Reihan Salam notes a piece by an ex-Obama aide who argues that, given Obama’s persona, it has proven tough for Republicans to make attacks on Obama stick. Like Salam, I think that the Obama’s persona is less than half of the story. The vast majority of those who produce the news at “mainstream” journalistic outlets are intensely sympathetic to Obama and just as intensely protective of him. You could see that this week with the reaction to Romney’s criticism of the Obama administration’s handling of Libya. These journalists will instinctively seek to minimize interpretations hostile to Obama and try counterattack against Obama’s opponents even before the Obama campaign has a chance. It must be nice.
So what does that mean? One thing the piece does get right is that this kind of media environment is not conducive to drive-by attacks on Obama. They will either get ignored or become so muddled in the reporting that they won’t make any impact on public opinion. These same journalists will then focus their reporting on whatever garbage the Obama team is spewing. The Republicans are much better off focusing on a limited number of issues and driving the point home day after day. A sustained argument will break through the media filter. That is what happened with Medicare right after the Paul Ryan pick. The Republicans were winning that argument because they were making an argument and had the best guy in the party to make that argument. But they went back to the Romney default message of having no message.
The irony is that the Republicans are facing a situation where unprincipled nonsense is more problematic than principled reformism, but the candidate is too wedded to opportunism to see it.
September 16th, 2012 | 3:42 pm
Pete, here is something that might interest you from the New York Times.
They’re working on making “voucher” a dirty word. The Democrats have found that scaring seniors has worked well in the past and so that’s what they are doing now.
September 16th, 2012 | 3:59 pm
Kate, which is why I’m pulling my (greying) hair out. They were winning when they were talking Medicare. They have a winning approach in Ryan’s most recent Medicare plan (Medicaid not so much.) Obama’s combination of proposed Medicare cuts and IPAD (nevermind the Obamacare cuts to Medicare) are an obvious vulnerability that should be driven home. And they are blowing it because of an addiction to shallowness and deadly caution. The Romney convention speech wasn’t just a missed opportunity (though it was that), it was also a singal about what kind of hollow, unprincipled campaign he was planning to run in the general. They think they are being so clever, but for some reason they just don’t get the basic dynamic that, in this media environment, if Romney doesn’t have a message, then the story is whatever Obama wants it to be. And if Romney doesn’t inform people about his proposals, then people will hear about Romney’s proposals from Obama.
This is a winnable election. Romney should be very slightly favored. But they are letting Obama get away with murder and think nonsense about relatives giving each other roses is the key to getting people to vote for Romney.
September 16th, 2012 | 4:05 pm
Letting Obama get away with murder…
September 16th, 2012 | 4:26 pm
Romney needs humanizing. I know all sorts of people, even on the right, who call him things like the cyborg or plastic man or Barbie man. But no, if he doesn’t make the case for competency and stability in his administration then he won’t win the election.
September 16th, 2012 | 4:50 pm
Maybe his tendency to always try to tell people what he thinks they want to hear is what seems so plastic about him. I don’t know anyone who has ever wondered about whether Romney’s parents loved each other. They do wonder whether Romney cares about anything other than getting elected or whether Romney’s policies would be in their interest (they don’t phrase it like that, but that is the main idea.)
And Peter, the worst part is they probably think they are being tough and realistic.
September 16th, 2012 | 6:30 pm
I agree with this analysis of the Romney campaign, but the bigger story here is that, tilted media or not, something about the times has made the middle portion of the American electorate abandon their duty to soberly assess the quality of the president. Obama is an incompetent, a jerk, a liar, and his policies are disaster-fostering even if the times have been relatively stable. It’s OBVIOUS. Been so for some time. Excuses could be made in 2008, perhaps even in 2009-2010. But at present, the Americans who are wavering have no excuse. They have had ample opportunity to see that tuning-out conservative media is no longer a responsible option.
I do intensive study on some of the most democracy-pessimistic texts that exist in the literature, such as Plato’s book VIII of the Republic, or Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, and even I am shocked. This election should not be at all close, and even if Romney wins (which remains my prediction) I will remain deeply troubled by it being this close. America is not well.
September 16th, 2012 | 7:11 pm
Gold star for Carl for stating the obvious. To his credit since most are afraid to say it.
September 16th, 2012 | 7:54 pm
Given the pathologies of democracy and a MSM cravenly protective of a really bad (not evil) president, the Republican candidate should be raising hell. But it’s not in him.
September 16th, 2012 | 8:33 pm
“They have had ample opportunity to see that tuning-out conservative media is no longer a responsible option.”
I am observing rather than making excuses, but my sense is that media consumption on the part of many persuadables is more passive than that. It is more not tuning in (they aren’t tuning into overtly politicalliberal media like MSNBC either.) I think a lot of other things are also at work. Imagine a Reagan who can’t really talk to working-class whites in non-Southern cities and suburbs and you have a sense of Romney’s problem (and it sin’t just Romney’s problem.) Due to demographic changes, the “Reagan Democrats” of this era will be different people who will partly come from different social groups than the Reagan Democrats of the 80s. The Republicans haven’t figured out how to deal with this yet and are hoping that supermajorities among the demographic America of 1980 will pull them through. I haven’t figured it out either of course.
September 16th, 2012 | 9:01 pm
It’s not entirely clear to me that there are any more Reagan Democrats. Perhaps Reagan Democrats were a peculiarity of the pre-boomer generation, and that what we have in their place, as is perhaps implied by Murray in Coming Apart, offers very little promise for a conservative future.
I once thought that conservatives could always take comfort in the periodic mugging of liberalism by reality, which is what brought Reagan in in the 80′s. I think the verdict is still out on this generation. But an Obama victory in 2012 in these conditions would imply a lot more about where the country is, in my view, than the relative weakness of Romney’s ability to connect.
Among other things it would imply that we now have an electorate that has passed a kind of tipping point where the majority of voters are now more persuaded by the aura of Opra-esque celebrity, than the practical effects of policy on their own lives. Which is amazing if you think about it.
September 16th, 2012 | 9:20 pm
Pseudoplotinus,
“It’s not entirely clear to me that there are any more Reagan Democrats.” In one sense that is true, but I was using it as more a of a short hand for people who are not part of the right-center coalition, but who might be won over (if not totally reliably.) I’m regularly struck by the “conservative” policy instincts of people on taxes, abortion, entitlement policy, but those same people have never considered voting Republican. It isn’t entirely their fault. They have never heard a Republican message that made sense to them. Some of it is media consumption. some of it is how conservative candidates talk. some of it is stuff I’m missing (no doubt.) Despair would be more justified if the center-right was doing a good job talking to these people.
September 16th, 2012 | 11:58 pm
For the record, I would describe myself as skeptically optimistic, but warily so. Mostly because I think the shennanigans we’ve been seeing in the media are also taking place in pollster sampling. Apparently a number of polls are being based on the 2008 turn-out model which is pretty biased in my opinion.
Regarding today’s equivalent to Reagan Democrats: I would characterize my parents as classic Reagan Democrats and it has been interesting to observe my five older siblings and their evolving political identities. None of them would call themselves conservative even though their sensibilities are obviously so. My impression is the so-called brand of conservatism has taken a real beating in the last couple of decades, and the result is that todays equivalent to Reagan Democrats are a lot more reluctant than their 80′s counterparts to acknowledge what they are.
However, that doesn’t necessarily mean they won’t pull the lever like their 80′s counterparts. At the moment my supposition is that the pollsters are hearing what these closet Reagan Dems in the sample think the pollsters want to hear, and not how they will actually vote. My understanding is that this is exactly how the Wisconsin recall vote played out. Walker was consistently underestimated in polls, even the exit polls on voting day.
Like I said, I am skeptically optimistic.
September 18th, 2012 | 12:53 pm
And on a related note:
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2012/09/14/why_romney_will_win_115452.html
September 19th, 2012 | 12:12 pm
“But at present, the Americans who are wavering have no excuse.”
Didn’t you just connect this general partisan attitude of the Rolling Stones reporter to ideological tyranny, in re: Bob Dylan?
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