Obama maintains hope, but not in comity

Much of Obama's speech was the same as always: I ran because the American Dream, the "basic bargain," is slipping away; we need to renew our commitment to shared prosperity, opportunity for all; to build sustainable broad-based prosperity by investing in green energy, education, infrastructure; to secure our budgetary future by controlling healthcare costs without denying care. And of course, the other side is about trickle-down, the failed policies of the Bush years, the toxic post-Reagan conviction that government is the problem.

What struck me as different was a subtle bid to tie his opponents to the wholesale corruption of our politics threatened by the unleashing of the Super PACs and the 501(c)(4)s post-Citizens United and Speechnow.org. Democrats have always suggested that Republican policies serve the wealthy.  Obama cast Romney and co. as pretty much owned and bound.

It began at the beginning, with a suggestion of corrupted process that's encompassed him too:

You didn't gild that: TPC hands Obama a sword of unvarnished truth to wield against Romney's tax plans

As we await the next jobs day bomb this morning, my anxious and superstitious nature can't help but fear that the Obama campaign is like the Confederate army approaching Gettysburg -- at its high water mark in the wake of a raft of good polls, Romney twisting in the tax return wind, and the Tax Policy Center dissection of his gap-ridden and fraudulent "tax reform" plans.

But with that gesture to ward off nemesis, I can't help but delight, like (I assume) all who have been waiting for team Obama to pivot from Bain attacks to spotlighting tax cut/spending cut plans so extreme Americans don't believe Romney would actually propose them, in the way Obama has taken up the Tax Policy Center's analysis of Romney's tax plans and used it to tear into said plans.  As reported by the Times' Jackie Calmes, this Obama riff in Florida yesterday is scarlet sweetmeat to me:

A line of attack with legs?

It's a cliche that political attacks work only when they have some demonstrable relationship to reality -- when they touch a chord of genuine perception about a candidate.

By that standard, Obama campaign attack theme spotlighted today by Reuters would seem to have long-term potential:

"Feeding the Democrats' storyline: Romney's refusal to release more than a year or two of his tax returns, questions about whether he is being honest about when he left his job at Bain Capital, and the reams of records that have been kept secret from his years as Massachusetts governor and chief of the Salt Lake City Olympics."

Shucks, is that all? Methinks Reuters' Jeff Mason writes with a keen sense of the reality gap between this gambit and 2008's "who is Barack Obama?":

Romney deems Obama a liar ex post facto

I have long marveled at the verbal contortions Romney must go through to a) justify current GOP nonsense positions and b) align his own prior pronouncements and actions with current nonsense.  Often this Operation Twist further involves c) differentiating his past and even sometimes his present position from a functionally similar position of Obama's, with whom the dear departed centrist pragmatist Massachusetts Mitt has often been aligned.

Hence Romney must regularly wax paradoxical, continually compiling new verses to this lover's rune:

I gave my love a cherry that had no stone,
I gave my love a chicken that had no bone,
I gave my love a story that had no end,
I gave my love a baby with no cryin'.

But Romney outdid himself this week when reversing the position taken by his aide Erich Fehrnstrom and his own long-held position that the individual mandate is a penalty, not a tax. Listen carefully:

“While I agreed with the dissent, that’s overtaken by the fact that the majority of the Court said it’s a tax and therefore it is a tax. They have spoken. There’s no way around that,” Romney said. “The American people know that President Obama has broken the pledge he made — said he wouldn’t raise taxes on middle-income Americans.”

Not only does Romney here assert that his own reasoning is negated in some existential sense by the Court's 5-4 ruling, along with the reasoning of the four conservative justices with whom he agreed. He is claiming that Obama's long-held position, which matches his own, retroactively became a lie the moment Roberts read the crux of his decision from the bench.  An ex post facto lie.

"In Mitt Romney's America..." -- Scare us, Obama

As I've said before, these recent Gallup numbers frighten me: voters give Romney the edge in handling deficit and debt, 54-39, and economic growth, 52-42. Together they suggest that people are buying Romney's core pitch: an able businessman is well equipped to run the economy.  The perception could well be decisive.

On the campaign trail, Obama is contrasting his core economic vision with Romney's, and that's good. He's tying Romney's Bain tenure to his trickle-down economics, and that's fair and potentially helpful -- though I think he desperately needs a bulked-up Super Pac to keep his hands clean while the team offsets all the scurrilous shit that Crossroads & co. will heap on his own head.

But what seems to my amateur political sensibility the most effective way to tear down the perception of Romney's economic competence is also the most truthful way: hammer home in detail the ruinous spending cuts and tax cuts that Romney has proposed for the country.  Scare people. Because these proposals are scary -- and most Americans oppose them when they're spelled out in ways that Romney dare not do.

I think Obama was on the right track when he hammered the Ryan budget in detail, extrapolating the specific cuts that would be called for if the broad category cuts were distributed evenly, filling in the details that Ryan decorously left blank.  He needs to do the same with Romney's proposals, which are in sync with Ryan's. I want to see the economic equivalent of Ted Kennedy's vision of Robert Bork's America. Romney's America would suffer

Romney's lullaby can't soothe Detroit

Mitt Romney can't go home again.

Compelled in Detroit to simultaneously defend his call for a "managed bankruptcy" of GM and Chrysler in November '08, lambaste the Obama administration for essentially following his prescription six months later, and deny that he favored a federal "bailout", the contorted candidate has squeezed out a quintessence of his characteristic casuistry. Generally, this boils down to

• what I did/said before was fundamentally in line with what I'm saying/recommending now, and
• what my opponent did/said is fundamentally opposed to what  to what I'm saying/recommending now,

when in fact the opposite is closer to the truth.

I like to compare Romney's offerings to the electorate with the paradoxical gifts bestowed by the lover in an old folk song:

I gave my love a cherry that had no stone,
I gave my love a chicken that had no bone,
I gave my love a story that had no end,
I gave my love a baby with no cryin'.

 In this case, as Benji Sarlin at TPM explains, the baby with no cryin' is a bailout with no fundin':