gloria Allred in asking a court to release the divorce records and lift a nondisclosure agreement on the theory that Romney’s testimony will somehow prove politically damaging.
Obama was helped into the Senate in 2004 when a court unsealed the divorce records of Republican opponent Jack Ryan. Ryan withdrew from the race and Obama won the general election without serious opposition.
Now the best his supporters can do against Romney is to air dirty laundry from some other guy’s divorce? Maybe if Obama loses, we can blame it on Ann Romney for not leaving her husband.
Always Look on the Bright Side of Life
Mickey Kaus borrowed one of our tropes the other day, noting that for E.J. Dionne, the outlook is “always sunny” for the left. “Obama’s ability to govern in a second term,” Dionne wrote, “depends not simply on his own triumph but also on the decisive defeat of those who have been obstructing him.” That means he needs a big enough victory to provide congressional coattails.
As Kaus notes, that was about a month ago. “when it looked like Obama had some chance of winning big. . . . Now that he doesn’t, winning big turns out not to matter so much! In a fortuitous development, it seems that, on second thought, Obama can not only govern but pursue an ambitious second term agenda even if Republicans continue to control the House.” (Here’s the latter Dionne column in case you’re a glutton for punishment.)
But wait, it gets better. Even a Romney win, it turns out, is good news for the left. According to Dionne today, “the right wing has lost the election of 2012”:
Mitt Romney would not be throwing virtually all of his past positions overboard if he thought the nation were ready to endorse the full-throated conservatism he embraced to win the Republican nomination.
If conservatism were winning, does anyone doubt that Romney would be running as a conservative?
Right, never before in American history has a nominee for president tried to appear ideological in the primaries and centrist in the general election. That can mean only that liberalism is triumphant and conservatism is dead. To E.J. Dionne, that is the meaning of everything.
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