Let’s step back from depressing daily political news for a longer look at the 2012 narrative.
At the end of summer, Democrats will have a home-field advantage with a convention in early September after Republicans go to bat in the last week of August. A let’s-try-to-love-Romney fest will be followed by a wall-to-wall TV week of making the case for Obama’s first term after umpteen prime-time GOP primary debates bashing it.
If down-in-the-mouth Democrats and open-minded independents are to be energized, that convention and the Obama-Romney debates to follow will be crucial for November.
For a year now, the media have been held captive by a one-sided story line about Obama’s “failures” in hard economic times, countered only by the weak defense that the Administration staved off even worse.
That better-than-terrible narrative, coupled with attacks on Romney’s Bain record, won’t do it in the fall.
If Barack Obama is to be reelected, a truer 2012 story line has to be brought into focus: the near-treasonous four years of subversion of every effort toward recovery on the part of a Republican Congress held captive by Tea Party extremists.
While David Axelrod et al hammer away at Romney in logistical skirmishes, the overarching message has to be retaking America from zealots who have been kept from driving the country off an economic cliff only by the President’s resistance in manufactured debt-ceiling crises and mindless attempts to destroy a social safety net for the poor to preserve and expand tax cuts for the superrich.
Ironically, articulation of that story line comes first from a representative of quietly alarmed traditional Republicans such as Jeb Bush, pointing out how Reagan and his father would have “a hard time” fitting in with today’s ideologues.