Why Obama’s Senior Strategists Think He’ll Beat Mitt Romney...

... and why I think they're delusional...


The question really is, do they believe that this, as related in a recent NY Magazine story, is not just the truth, but the whole truth?

The subject line of an e-mail from the Romney press shop that hit my in-box last week summed up the challenger’s framing of the election concisely and precisely: “What’s This Campaign Going to Be About? The Obama Economy.”

The president begs to differ. In 2008, the junior senator from Illinois won in a landslide by fashioning a potent “coalition of the ascendant,” as Teixeira and Halpin call it, in which the components were minorities (especially Latinos), socially liberal college-educated whites (especially women), and young voters. This time around, Obama will seek to do the same thing again, only more so. The growth of those segments of the electorate and the president’s strength with them have his team brimming with confidence that ­demographics will trump economics in November—and in the process create a template for Democratic dominance at the presidential level for years to come.

Let's stipulate, for the sake of discussion, that Obama's majority was just as they've described it. That still begs the question of whether that majority was the attracted by some quality of Barack Obama. It begs the question of whether that quality was inherent and still-extant or merely perceived. And it utterly ignores the question of whether there were conditions in 2008 that made that set of demographics more susceptible to Obama than they might be in conditions as they'll exist in 2012. I think it's likely that Barack Obama will, once again, win a majority of voters that are "minorities...socially liberal college-educated whites...and young." So did, if I'm not mistaken, Presidents John Kerry and Al Gore before him.

I also am quite confident that there are not enough voters in those demographics to be dispositive - winning a majority of them is, in itself, not enough of an accomplishment to guarantee oneself a majority of the total votes cast. And the facts on the ground have changed substantially since 2008.

But I think it's clear that the article is right about what they're going to attempt to do to Mitt Romney.

They will pummel him for being a vulture-vampire capitalist at Bain Capital. They will pound him for being a miserable failure as the governor of Massachusetts. They will mash him for being a water-carrier for Paul Ryan’s Social Darwinist fiscal program. They will maul him for being a combination of Jerry Falwell, Joe Arpaio, and John Galt on a range of issues that strike deep chords with the Obama coalition. “We’re gonna say, ‘Let’s be clear what he would do as president,’ ” Plouffe explains. “Potentially abortion will be criminalized. Women will be denied contraceptive services. He’s far right on immigration. He supports efforts to amend the Constitution to ban gay marriage.”

The Obama effort at disqualifying Romney will go beyond painting him as excessively conservative, however. It will aim to cast him as an avatar of revanchism. “He’s the fifties, he is retro, he is backward, and we are forward—that’s the basic construct,” says a top Obama strategist. “If you’re a woman, you’re Hispanic, you’re young, or you’ve gotten left out, you look at Romney and say, ‘This ****ing guy is gonna take us back to the way it always was, and guess what? I’ve never been part of that.’ ”

That campaign does, of course, make clear what a failure the first Obama term has been. They've got nothing to run on, nothing to even attempt to run on. They've got one of the most significant "accomplishments" in the history of American politics on their resume with Obamacare, and they don't want to take any credit for it. So they're reduced to telling ridiculous lies about their opponent...