The Democrats’ formula in 1996 — the last time a Democrat ran for re-election as president — was “M2E2,” for Medicare, Medicaid, Education and the Environment, all the things the thoroughly evil Republican Congress was planning to massacre if Bill Clinton wasn’t there at the bridge. But this time, the acronym ought to be “IHH,” for Incoherence, Hypocrisy, and Hypotheses based upon utter conjecture, which can never, ever, be proved.
As for hypotheses, there is the assertion that a President Romney in 2011 would not have said “go!” to the mission that took out Osama bin Laden. The Obama team has taken a statement Romney made in 2007 — that killing bin Laden was less important than breaking al Qaeda — to mean he wouldn’t have jumped at the chance to capture the killer. Romney is suddenly blamed for a “decision” he never made or faced.
This fits well with the other big story, the claim that their stimulus package was the one thing that stopped the monster recession from becoming the greatest depression that ever existed, and they ought to get credit for that. The only thing wrong is that there’s no way prove it, and it’s just as easy for others to make their conjectures. But what is this to the partisan mind?
Then there’s hypocrisy — as in Obama’s reaction to the possibility that the Supreme Court might overturn his health care reform act, the ultimate jewel in his crown. “I’m confident the Supreme Court will not take the extraordinary, unprecedented step of overturning a law that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress,” he said. There was nothing at all wrong with this statement, except that this step was both routine and quite common, having often occurred between 1803 and the present; that the majority was not “strong,” but barely five votes in a House in which his party had an impressive majority; that the law passed in defiance of public opinion; and that at the same time Obama was urging the “extraordinary, unprecedented” overturn of the Defense of Marriage Act, which really did pass by a true “strong majority,” with votes from both parties, and not despised by the public. At the same time, Obama’s supporters insisted that liberal justices who vote predictably as a bloc in favor of their preferred causes are neutral observers with open minds on all matters, while conservative jurists who did the same thing were corrupt and unprincipled tools of their party, who disgraced and embarrassed the Court.
Then there’s incoherence, in which Democrats flipped on the charge that Romney was a flip-flopper. They now argue that instead of being too malleable, he is a rock-ribbed right-winger, of the most extreme and fanatical kind. This reached a peak in speech by (who else?) Joe Biden, who said Romney was both too tough and too soft, too weak and too bellicose, too doctrinaire and too inconsistent to be trusted in foreign affairs. As Alana Goodman wrote in Contentions, “Romney was too much of a hardliner, but … can’t be counted on to make tough decisions. Romney is too inexperienced, and yet Obama was fully prepared in 2008. Romney has no interest in foreign policy … yet he’s also a dangerous ideologue who is ‘mired in a Cold War mindset.’ ” (Though we did at least win the Cold War.) Romney would take us back to Bush-era policies, yet it was Obama who ratified most of them, adopting Bush’s strategies for the war against terror, through which bin Laden was caught.
When they flip, even over flip-flops, they ought to think it over, drop the conjectures and stay with the record. But then they’d have nothing to say.
Examiner Columnist Noemie Emery is contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and author of “Great Expectations: The Troubled Lives of Political Families.”
