Woodward: 'The White House has a Secret Plan to Win the Election'

CHRIS MATTHEWS, HOST: Welcome back. Bob, tell me something I don’t know.

BOB WOODWARD, WASHINGTON POST: That the White House has a secret plan to win the election, and it’s complex and it’s secret, but, look. Barack Obama wants to win so badly as I understand it, everything in the White House is driven by the election, and that level of commitment will take them to a point where he is going to show some leg in a way that people are going to say, “Wow, he really wants the job,” and this emotional connection could take place.

MATTHEWS: Wow! I am impressed by that.

Well, Chris is a notoriously cheap date. But everybody knows that Obama really wants to hold onto the job — the perks are awesome when you’re at the top of the One Percent, to borrow from a recent Obama-approved movement’s terminology. But Obama began office being compared — by his admirers — with Star Trek’s Spock, a notoriously aloof, detached, self-contained character, the very definition of non-emotional.  Three years later, he was recently described in the otherwise-Obama-friendly Washington Post as having further shut down emotionally:

This president endures with little joy the small talk and back-slapping of retail politics, rarely spends more than a few minutes on a rope line, refuses to coddle even his biggest donors. His relationship with Democrats on Capitol Hill is frosty, to be generous. Personal lobbying on behalf of legislation? He prefers to leave that to Vice President Biden, an old-school political charmer.

Obama’s circle of close advisers is as small as the cluster of personal friends that predates his presidency. There is no entourage, no Friends of Barack to explain or defend a politician who has confounded many supporters with his cool personality and penchant for compromise.

Obama is, in short, a political loner who prefers policy over the people who make politics in this country work.

There’s no doubt his handlers will craft a reelection strategy, with the assistance of the supine media once again, that will be a scorched earth campaign to paint whoever the Republican nominee is in the very worst possible light. But to borrow from Woodward’s language, Obama will have to show a lot of leg to generate an emotional connection with voters — especially since he’s demonized them all at one point or another in his career.

* A registered trademark of AceCorp LLC.