'The President Jumped the Gun in Elevating an Opponent'

“Yeah, it was a trap,” Moe Lane writes:

Governor and new Presidential candidate Rick Perry (R-TX) on his priority levels:

… if I hurt the president’s feelings, well, with all due respect, I love my country and I love future generations more than I care about his feelings.

To give the context: the White House has been taking the opportunity offered by Perry’s entrance to the race to take slaps at the candidate.

As Glenn Reynolds noted at the time, this was not a particularly smart strategy… which is something that I’ve come to agree with, and I’ll tell you why.

• The President jumped the gun in elevating an opponent.  This is almost forgivable and certainly understandable – the Democrats have been almost besides themselves trying to find somebody, anybody on the Republican side to ‘promote’ to the position of  head demon – but in typical fashion the Left stepped on a metaphorical rake while trying to do it with Governor Perry.  I refer, of course, to their epic own-goal with the ‘black cloud’ oopsie… and you can tell that it was an oopsie because it got Jon Stewart to yell at the Democrats*.  That’s a fairly reliable indicator that the Left has gone too far.

Read the whole thing. In addition to elevating Perry, Obama also lowered himself — the President’s shadow campaign through the Midwest in Darth Vader’s tour bus reduced the president to appearing as just another candidate on the stump competing for the White House next year, a lowering of stature even Carter avoided when being primaried by Ted Kennedy:

Ted Kennedy had an enormous lead over Jimmy Carter through all of 1979, but ultimately he carried just 35 percent of the primary vote in 1980. A big reason why was Carter’s excellent use of the Oval Office. Not only was Carter careful to dole out patronage in ways that helped him in the battle against Kennedy, but he also employed a masterful “Rose Garden Strategy,” in which he made a point every day to seem presidential. It worked like a charm.

As Allahpundit noted last week, the Magical Misery Tour was designed to sure up Obama’s base, but as often happens when the president pitches to his supporters, it plays very, very poorly to the rest of us. Ann Althouse once wrote, “People who like Obama are blinded to the way other people see him.” Obama and his staff are blinded to the way his actions are seen by those outside their worldview.

Update: “Obama bus tour ridiculed on Twitter,” The Hill reports: “72 percent of the opinions expressed were negative, while 22 percent were neutral and only 6 percent were favorable.”