Story Of Obama

The myth of Romney momentum

Romney Says He’s Winning — It’s a Bluff
By Jonathan Chait, 23 Oct 2012

"In recent days, the vibe emanating from Mitt Romney’s campaign has grown downright giddy. Despite a lack of any evident positive momentum over the last week — indeed, in the face of a slight decline from its post-Denver high — the Romney camp is suddenly bursting with talk that it will not only win but win handily. (“We’re going to win,” said one of the former Massachusetts governor’s closest advisers. “Seriously, 305 electoral votes.”)

"This is a bluff. Romney is carefully attempting to project an atmosphere of momentum, in the hopes of winning positive media coverage and, thus, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.

"Over the last week, Romney’s campaign has orchestrated a series of high-profile gambits in order to feed its momentum narrative. Last week, for instance, Romney’s campaign blared out the news that it was pulling resources out of North Carolina. The battleground was shifting! Romney on the offensive! On closer inspection, it turned out that Romney was shifting exactly one staffer. It is true that Romney leads in North Carolina, and it is probably his most favorable battleground state. But the decision to have a staffer move out of state, with a marching band and sound trucks in tow to spread the news far and wide, signals a deliberate strategy to create a narrative.

"Also last week, Paul Ryan held a rally in Pittsburgh. Romney moving in to Pennsylvania! On the offensive! Skeptical reporters noted that Ryan’s rally would bleed into the media coverage in southeast Ohio and that Romney was not devoting any real money to Pennsylvania. Romney’s campaign keeps leaking that it is planning to spend money there. (Today’s leak: “Republicans are genuinely intrigued by the prospect of a strike in Pennsylvania and, POLITICO has learned, are considering going up on TV there outside the expensive Philadelphia market.” Note the noncommittal terms: intrigued and considering.) The story also floats Romney’s belief that, since Pennsylvania has no early voting, it can postpone its planned, any-day-now move into Pennsylvania until the end. This allows Romney to keep the Pennsylvania bluff going until, what, a couple of days before the election?

"Karl Rove employed exactly this strategy in 2000. As we now know, the race was excruciatingly close, and Al Gore won the national vote by half a percentage point. But at the time, Bush projected a jaunty air of confidence. Rove publicly predicted Bush would win 320 electoral votes. Bush even spent the final days stumping in California, supposedly because he was so sure of victory he wanted an icing-on-the-cake win in a deep blue state. Campaign reporters generally fell for Bush’s spin, portraying him as riding the winds of momentum and likewise presenting Al Gore as desperate.

"The current landscape is slightly different. The race is also very close, but Obama enjoys a clear electoral college lead. He is ahead by at least a couple points in enough states to make him president. Adding to his base of uncontested states, Nevada, Ohio, and Wisconsin would give Obama 271 electoral votes. According to the current polling averages compiled at fivethirtyeight.com, Obama leads Nevada by 3.5 percent, Ohio by 2.9 percent, and Wisconsin by 4 percent. Should any of those fail, Virginia and Colorado are nearly dead even. (Obama leads by 0.7 percent and 1.0 percent, respectively.) If you don’t want to rely on Nate Silver — and you should rely on him! — the polling averages at realclearpolitics, the conservative-leaning site, don’t differ much, either.

"If you look closely at the boasts emanating from Romney’s allies, you can detect a lot of hedging and weasel-words. Rob Portman calls Ohio a “dead heat,” which is a way of calling a race close without saying it’s tied. A Romney source tells Mike Allen that Wisconsin leans their way owing to Governor Scott Walker’s “turnout operation.” That is campaign speak for “we’re not winning, but we hope to make it up through turnout.”

"Obama’s lead is narrow — narrow enough that the polling might well be wrong and Romney could win. But he is leading, his lead is not declining, and the widespread perception that Romney is pulling ahead is Romney’s campaign suckering the press corps with a confidence game."
 
Quote from RCG Trader:

Yannis, you are going to get smacked down. AGAIN.

But you mos def get an A for effort. Mos def.
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RCG is running scared. Run, RCG, run.
 
Quote from RCG Trader:Yannis, you are going to get smacked down. AGAIN. But you mos def get an A for effort. Mos def.
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No attachment either way. Just hope for the best for all of us. And that's Romney/Ryan :)
 
Quote from Yannis:

No attachment either way. Just hope for the best for all of us. And that's Romney/Ryan :)
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You were right, Yannis. Liberals like to attack the messenger when their own message is failing.
 
Quote from pspr:You were right, Yannis. Liberals like to attack the messenger when their own message is failing.
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I understand their anxiety at this point, given that polls are currently neutral/negative for them. They don't know how effective their ground plan will really be and therefore how many dems will actually go vote. In addition, there's still a considerable number of undecideds who traditionally break for the challenger. Oh well, we'll see.
 
Obama V Romney Round 3
by Fred Thompson

One of these guys looked presidential and one of them looked like a somewhat desperate challenger. Romney looked like the president, and Obama looked like the challenger. In preparing for this debate Romney may have demonstrated his presidential mettle in a way that he has not demonstrated before now. He showed guts and the willingness to go against mainstream thinking, even some in his own party. He was also willing to place a substantial bet on his own intuition about the mood of the American people. This is the stuff of presidents.

I believe that Romney took a cold, hard look at the numbers and decided that on the current course, he would win. The only thing that could side track him would be to make women and independents feel that, even if he was strong on economic issues, he was not up to the potentially-even-more-important challenges that foreign policy presents to a president. It seems to me that Mitt’s thinking went something like this:

“Some American voters are fed up and disillusioned, but are still looking for a level of comfort before they vote to replace Obama. I must not scare them off by playing into Obama’s mantra that I’m eager to get the United States into another war. That’s the last thing I want and I think I can persuade these folks of that.

“But in order to seal the deal, I’m going to have to absorb some hits. If Obama is looking at the same numbers and trends that I am (and he is), then he will come out aggressive and unpresidential. He feels he has no choice. He is under pressure, however he doesn’t do well under pressure. As the media’s favorite son, Obama has seldom been tested. It has taken a tough campaign and a challenger who would go toe to toe with him to bring out Obama’s natural resentment of anyone who criticizes or contradicts him. He much prefers to talk down to people, literally, such as when, during a State of the Union address, he castigated the Supreme Court and misled the American people about what the High Court had done, or when he lectured and denigrated Paul Ryan to his face in a speech before Congressional leaders after Ryan submitted a budget plan.

“People are not used to seeing that look on Obama’s face when the shoe is on the other foot — when he is desperate. I want them to see that look. Obama will be even more frustrated when I don’t take the bait. When Obama takes a serious, debatable issue of foreign policy and turns it into a personal shot at me, I win, he loses. If Obama is vulnerable on anything more than his disastrous past record, it’s his total failure to put forth a credible plan for the future. So when he attacks me, instead of answering the attack, I’ll just pivot and say that an attack on me is not a plan for the future, reminding everybody of his weakness.

“However all of the hits won’t be from Obama. His tactics will appeal to those who judge a presidential debate as they would an Olympic boxing match. He will win some snap polls right after the debate. Among the media, especially, ‘feisty’ has become synonymous with presidential. That’s just the opposite of what most think when we are talking about foreign policy and issues of war and piece. He will ‘win’ as Nixon won against Kennedy, Kerry won against Bush, Mondale won against Reagan and even Ford won against Carter, until what was said was absorbed. I’ve got my eye on a bigger picture.

“Even my supporters will be disappointed initially. They want me to pound him, especially on his weakness in failing to provide security for our people in Libya, and for the obvious cover up after the attack. But that’s just it: it is obvious. And when I calmly lay out Obama’s overall weakness on foreign policy, Libya will fit right in for those who have followed the matter. For others, what I say about it won’t matter anyway.

“It’s also not going to hurt my cause to agree with the President on some things. How could I not when most of his successes in fighting terrorism have been when he has followed the Bush policies or reversed his own positions.

“The most surprised and disappointed person in America that I didn’t come out swinging on Libya will be Barak Obama. He and his team have had several days to prepare for this.

“You can bet that they have a game plan to deny, obfuscate and mislead, then try to turn it back on me. He’ll rely on the limited time I will have to pin him down. All of this planning will be wasted time for him and we will be able to see the disappointment on his face by the end of the debate. And, long before, my supporters will have seen my strategy and will be in full support.

“I have a fine line to walk. If I come off as weak because I over-compensated for the warmonger image Obama will try to paint of me, I will have blown this thing in the 9th inning. But I’m going to trust myself and be myself. I am self-confident, knowledgeable and moderate in my temperament. That’s what I’m going to go with”

I’d say Romney’s strategy worked beautifully. And I’d say that he walked away from that debate having checked the final box to qualify as the next President of the United States.

:cool: :cool: :cool:
 
Quote from Yannis:

Second Debate Sets Up Romney Win
By DICK MORRIS

Romney emerges from the second debate well positioned to win it all. The post-debate polling reflects that he solidly won on the key issues: economy, energy prices, and China. Obama scores well in his overall ratings in these surveys simply because he benefits by comparison with his sleep-walking performance in the first debate.

Fundamentally, Romney's smooth, polished, dignified, articulate, sincere, and compassionate manner in the debate puts to rest eight months of Obama negative attacks on his character. Barack Obama is about to learn the lesson Jimmy Carter learned in 1980 when he lost to Reagan -- and found his lead collapsing after the debates. When a president with a failed record tries to win by attacking and demonizing his opponent, he can succeed only if there are no debates. Since neither Goldwater (1964) nor McGovern (1972) had the chance to show themselves to America in debates, the negative characterization of them by first Johnson and then Nixon stuck. But Ronald Reagan's debate performance nullified Carter's attacks and showed him not to be the war-mongering madman the president had accused him of being. Similarly, Obama's portrayal of Romney as insensitive, elitist, incapable of understanding the problems of the average person, a tax cheat, and a cold blooded capitalist all fell before Romney's real persona as it came through on television.

And once Obama is stripped of his negative messaging, he has nothing to say. His defense of his economic record and his energy drilling essentially boiled down to asking people what they wanted to believe -- their own eyes or Obama's speeches.

Stylistically, Romney's dignity played very well. He struck just the right balance between letting Obama walk over him (as Ryan let Biden do) and being obnoxious and petty (as Obama appeared to be).

The Romney campaign has exactly the right ads on the air to exploit their debate edge. The sixty second ad they now are running in swing states, featuring Romney's first debate narrative on the economy played over faces of Americans suffering from economic distress is just the right move.

Specifically, Romney:

1) Explained his tax plan very well. His suggestion that he would allow up to a flat $25,000 in deductions was excellent.

2) Recited the statistics of economic decline so well and so frequently that they will be repeated again and again by voters as they contemplate their decision.

3) Clearly pinned the blame for high gas prices on Obama by enumerating the president's anti-oil, anti-coal policies.

4) Put the China issue in play big time by explaining Chinese currency manipulation. In the next debate, Romney should drill down and explain how much Chinese chicanery and hacking costs us jobs and how passive Obama has been in the face of their conduct.

5) Demonstrated his compassion and heart in his personal stories of his ministry. He should continue just this kind of argumentation.

And then there's Libya. The intervention of Candy Crowley saved Obama on the ropes. But as inappropriate as it was, her statement -- that Obama said at the outset that it was a terror attack -- was technically correct, but, ultimately wrong. We all know that Obama tried to play the attack as a rally gone awry, impelled by passion generated by a film about Islam. WE heard him say so on The View, on Letterman, at the United Nations and all over the nation for two weeks.

Romney should explain that the president's goal was not to interfere with his narrative that by killing bin Laden, he had ended al Qaeda as a terrorist organization. He did not want an attack and an assassination on his record in the last two months before the election. So he pretended that it was all because of an intemperate movie. He should cite the statements of the State Department that they never considered it a terrorist attack.

Then he should go on to show how Obama's foreign policy based on naïveté has failed and is going up in flames. The evidence is there: the Libya attack, the increasing likelihood that Egypt will reject the Camp David accords, the turn of the Arab Spring into a jihadist coup, the unrelenting progress of Iran toward a bomb, the failure of any effort to rein in North Korea, the growing power of Chavez in Latin America and....the brazenness of China's trade and currency policies.

Romney has this election in hand. Obama is left with nothing to stand on. No record to cite. No proposals to convey. Stripped of his negative campaign, he has nothing really left to say.
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Way to go Dick

Yannis,we tried to tell you Morris was a fucking idiot
 
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