What's got you down, chum? Poll numbers slipping? Wondering where all the bumper stickers went? Get it off your chest.Heading down to Norfolk this morning to do a little "bidness"...hoping to have lunch with Sally, if she'll get off her butt and call me back...
CW I'm a little surprised you thought all along Obama would be re-elected. It's true Democrats have built in advantages and Obama had the bully pulpit, but Republicans are not without a few advantages as well, maybe the biggest of advantages. And that is the economy stinks. Folks are hurting and no amount of propaganda can change that fact or convince people otherwise. And it's hard to sell the same "hope and change" bullshit twice.
ReplyDeleteMy thinking was the day Obama was elected this would be a replay of 1980. I saw Carter elected in 1976 with much the same campaign theme(s) as Obama (you know this amorphous, ambiguous, all things to all people crap when nobody really had any idea what the guy was about). I thought, again the day he was elected that Obama was at least as left wing as Carter, and as it turns out more so. After four years the economy would be a mess, foreign policy would be a mess and frankly we'd be lucky to survive considering he had both houses of Congress. But if we did make it, I knew that if the Republicans ran a good competent candidate it would probably be a landslide. That remains to be seen but it appears increasingly likely.
But I have to admit I was getting a little nervous. A month or so ago I thought I might be falling into the "rich Manhattan liberal" trap. Remember that? In 1972 a New Yorker was complaining " I don't know how Nixon won, I don't know anybody who voted for him". Tickbiters tend not to be liberals, so maybe I was insulated from what was really happening. Maybe the country had changed enough both demographically and in terms of values and I just hadn't noticed. Maybe I was deluding myself.
But I kept waiting and hoping for Romney to go over the heads of the press and make his case to the American people. And by golly that's just what he did in the first debate. For every positive impression made by Romney, there was a corresponding negative for Obama. Obama positioned Romney as part Gordon Gekko part Cotton Mather. When that malicious construct fell, so did Obama. He showed himself to be a small minded, dishonest, shallow, intellectually deficient Chicago machine politician. No more no less. And as did everybody else, I knew then it was over.