It was so unsuccessful the first time that it clearly deserved another try.
Some people are bringing back the terrific idea of attacking President Obama for his association with his erstwhile pastor — the idea being that moderate voters would look at the immoderate cleric, and conclude that Obama was like him.
It didn’t take in 2008, partly because the press shielded its candidate, but also because Obama is so much who he is. People took a long look at the self-absorbed, cool, and collected Obama, and understood that he went to the church of the Reverend Wright because, as a newcomer who was raised by his white mother’s family, he needed an entree into urban race politics. He sat in his church not caring much what Wright said (and possibly not really listening), and dropped him the moment he became an embarrassment, with nary a murmur or qualm.
The same applies to Bill Ayers and his better half, the charming and elegant Bernardine Dohrn, who served as a similar entree for Obama into upscale, Caucasian Hyde Park.
If these attacks didn’t work when Obama was a political blank slate and largely unknown, it surely won’t work now that we have lived with him for what seems an eternity. He has yet to declaim “God damn America!” much less try setting a bomb. He may be many things, but “racist” and “terrorist” aren’t two of them. He is a user of racists and terrorists, but this is a different and whole other story, and trying to prove otherwise only wastes money and time.
In the Bush-era, the country was politically tied. Candidates could win by holding their own base and peeling off a few centrists. But 2008 was a huge shift election, in which (after the fiscal implosion took place in September) states and voters which for years seemed to be safely Republican swung to the Democrats’ side. Obama won by a larger percentage than all Democrats but three — Andrew Jackson, Lyndon Johnson, and Franklin D. Roosevelt. He won by the biggest split since the elder George Bush vanquished Michael Dukakis, carrying states that had not gone Democratic for president since the LBJ blowout of 1964.
The 2009 and 2010 elections saw many of those states move back again, but those were for Congress and governor: The fact remains that Mitt Romney has to win over a very large number of states and people who once voted for Obama, once liked him, and may like him still. Two things are clear about most of these voters: First, they elected Obama knowing all about his old friendships; and second, many don’t like the things that he’s done in office. Their votes won’t be changed by what they knew last time. Therefore, Romney should run against what Obama has done while in office, not against who Obama is or whom he once knew.
Meanwhile, Romney should steer clear of all the old chestnuts that stir up the base of the base. Obama didn’t set out to sink the country on purpose, it just turned out that way. He isn’t an angry black anything, he’s a condescending elitist. He isn’t an alien form, but a home-grown American leftist, whose views can be found in any faculty lounge in the country.
Obama has nearly doubled the publicly held national debt since his inauguration, with insolvency looming. He has wasted billions on phony green energy systems, and seems incapable of learning either from his own misjudgments or from the examples of Spain and of Greece.
Obama isn’t a Kenyan, a Muslim, or alien presence. He’s something worse than all that: He’s a failure. And that should be more than enough.
Examiner Columnist Noemie Emery is contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and author of “Great Expectations: The Troubled Lives of Political Families.”
