This is a really boring time of the presidential contest. Romney killed the suspense for his convention by naming his shitty running mate two weeks early. Congress is out on recess. People are wrapping up their summer vacations. But, I’ll tell you what. In years past, we typically got our butts kicked in August. Remember 2004, with the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, or 2009, with the outbreak of Tea Party maniacs at all the town hall meetings? This year has been different. Team Romney has been on the defensive pretty much non-stop since the second he arrived in London for the Olympics in July.
Romney hasn’t exactly been helping himself. His gaffes on his foreign trip were self-inflicted. His decision not to disclose his tax returns is his own. And the selection of a no rape/incest/health exception Medicare butcher as his running mate was opposed by his own advisers, for obvious reasons.
Still, the Obama team deserves credit for keeping their boot on the neck of the Romney campaign for a half dozen weeks in a row. This time, we were not unprepared for August.
I think that the OBama team learned a valuable lesson on August recess from the whole ACA death panel townhalls and such, to not let your opponent define you, but to define your opponent instead.
Absolutely, I think that it took having their asses handed to them in terms of the politics of the stimulus and the ACA were kind of an eye opener. Procedurally, I think they did a great job and got some much needed things into law, but they abdicated the selling of these. Now we seem them coming out off the starting blocks with a bang!
BTW Booman, any thoughts of the 950 pages of Bain File documents gawker just posted?
http://gawker.com/bain-files/
If nothing else, it should drive more bad news days for the Romney campaign.
Some Fortune reporter is already saying that there is nothing new in the files, because they are the same he claims to have seen “months ago” and there is nothing there.
Well then that reporter should be fired or at least asked WTH didn’t he print something when he got ’em and the Robme camp should be pissed because months ago was when Obama start his Bain attacks and when no one in the village thought they were working. So if this reporter sat on these files until now, then he missed a real opportunity.
But it’s to our advantage that he did, then the whole “retroactive retirment” line that the Romney advisor coined never would have happened.
The first commenter opines that the process of selecting someone to figure out this complexity to begin with would be extraordinarily tedious.
Team Obama is taking NOTHING for granted, nor should they. The Akin hurricane shows just how difficult it is to exercise control over the campaign’s narrative, but they were already loaded and ready for almost anything before the VP choice. Now the avenues of attack and counterattack are literally endless. I’m particularly impressed with how rapidly and effectively they have been able to counter the Robme camp’s most insidious, lying attacks and keep some pressure on the MSM to tell some of the truth an not cover for all of the lies.
The question going forward is whether or not they will have built up enough good will (a nearly three year effort now) to withstand the post-labor day onslaught of TV money. If they can meet it directly, I still feel they can get the Republicans to give up on Romney as early as October.
I will hand it to Robme, he has done a pretty good job of being white, which is keeping him in the game.
Akin was the August surprise and the whole discussion about procedures for establishing whether a woman who seeks an abortion after a rape was “legitimately” raped or just inventing a story to get an abortion. Bet you missed that little wrinkle. I guarantee you the more women than not didn’t miss the implications.
Not to mention the news that in 31 states, women who do what the GOP wants has has the kid of the rapist would have to grant visiting privileges to the rapist to see “his child.” That one’s not as widely known (a Georgetown Law Journal article) but not doubt the word will get out.
As to the “wrinkle,” I thought that was the whole reason why “legitimate” was such an offensive term. It’s not subtle, it shouts loudly that many if not most “rapes” are just made up by disgruntled women.
As to paragraph 2, I was kinda under the impression that laws like this are already in effect in a few places, but have only just heard of the whole thing as of a day or two ago–has that not happened yet?