Yesterday, senior White House campaign strategist David Axelrod put his finger on the exact question of the 2012 campaign.<\/p>\n
He did it in a Twitter rebuttal of the Gallup Poll\u2019s latest survey. \u00a0The sampling was taken between Thursday and Sunday and shows Mitt Romney leading President Obama by five points. \u00a0Gallup, Axelrod wrote, “has a sample that looks much more like the electorate in 2010 than the voting population that is likely to turn out in 2012.”<\/p>\n
You may have been wondering about the bizarre blizzard of charges blowing out of Team Obama of late. \u00a0Is there anything, in their telling, the GOP has not declared war upon? \u00a0Race, class, gender \u2013 no matter what your identity, the GOP, they insist, has gone into battle against you. \u00a0It is a fair bet that no campaign in American history has embraced identity politics as completely as has the Obama effort, and we are only in April.<\/p>\n
But how could the candidate who said, \u201cThere is no black America or white America\u2026. There is just the United States of America,\u201d have flip flopped so completely?<\/p>\n
That is not a rhetorical question. \u00a0Part of top-level politics is establishing a consistent identity. Think of the presidents of the last thirty years: Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush. Each had clear personality traits that he displayed from the beginning to the end of his public life and that infused his every position and presentation. \u00a0And as a result, voters felt they knew who these men were.<\/p>\n
But who can we now say Mr. Obama is? \u00a0Uniter? \u00a0Divider? Post-identity politics? Propounder of identity politics? \u00a0Hope and change? \u00a0Same old same old? \u00a0This is the kind of identity disruption that usually spells the early end to electoral viability.<\/p>\n
In the present instance, though, it reflects serious concern about Mr. Obama\u2019s reelection chances.<\/p>\n
In recent history, it is said, when a president has been unseated after a single term, the prior popular off-year-election vote by party for the House of Representatives has been within one or two percentage points of the next presidential vote.<\/p>\n
And that is the Obama campaign\u2019s problem.<\/p>\n
Unless the administration can change the national topic from state of the economy and size of the deficit, this year\u2019s balloting is sure to be d\u00e9j\u00e0 vu<\/em> (2010 version) <\/em>all over again. \u00a0It doesn\u2019t take a political savant to see that the unending list of wars that Team Obama accuses the GOP of waging is in part a drive to distract. \u00a0If everyone is talking about Hilary Rosen and Ann Romney, no one will be talking about the still stagnant economy and the futility of the unprecedented stimulus spending. \u00a0And the nation\u2019s debt will not be even a blip on the nation\u2019s political pulse meter.<\/p>\n But it is more than that.<\/p>\n Women, African-Americans, any American with a high school education or less: disproportionately these are the people who lost jobs in the downturn and are least likely to find new ones in the absence of a vigorous upturn. \u00a0In other words, they are the voters whom the moribund economy has hurt the most \u2013 and that economy is now the political property of the president.<\/p>\n Looking forward, they are also the Americans who will be most hurt by the president\u2019s proposed doubling of the capital gains tax (the effect of the Buffet Rule). \u00a0That move that will choke off the capital that funds the creation and expansion of new enterprises and of the jobs they generate. \u00a0What\u2019s more, they are the ones Obamacare\u2019s damper on business expansion will most harm.<\/p>\n And they are the voters on whom the president\u2019s reelection most depends.<\/p>\n Here, then, is Mr. Axelrod\u2019s calculation: If these voters show up at the polls this year in the same numbers as they did in 2008, the president can win. \u00a0If their turnout duplicates 2010, the president loses. \u00a0With his record, the president can\u2019t pull them out with hope. \u00a0So he and his aides are turning to fear.<\/p>\n What a change.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Yesterday, senior White House campaign strategist David Axelrod put his finger on the exact question of the 2012 campaign. He did it in a Twitter rebuttal of the Gallup Poll\u2019s latest survey. \u00a0The sampling was taken between Thursday and Sunday and shows Mitt Romney leading President Obama by five points. \u00a0Gallup, Axelrod wrote, “has a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[12],"class_list":["post-1162","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-political-commentary-general","tag-hugh-hewitt"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1162","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1162"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1162\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1170,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1162\/revisions\/1170"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1162"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1162"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1162"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}