Oct 15 2012
Will Obama Trip Over Traps Set For Tomorrow’s Debate?
President Obama is going to go all male-alpha on us tomorrow night in the next debate, in order to make up for his flat and meandering performance in the first debate. This could easily become an unmitigated disaster if he over does it (like crazy Joe did in his dramatic debate debacle). If Obama comes out red hot like Biden, he will more than likely fall into a series of policy and reality traps waiting for him.
These traps include:
(1) The first big trap is the one Biden set for the President on Benghazi. During Biden’s debate he made the ridiculous claim the White House and President were ignorant to the facts surrounding the attack that killed 4 people (among them our ambassador) for more than a week. As someone put it, either this is a lie to cover up something worse, or this President is so out of touch he was too lazy to find out the real story. Take your pick – lose or lose. Obama should admit the mistakes and simply promise to move heaven and earth to bring the perps to justice.
But that would go against the strategy of being the alpha-male against Romney. So Obama has little chance of being superior if he has to admit the mistake of blaming a video and a spontaneous protest for what was clearly (from day 1) a planned attack and massacre.
(2) The “Romney only paid 14% in taxes” line. Obama will try to paint Romney as a greedy, tax sheltering, 1% Scrooge. But all Romney needs to do is note that he got away with 14% in taxes by paying something like 45% to charity:
… a new analysis of the GOP candidate’s wealth shows that the millionaire was so generous that he kept just 42 percent of his income.
Romney’s answer is simple. If I sent that to the government only a fraction would trickle down to those in need, so he prefers to maximize the money that reaches the needy by bypassing the bureaucracy. It will be a pointed reminder to the Libertarian, Tea Party element that still exists in the electorate.
(3) If Obama goes to the 47% meme, he will also leave himself open. Mainly because Romney has walked back his own comment, but more importantly Romney can point out Obama only offers the 47% more government dependence, not economic freedom. Romney can ask which path do they want to go down: food stamps or job opportunities?
Watching Biden, who is much more seasoned debater than Obama, I could see the trap he fell into. The need for drama obliterated his ability to convey a cogent and coherent message. You can either impress with your brilliance or go to the dramatic BS. You can’t do both.
Romney just needs to perform well, Obama has to try not to be the Snark-in-Chief and not put the final stake through his own campaign.
BTW, you can see Obama losing ground still in poll after poll. This new swing state poll shows crippling damage to Obama in the states he needs to carry:
Apparently Romney is leading in the swing states with “likely” voters by 4% 50-46%. As I noted in a previous post, this gap of Romney at 50% and Obama at 46% would make almost a given Obama loses these states, and therefore the election. A side note: in these states Romney has tied Obama with women, another clear danger sign for campaign Obama.
If Obama over does it tomorrow night, he will cement these numbers in place and that should end the election (barring a real surprise).
I especially liked your come-back in #2:
That’s such an honest reply, one that I’m sure resonates with many of us when faced with annually sharing our earnings: “Do I give it to the government, or can I personally direct it to a better purpose, cause, or person?” The latter option is always so much more gratifying!
Not only gratifying but also far more efficient and beneficial. Government (especially Fed.) is the least able to allocate charity where it is most effective. It also happens to be the costliest way to disburse charity. Lost in recent times, is the basic understanding that the further away the money goes the least effective it becomes. When money is taken from a tax payer and is sent through the bureaucracy, it loses more of its “value” than in almost any other way possible. The losses from fraud are massive. It is a scandal that these enormous medicare scams do not receive more attention by the media. The losses from intentional abuse of the system are also enormous. And the losses from the incentives that encourage use of the system are also not insignificant. The founders understood this problem 300 hundred years ago. But I don’t think even they could have imagined the sheer scale of it as we see it today. The problem with trying to explain this to the masses is that discussing efficiency, incentives and abuse just doesn’t sound as good as continuing to hand out freebies.
AJ,
You missed the down ballot implications of heavy “R” rural voting.
Since the Democrats are losing 59/37 percent in the rural areas of the swing states with Obama, a lot of Democratic Senators and a few House seats in primarily rural states are going to suffer for it because Obama is polling higher than the generic Democratic brand —
“Voters in rural areas were holding back from Mitt Romney for a variety of reasons, ranging from more conservative voters not being very high on him to the perception of him as an elite and out of touch,” Greenberg says. “The debate went a long way to making rural voters more comfortable with him in the way they were comfortable with George Bush.”
Judy notes that “these really are Republican base voters … coming home. They’re 85 percent white, 50 percent conservative, and two-thirds of them attend church at least a couple of times a month.”
and
Both Judy and Greenberg agree that Obama’s rural battleground plunge could hurt Democrats who are seeking or trying to hold on to U.S. House and Senate seats in those same states.
“In these swing states, there are a lot of very, very close Senate races,” Judy says. “Whoever is able to prevail in these swing states will likely bring along enough Senate candidates to give his party control of the Senate.”
Greenberg adds that Romney’s gargantuan lead in rural counties in battleground states makes it harder for Democrats to win Senate and Congressional races in rural states.
“It still can be done, and there are lots of really solid Democratic campaigns in these areas,” Greenberg says. “But it obviously makes it that much harder to win in those races.”