Official White House photo
Four years later, to his critics, he's still a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.
I've met consultants who've stressed the importance of a "message matrix" -- a four-square chart in which a campaign decides (1) how they'll define their opponent; (2) how they'll define themselves; (3) how their opponent will define them; and (4) and how their opponent will define themselves. It's Campaign Management 101.
When it comes to challenging President Obama, Republicans may have skipped the class.
I saw a conservative the other day complaining that Obama is "just another politician," who's such an extreme liberal, he's unlike any politician in American history. The fact that both claims can't be true was an easily overlooked detail.
I mention this because yesterday offered another classic example of the right's incoherence on the subject.
Barack Obama figured out who Mitt Romney was in March, but the same can't be said the other way around. [...]
Is Obama a radical leftist working to turn America into a socialist welfare society? Or is a well-meaning incompetent, incapable of bringing change to Washington?
Judging by Romney's messaging this week the answer is they still aren't sure.
In yesterday's case, Team Romney spent Thursday excitedly telling the political world Obama doesn't believe change comes from Washington, after having excitedly told the political world on Wednesday that Obama believes change can only come from Washington.
Again, both of these attacks can't be true at the same time. The lines are polar opposites.
Republicans have been gearing up for this moment since the day after Obama was elected more than four years ago, but they've never been able to figure out exactly what they dislike so much about the president.
We talked a month ago about the "Pick a smear and stick with it" thesis, and it underscores what BuzzFeed is reporting on.
At different times over the last four years, Obama's detractors have said he's a ruthless Chicago thug and a "wuss." He's a bystander who goes golfing too much and an activist president who engages too much. He's sticking to the Bush/Cheney script on national security and he's putting us at risk by abandoning the Bush/Cheney national security agenda. He's cutting cherished entitlement programs like Medicare and he refuses to cut entitlement programs like Medicare. He's too mean to Wall Street and he's too nice to Wall Street.
The Obama campaign tends to stick to specific themes, incorporating new information into the message matrix aides drew up a year ago, reinforcing larger arguments. The Romney campaign tends to act like small children playing soccer, running wildly to wherever they see a bouncing ball, whether it's strategically wise or not.
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This is the perfect metaphor for Rmoney's campaign!
I agree. This is a brilliant metaphor!
Definition of President Obama :
Everything real and genuine that Mitt Romney is not, cannot be and never will be.
Funny....yet so true!
The Romney campaign tends to act like small children playing soccer, running wildly to wherever they see a bouncing ball, whether it's strategically wise or not.
He's black.
You got that right!!
The "new" Republican Party accepted the rwn belief that "black" was enough to get rid of this president so they made no serious attempt to "define" him, even though they could have early in this race! Unfortunately, the rwn's were wrong - "black" isn't a "defining" perjorative with the majority of voters in this country.
Now the "new" Republican Party has to take its medicine - they let themselves be "led" by a SMALL group of rwn's and managed to lose the rest of the country like they did in 2008. It looks like they STILL haven't learned their lesson! Wonder if they will THIS TIME!!!
You know, I'm sure that racism plays a part to a certain demographic, but let's not forget the 8 years of demonization of Clinton and his family while he was in the White House. I suspect it's just as important to many of these people that he's a Democrat.
Oh, there's a BIG difference. Clinton's attacks were "self-inflicted". It was only because of the perceived "success" of these attacks on Clinton that the rwn's "modus operandi" became established - that they can attack a candidate on his social characteristics rather than on his policies.
Obama did NOTHING to incur these attacks - in the rwn's mind, being "black" is as "bad" a social characteristic (maybe even worse) as being a philanderer.
This needs to be in the spotlight - Not only did Mitt Romney protest in favor of sending other people’s childrento die in Vietnam, even as he avoided service himself, he then complained about how those dying Americans made it “tough” for him while he was in France avoiding service.
This needs to be in the spotlight - Not only did Mitt Romney protest in favor of sending other people’s childrento die in Vietnam, even as he avoided service himself, he then complained about how those dying Americans made it “tough” for him while he was in France avoiding service.
Politically speaking, there's really a limit to how far back in time you can reach to define somebody. And it hardly seems worth the trouble when Romney hands us fresh goodies every week.
But it certainly adds to the growing body of evidence that he was just as slimy, amoral, and entitled when he was a young man as he is today. Child is father to the man.
Yes they can, if you assume that change is impossible.
Don't be silly. They know exactly what they dislike about him:
The problem isn't that they can't figure it out, it's that they can't admit either of them.
Another thing that has the GOP hamstrung, beyond their overall incompetence at governing, is they simply can't accept the fact that this half black man with a foreign name is miles above them in terms of intelligence, strategy, tactics, etc.
I'll never forget several years ago when Obama went to the House and tried to have an articulate discussion with the representatives, who thought they were going to lambast and embarrass him. He turned every one of their arguments on their head, and made Cantor et all look like outmatched buffoons getting schooled by the headmaster.
Ah yes, Citizen - that was a thing of beauty. One of the "buffoons" in the room that day was Paul Ryan, who got his "math" handed to him by the Prez re: Ryan's vouchercare scheme.
"Four years later, to his critics, he's still a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma." Nice JFK reference Steve.
sorry - Winston Churchill
http://phrases.org.uk/meanings/31000.html
Churchill describing the USSR, as I recall. Which is totally in line with the the Romney campaign's rather grandiose view of itself and Obama and of the US and the world.
Gonna try a linkie thing:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JDo78gP5Zf4
Right around the 3:00 minute mark
The candidate who needs to redefine his campaign is the President.
The key in transforming a tactical victory into a strategic one that produces far reaching consequences is whether the leader was bold and nimble enough to quickly exploit his advantage.
Stop thinking small. Sweep the house clean.
Oh for Dog's sake. Really?
When the truth becomes a sidebar, this is what you get. Any intelligent person supporting Republicans the last several years simply is able to push the truth aside. The radio jocks have nurtured this mindset, and it permeates literally everything. Just try talking to a devoted wingnut for an extended time, you will find that they allow themselves to beleive little or big lies.
Rush's people have been gleefully calling themselves 'dittoheads' since at least the early '90s. It's been more than "several years". It's been a couple decades, at least.
The GOP & by extension can't define the President because he's the only adult in the room. See one has to have character, a moral compass, and a long term vision - none of which describe the GOTP and Mittens.
And let US not forget he's black - enough said!
They also can't really grapple with Obama because their paranoid fantasy version is more real to them than the genuine article. The fantasy Obama is the repository of all of their fears, so naturally there's no coherence.
Indeed the GOP is incoherent and contradicts itself constantly.
It seems that they've gone largely crazy.
more evidence: New Mexico Gov. Requires women seeking childcare assistance to prove they were "forcibly raped".
"If adopted, this policy will have numerous implications. It establishes in state law a narrow definition of rape that can and will be applied in other areas of law and policy. It puts a heavy burden on women who have been raped and are now struggling economically to support a child or children to prove the manner in which they were raped and to meet a test set up by the state to exclude many women in need of childcare assistance who would otherwise qualify."
seems the gov has backed off the wording, but of course still is quite crazy, only realizing that it's better to hide it.
T Party ideologues, the country club set, and Biblical literalists have little in common and that is the basic problem the GOP has in projecting a cohrent anything.
This used to be the Democrats big problem with Dixiecrats, labor, and Northern liberals. But, of late, Democrats have shown a proclivity toward what most of us want; pragmatism.
Romney and republicans have spent four years and hundreds of millions of dollars attempting to paint President Obama as "foreign," but all it took was a single inexpensive amature video for the public to see for themselves that it is Romney who is foreign to most Americans.
"The Romney campaign tends to act like small children playing soccer, running wildly to wherever they see a bouncing ball, whether it's strategically wise or not."
The horror is that this likely describes a Romney presidency. The fact that he's surrounded himself with idiots tells us something well-hidden: he's not very bright. He belongs to a class of Republican politicians molded after some news anchors: photogenic empty suits full of pretensions. His only core loyalty is to wealth, and to people who know only greed and fear.
Curiously, the National Review may have let a monumental Freudian slip loose on their view of the Romney ticket.
The image the Right has created about the President of him being a Muslim, socialist, wimpy take your guns and constitutional rights away, redistributing, tax the rich, mooching liberal......... you know what I mean, is such a lie that most people, (other than those who believe Faux News is fair and balanced), see through it. But for the right they believe these lies, and constantly are looking for anything (the shiney object) to reinforce these beliefs about him and so they completely underestimate him.
The fact that "I'm a successful businessman" Romney and his team have gotten sucked up into this too and has had the effect of people questioning their ability to manage and govern rather than the President's so we've ended up with this vortex with Obama sitting on the side watching Romney and his team getting sucked in deeper and deeper every day. Not have they only underestimated the President's ability and standing but totally and ineptly overestimated their own.
A thing of beauty to watch.
Republicans are having a hard time defining President Obama because they really can't come right out and say the real reason they don't like him: He's a well educated, intelligent African-American who doesn't fit into their neat little bigoted pigeon holes
Exactly...the False Obama they've constructed and cling to so dearly (and in most cases fervently) simply doesn't exist. Their twisted, irrational, and delusional hatred of him is the very thing that's going to get him reelected.
"We Built This"!! Yes, you did...and it's blowing up in your faces!!
Just try explaining irony to "Dittohead Nation"!!!!!
C'mon, Steve, of course their accusations are inconsistent. At the tea-partier and ordinary voter level all they really know is that they hate the guy. They hate him at such a visceral level they can't figure out why. They look at him the way Eastwood did-- the alien, the punk kid outsider who's come in and taken over the neighborhood. He's just too wrong. He's so wrong that they'll nod righteously at anything negative about him, no matter how much it contradicts anything else they've nodded to.
The Kochs and people like them know exactly why they hate him, of course. Most of them, I think, also share some of that visceral feeling of wrongness, but their antipathy goes deeper. He not only threatens their business interests, he also threatens what they've believed is their best shot in at least three generations to achieve goals they've wanted since Theodore Roosevelt betrayed his class. Obama blocks the way to their dreams of restoring the age of the Robber Barons, complete. They'll pay a lot to stoke those visceral aversions among the rubes and repeal the twentieth century.
they've never been able to figure out exactly what they dislike so much about the president.
They've known all along exactly what they dislike so much about the president; they just haven't been able to say it out loud.
Have no fear, though - one day very soon, a prominent repug, possibly even RMoney himself, will, live on national teevee, drop the n-word.
THEN it will be all over.
Is short term memory loss contagious? Is babbling a sign of dementia? Should we as a society be more concerned with the symptoms or the disease?