Politico is getting pretty desperate. They accuse the president of running a campaign that is lacking in audacity. I get that they are riffing on the title of the president’s book, but “audacity” is not normally seen as a good thing. That’s why the book title was clever. To see that this article is stupid, all you have to do is realize that they open with a bit of advice from Napoleon and then they never manage to refute it. What exactly Napoleon said may never be known, but the gist of it was that you should never interrupt your enemy when they are in the process of a making a mistake. The point being, for Politico, that the Obama campaign isn’t making bold and risky moves because Mitt Romney seems to wake up each morning and light himself on fire. Why change the subject?
Politico actually has no answer to that question, although they do get a quote from the nation’s favorite concern troll, Ed Rendell, and another from former McCain aide Steve Schmidt, the man who gave the nation Sarah Palin. Both of those geniuses argue that playing a prevent defense is needlessly risky, despite the fact that the president’s standing in the polls has been rising steadily. It seems to me that Romney and his troops are being routed on the field of battle, and one GOP pundit after another is throwing down their weapons and fleeing for safety.
So, obviously, now would be the time for the president to shift strategies and offer up some nice targets for Romney’s artillery. What’s missing here is the recognition that Obama has already had an audacious presidency. What do you call passing health care reform in the face of massive headwinds from a horrible economic meltdown, an aroused and unified Tea Party opposition, and all the usual corporate opponents? How easy is it to re-regulate Wall Street or set up a consumer protection bureau that goes after predatory lenders and dishonest contracts? How easy is it to take on Big Oil and Big Coal and make massive investments in clean and renewable energy? How easy is it to cut the private lenders out of the college loan economy? How easy is it to end wars that aren’t going well?
It is Mitt Romney who is offering the audacious program in this election. It takes quite a bit of audacity to tell the American poor and middle class that they will have to make do with less earned benefits from Social Security and Medicare, get less help when they lose their jobs, go without health insurance, pay more in taxes, all so Romney can blow another hole in the federal budget with tax cuts for rich people and corporations. That takes “brass,” as Bill Clinton put it in a slightly different context at the Democratic National Convention. Romney doesn’t really want to talk about his plans because they are unpopular, but that’s what’s he’s using to attack Obama’s Citadel. Other weapons include a promise to harass Latinos so badly that they self-deport, the intent to appoint judges who will ban abortion, an opposition to gay marriage, support for laws that disproportionately disenfranchise blacks, and a new foreign policy where Israel makes our decisions in Middle East for us and war with Iran becomes a certainty.
If the battle is for public opinion, Romney’s policies are blunt and broken tools which have no hope of breaching the president’s fortifications. The only thing he can catapult is the propaganda. All Politico is trying to do is to lull the president out of his impregnable castle so he can be attacked with sticks and stones.
They have no advice to offer the president, and he doesn’t need any.
