Thursday, June 14, 2012
Mitt Romney vs. Barack Obama is not exactly
Jefferson–Adams or Lincoln–Douglas. No Harry Truman or Bill Clinton here, let
alone FDR or Reagan. Indeed, it’s arguable that neither party is fielding its
strongest candidate. Hillary Clinton would run far better than Obama. True, her
secretaryship of state may not remotely qualify as Kissingerian or Achesonian,
but she’s not Obama. She carries none of his economic baggage. She’s unsullied
by the last three and a half years.
Similarly, the Republican bench had several candidates
stronger than Romney, but they chose not to run. Indeed, one measure of the
weakness of the two finalists is this: The more each disappears from view, the
better he fares. Obama prospered when he was below radar during the Republican
primaries. Now that they’re over and he’s back out front, his fortunes have
receded.
He is constantly on the campaign trail. His frantic
fundraising — 160 events to date — alternates with swing-state rallies where
the long-gone charisma of 2008 has been replaced by systematic special-interest
pandering, from cut-rate loans for indentured students to free contraceptives
for women (the denial of which constitutes a “war” on same).
Then came the rush of bad news: terrible May unemployment
numbers, a crushing Democratic defeat in Wisconsin, and that curious revolt of
the surrogates, as Bill Clinton, Deval Patrick, and Cory Booker — all
dispatched to promote Obama — ended up contradicting, undermining, or deploring
Obama’s anti-business attacks on Romney.
Obama’s instinctive response? Get back out on the air.
Call an impromptu Friday news conference. And proceed to commit the gaffe of
the year: “The private sector is doing fine.”
This didn’t just expose Obama to precisely the
out-of-touchness charge he is trying to hang on Romney. It betrayed his core
political philosophy. Obama was trying to attribute high unemployment to a
paucity of government workers and to suggest that the solution was to pad the
public rolls. In doing so, though, he fatally undid his many previous
protestations of being a fiscally prudent government cutter.
He thus positioned himself as, once again, the
big-government liberal of 2009, convinced that what the ailing economy needs is
yet another bout of government expansion. A serious political misstep,
considering the fate of the last stimulus: the weakest recovery since the Great
Depression with private-sector growth a minuscule 1.2 percent.
But that’s not the end of the tribulations that provoked
a front-page Washington Post story beginning: “Is it time for Democrats to
panic”? The sleeper issue is the cascade of White House leaks that have exposed
significant details of the cyberattacks on Iran, the drone war against
al-Qaeda, the double-agent in Yemen, and the Osama bin Laden raid and its
aftermath.
This is not leak-business as usual. “I have never seen it
worse,” said Democratic senator Dianne Feinstein, eleven years on the
Intelligence Committee. These revelations, clearly meant to make Obama look the
heroic warrior, could prove highly toxic if current investigations bear out
Senator John McCain’s charges of leaks tolerated, if not encouraged, by a
campaigning president placing his own image above the nation’s security. After
all, Feinstein herself stated that these exposures were endangering American
lives, weakening U.S. security, and poisoning relations with other intelligence
services.
Quite an indictment. Where it goes, no one knows. Much
will hinge on whether Eric Holder’s Justice Department will stifle the
investigation he has now handed over to two in-house prosecutors. And whether
Republicans and principled Democrats will insist on a genuinely independent
inquiry.
Nonetheless, there is nothing inexorable about the
current Obama slide. The race remains 50-50. Republican demoralization after a
primary campaign that blew the political equivalent of a seven-run lead has now
given way to Democratic demoralization at the squandering of their subsequent
post-primary advantage.
What remains is a solid, stolid, gaffe-prone challenger
for whom conservatism is a second language versus an incumbent with a record he
cannot run on and signature policies — Obamacare, the stimulus, cap-and-trade —
he hardly dare mention.
A quite dispiriting spectacle. And more than a bit
confusing. Why, just this week the estimable Jeb Bush averred that the
Republican party had become so rigidly right-wing that today it couldn’t even
nominate Ronald Reagan.
Huh? It just nominated Mitt Romney who lives a good 14
nautical miles to the left of Ronald Reagan.
Goodness. Four more months of this campaign and we will
all be unhinged.
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