Shooting Blanks, Washington Style
What does a big cash advantage and nine figures of relentless (and extremely early) negative advertising buy you? Meh, not much:
Mitt Romney holds thin advantages over President Obama on leadership, personal values and honesty, according to a new poll for The Hill.
The poll, conducted for The Hill by Pulse Opinion Research, suggests voters see little difference between the candidates on character issues that Democrats have cited as key to Obama’s appeal.
It found 48 percent of voters consider Romney the stronger leader, compared to 44 percent who favored Obama.
Similarly, 47 percent of likely voters also said Romney most shares their values while 44 percent picked Obama.
When asked which candidate voters considered more honest and trustworthy, 46 percent said Romney and 44 percent said Obama — a result within the poll’s 3 percentage point margin of error.
Whatever will Team Obama have left to fire during the real campaign season?
On second thought, don’t answer that.
My guess? They’ll try to set up a Mormon serial-killer to link Romney to.
44% consider Obama a strong leader?
I’m quite honestly speechless. Does this 44% of the population also chase laser pointer dots? Calling them lemmings would be quite insulting to real lemmings.
If they’re smart, they’ll fire the guy whose name is on the marquee.
I don’t know how it will play out on the national level, but here in Texas we seem to be seeing a definite blow-back on the negative campaign strategy. In the Republican primary runoff for U.S. Senate, David Dewhurst has gone all out character assassination on Ted Cruz. The last poll I saw has Cruz up by 10 points. This is for a guy (Cruz) who was polling at 2% when he first entered the race a year or so ago.
Dewhurst’s tactic have definitely swung my opinion against him. Cruz has concentrated on explaining his position and contrasting it to easily verifiable examples of Dewhurst’s positions on various issues. He has also been endorsed by pretty much every significant Tea Party Republican and conservative talk radio host.
Unfortunately, Texas isn’t the rest of the country, but hopefully something similar will happen with Romney in November.
From Colorado, tt’s difficult to follow Texas races closely. That’s why I found George Will’s recent column so helpful. He explained how either Dewhursr or Ceuz would most likely make a fine Senator from the great state of Texas.
But Cruz has something Dewhurst doesn’t. Cruz is the Tea Party candidate. And in my mind, that makes him the guy who must win. And it looks like he will — handily — for the reasons you described.
Don’t count the Tea Party out. The big rallies are over with, because the Party has gone underground to work on grassroots organizing and GOTV. They WILL be heard in November.
“Don’t count the Tea Party out.”
Never.
What Cruz has been able to do in this election is really inspiring. He talks the talk and walks the walk.
And the tipping point for me was a recent radio ad that a Dewhurst PAC began running insinuating that Cruz represented a man convicted of bribing judges to send juvenile offenders to a for-profit detention center when in fact the man Cruz actually represented was the real estate developer that built the detention center. He defended him in a civil suit that was not related to the bribery case.
These sorts of tactics juts reflect badly on the man and made it impossible for me to vote for him.
Cruz’s background is also a bit inspiring, almost a parallel to Marco Rubio. Cuban emigrant father who fled the Castro dictatorship, but who also fought in the Cuban revolution and was incarcerated in a Cuban prison and beaten before he eventually escaped to the U.S. Good stuff.
Emigrant = immigrant. Stupid brain.