WASHINGTON — It has been a very rough patch for Our President,
and I do believe it is going to get rougher still. Do not be
surprised, as the month goes on and August runs into September,
that his campaign budget becomes tighter. President Barack Obama is
spending more money than he is raising. It will get worse. A
president who mismanages the federal budget the way Obama does
cannot be expected to manage his campaign budget much better.
Lavish spending, it turns out, is a way of life for the community
organizer who became our 44th president. Lavish spending on
Campaign 2012 will be looked back on and seen as one of the
campaign’s greatest weaknesses. He can spend the money, but my
guess is he will not be able to raise it.
Yet this week he had other headaches too. This week
Politico finally reported the dissension and backbiting
within the campaign that have been rumored for weeks. You will be
hearing a lot about this in the weeks ahead. The magical team that
David Axelrod and David Plouffe put together in 2008 is falling
apart.
At The American Spectator we reported years ago that
this team was in reality the greenest pack of greenhorns ever
assembled to take over a White House. For over three years the
mainstream media have covered for the Obama galoots. It is a
perfect example of the Taranto Principle by which the mainstream
media’s biased reporting only encourages Liberal excess. Well, now
Axelrod and Valerie Jarrett and all the rest of Obama’s minor
figures who aspired to be major players are at each other’s
throats. It will fall to the President to gather them up and lead
them to one more term in the White House. Except that as Ron
Suskind demonstrated in his excellent book, Confidence
Men, Obama does not lead. He cannot. He just walked out on
another meeting.
But there is more. Niall Ferguson dominated the cover of
Newsweek to tabulate the carnage that is our economy. Also
he added up the foreign policy failures of the administration. It
does not look good. Ferguson rather rudely asked Obama to “Hit the
Road, Barack.” Finally, the President reported that his dog Bo is
overweight and will be going on a diet.
So with all this drear Our President hastily called a press
conference the other day. He has not held one in months. He
attempted to say that his charges that Mitt Romney has been
responsible for at least one death and is a tax cheat were not
outside the “bounds” of presidential discourse. “If you look at the
overall trajectory of our campaign,” he said, “and the ads that
I’ve approved and are produced by my campaign, you’ll see that we
point out sharp differences between the candidates but we don’t go
out of bounds.” Actually, if Romney is responsible for all the
misdeeds Obama has laid to him, he should not be running for
president. He should be behind bars.
Lately in Washington the scurrilous tone of Obama’s campaign has
even made the mainstream media uneasy. They again launch into their
false theater about how “both sides do it and oh woe is us.” They
cite the Obama campaign’s claims about the dead woman and Romney’s
taxes. They mention Stephanie Cutter, Obama’s deputy campaign
manager, who charged Romney with a “felony” for the way he exited
his business connection with Bain Capital. Then they bring in their
examples of the Republicans’ excesses. Inevitably they go back to
2004 and the charges that Senator John Kerry, then the Democratic
candidate for president, had his war record mangled by Swift Boat
Veterans for Truth and other Republican apparatchiks. Though wait!
The Swift Boat Veterans spoke the truth. They even relied on taped
Congressional hearings before which Kerry charged his fellow
combatants with war crimes. His problem was his record in Vietnam,
not the Swift Boat Veterans’ allegations. The mainstream media also
trot out an allegation about Romney claiming that the Obama
Administration is “gutting” welfare. Two Republicans, they say,
were among the governors who asked for some sort of waiver on
welfare. The Republicans deny it. It is all pretty thin gruel.
Let us come to the point. Obama is reaching out to his very own
special constituency. It is composed of those who believe that the
Republicans would put up as their candidate for the presidency a
person who in his business life would engage in fraud, tax evasion,
even murder. Mr. Obama is casting his net for the moron vote. I do
not believe that there are enough morons out there to reelect
him.
