The Emperor’s latest suit of new clothes fits about as well as
the previous ones. Now we all have to mouth platitudes about what a
terrific campaign Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan ran. Well, guess what,
they ran a pathetic embarrassment of a campaign, and when the R/R
met Conductor Karl Rove’s caboose at the American Crossroads, the
result was a disastrous train wreck. The Emperor not only has no
clothes, he is covered in unsightly warts.
I say this fully acknowledging that Romney almost won with a
fine debate performance and that I for one was gulled into
predicting he would win. But that would have been a fluke, losing
the campaign and winning the debate.
Without doing a laundry list of complaints, I can prove my case
with a simple question: did anyone here see an ad, one single
solitary ad, laying out exactly what was going to happen to you
after Obamacare is implemented? Anyone mention the “fine” you will
pay if you do not honor the mandate to buy health insurance? Anyone
mention one by one, slowly, each new tax that will kick in
automatically on January 1, 2013?
I saw a million polls on Rasmussen and Real Clear Politics about
the Presidential and the Congressional and immigration and
exfoliation and peregrination and miscegenation and who knows what
all, but not one single poll asked people if they know the amount
they will pay extra in 2013. Not one asked if they are aware of the
amount of the health insurance penalty. So it falls to me to give
you the results of my informal poll. The answer is zero. Zero!
Nobody knows because it was out of sight, out of mind and no one
called it to people’s attention.
I went around asking my wealthier friends if they were aware
that if they die on December 31 and leave an estate of 5 million
dollars, their children will receive five million dollars (well,
not in New York, with an estate tax as high as 16 percent), but if
they hang in until January 1, their children will receive 2.8
million and Uncle Sam will take delivery of the other
$2,200,000.00. No, they were not aware, for the most part. And
those are the more fiscally knowledgeable people in the
society.
Personally, I would have preferred direct attacks on the
Democrats and on the President, but even in the Gentleman Jim
model, it made sense to EDUCATE people about the dollars-and-cents
consequences of their vote beyond repeating like a mantra umpteen
zillion times that there are 23 million Americans looking for
work.
Even that issue was not framed to pack a punch. It would have
resonated much more to repeat how many people had jobs when Obama
took office and how many have them now. Then point out this is the
first time in our lifetimes the country has fewer total jobs at the
end of four years.
But if Romney was dumb Rove was dumber. He collected upwards of
one hundred million dollars and all but one of the candidates he
backed lost. The reason for his monumental ineffectiveness was
simple: his ads sounded like campaign ads from the Campaign.
The whole point of surrogate advertising groups is to get their
hands dirty. If the man on the ticket wants to be Mr. Nice Guy,
then it’s up to his backers to play rough. (The Talmud says a
scholar should not fight back against his detractors but his
students and followers should instead.)
The Swift Boat guys defeated John Kerry by telling uncomfortable
truths that George W. Bush did not think were fodder for
Presidential conversation. Where was the equivalent material about
Obama in the ads run by Rove and his pals?
We did not even hear substantive material from his Presidency
that was hard-hitting. No ad mentioned his telling Medvedev to tell
Putin he would be flexible after the election. No ad mentioned he
agreed with Sarkozy that Netanyahu is a liar. No ad mentioned he
told the San Francisco Chronicle he would bankrupt the
coal industry.
But we certainly did not hear personal things on the level of
the ads against Romney for being a vulture capitalist. We did not
hear that he was a community organizer for years without a single
testimonial from anyone who benefited from his help. We did not
hear that he lets his brother live in a hovel in Kenya.
Nor do the Republicans get credit for playing nice. The press
frames it as a mutually negative campaign. I see the downside of
this strategy, but where is the upside? Whose respect did they
gain?
Yeah, I know I made the same
point here eight years ago, but those who do not repeat it are
doomed to learn from history.
