One of Our Presidents is Missing!
Jay Cost, on the man who wasn’t mentioned even once during the primetime speeches at the RNC last night — Barack Obama:
At first blush, it might seem like an odd move. After all, this president is unpopular and in a weakened political position. Isn’t the time to strike now? The answer is, probably not.
For months, Democratic politicians, pundits, and strategists have been insisting that this election would be a choice, not a referendum. Little did they know that the Republican party actually agreed with them. Democrats thought that this “choice, not referendum” meme was their trump card, but in fact virtually every successful challenger throughout American history has won by making the contest a choice.
One side is campaigning like winners; the other, not so much. Don’t get cocky, but do draw your own conclusions.
I voted in 1980 and remember most polls had the race a virtual toss-up going into the last weekend, but Carter was way below par – it was 43-43 or something like that. After the election day blowout, the media tried to figure out what had happened. Basically, it seemed like voters weren’t sure about Reagan (thanks to the media, of course) but ABSOLUTELY COULD NOT BEAR to pull the lever for Carter again. So rather than people fretting about “the devil we know vs. the devil we don’t know” the dominant paradigm seemed to be “Let’s roll the dice, almost anybody will be better than this guy.”
Barack Obama is the worst president in my lifetime. Almost anybody will be better than this guy.
The future won’t include President Obama’s ‘plan of the past’. So, why mention it?
It made me very happy to see that Jay Cost and I think the same about the race right now:
The American people know that Barack Obama has not earned another term. What they don’t know is if we Republicans have given them an acceptable replacement for President Obama. Is there a time and place for pointing out all of Obama’s mistakes and failures? Of course. But what the Republicans need to do right now is establish that Romney is an acceptable choice.
I think they’re doing that. If I’m right, we’ll see Romney at or above 50% in Rasmussen before the Democrat Convention starts. IMHO that will lead to the Democrats having a shrill and ugly convention. Which will just solidify Romney’s lead.
A week or two of Romney about 50% and we get a preference cascade. And we end up with Romney getting more than 300 EVs, and the Republicans w/ 55 seats in the Senate, and a strong majority in the House (perhaps even picking up some seats in the House, although I haven’t looked at things enough to guess whether that’s even possible).
All this is contingent on Mitt doing a good job Thursday night. (I was going to say “closing the deal”, but that happens on Nov 6.) I’m expecting he will.