The old guard — the Clintonistas — are carping loudly about how the Obama campaigners are botching the job, guaranteeing that they will lose in November. It sounds a lot like sour grapes to me. These guys are sittin’ around in a muggy mist of regret that they’re not in the headlines anymore. James Carville seems like a good example of a whiny camera-hugger.
But John Cassidy takes their complaints seriously and I take Cassidy seriously.
The official statistics may say the economy is recovering and things are better than they were when Obama came to office, but, as James Carville, Stan Greenberg, and Erica Seifert point out in a new campaign memo, many independent voters simply don’t believe it. Rather than seeking to persuade them that they are wrong, the President needs to show them two things: 1) He understands their concerns and is on their side; and 2) The outlook for the country will be a lot worse if he loses and the Republicans take over. …New Yorker
Isn’t that what Obama is doing?
Okay, maybe not. And Cassidy makes a astute point about going after Romney: ask why Romney isn’t acting like the top tough guy of the Republican party rather than its compromise candidate?
… Portraying him as an out-of-touch rich guy, and banging on about all the people he fired at Bain Capital, won’t by itself turn America against him. In this country, being rich and ruthless isn’t necessarily a barrier to electoral success; to the contrary. Mike Bloomberg is an out-of-touch rich guy and a hard-nosed businessman. A largely Democratic metropolis has reëlected him twice because it views him as a competent, straight-shooter.
The key difference between Romney and Bloomberg is that Romney hasn’t used his money to create an independent platform; he’s thrown in his lot with the G.O.P., which many independent voters view with suspicion. According to a recent NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, fewer than a third of Americans have a positive view of the Republican Party, and just nine per cent of them have a “very positive” view. That, rather than his own record as a businessman and a governor, is Romney’s achilles heel. In addition to highlighting his record and portraying him as a soulless flip-flopper, the Obama campaign should be relentlessly depicting him as the prisoner of a rabid and obstructionist party that has consistently stymied efforts to get the economy going, and which is committed to an extremist agenda involving attacks on Medicare, Social Security, public schools, and other popular government programs….New Yorker