Obama's "Long Game" Is Making History

[SoDesuKa]

Obama's "long game" is making it happen:

• Ya Gotta Have Something to Sell. Republicans became fearsome in their ability with political marketing, but they forgot the first rule of sales, which is that there's no attractive way to package empty promises. Their best shot is to acknowledge that Romney is a rich sneak, and work around it. Unfortunately for them, there isn't a big market for rich sneaks. Been there, done that.


• I don't have to tell you and you can't make me, says Mitt. Attempts to go with the rich part and dump the sneaky part are encountering resistance from the candidate himself. Sneakiness is apparently part of him the way it was with Nixon. The smart politicians in the Republican Party are chewing their fingernails thinking about the possibility of a complete wipe-out in November.


• Legacy of the Bush administration. Ya gotta have something to sell, and if you don't, there's nobody going to buy your empty promises, especially on the heels of the Bush administration . . . which completely relied on empty promises. Yeah, we'll get you back to work, they say. That is being read as an empty promise, as indeed it is.


• It's Obama in a walk. The question is if Obama will take the house of Representatives as well. And Karl Rove - a fair to middlin' sneak in his own right - knows it.

[center]


Old Mother Hubbard
Went to the cupboard,
To give the poor dog a bone:
When she came there,
The cupboard was bare,
And so the poor dog had none.
[/center]

[trotsky]

1. The wildcard is the unlimited sum of money that will benefit the Republicans...

thanks to Citizens United. We've never seen a campaign season like the one that's unfolding - it's going to be outrageously vicious. The strategy on the right, I think, will not necessarily be to get votes for their candidates, but to eliminate as many votes as possible for Democrats. We've already seen that with photo ID laws and other tricks designed to suppress voter turnout. Now they'll use their unlimited funds to unleash a new generation of attack ads. It's not gonna be pretty.

[SoDesuKa]

4. Citizens United

Deep-pocket candidates have been known to lose big in the past, and Romney is still an unknown. Team Obama has moved quickly against Romney's big weaknesses:

• He comes from nowhere;
• He's never done anything important except make money - for himself; and
• He's overly sensitive to criticism, i.e., he closes up, the way Nixon did.

It's not going to be close, and money won't make the difference. The guy has spent his career looking after A Number One, and there's nothing money can do to change that impression.

Obama, in a walk.

[Scuba]

2. The optimism is your final point is nice, but...

... we are very much at risk of losing the Senate, with 23 Democratic, 2 Independent and only 10 Republican seats on the line.


Keep working.

[SoDesuKa]

3. Romney's a Sneak

The reason he won't release his tax returns is that he's a sneak, and you can't hide that. He's a really bad choice to headline the Republican Party, because they're not going to get this opportunity again for years. The reason the handwringing is so public is that the professionals know how weak a candidate he really is.

Republicans don't have the same aversion to sneaks - after all, there have been a lot of them! But the general public likes a guy that they can trust . . . and you can't trust Romney.