Again, a good read. Mitt Romney is not septuagenarian military hero (or at least martyr) John McCain, and President Obama has clearly shown what sort of President he is.
No two Presidential elections are exactly alike. Even the 1952 and 1956 Presidential elections that had the same Presidential candidates weren't quite the same because four years after the election of Dwight Eisenhower people knew what Ike was.
2012 will be a referendum, not a choice.I've seen plenty of R posters fantasize that President Obama is the new Jimmy Carter. Unlike Carter, President Obama has gotten much of his legislative agenda passed and needs make new promises only to reflect changing reality. When an incumbent meets his promises, he can run on his record. When he fails he must make new ones or estate his old promises as did Carter.
Incumbent politicians run on their records and win or from their records and lose.
No more promises of bipartisanshipBipartisanship has failed. Republicans rejected just about everything and doubled down in 2010. To be effective in changing the direction of America the President needs to hold a majority in the Senate and win back the House.
No more “Yes, we can.” A campaign slogans like "Yes, we can!" translates no better into public policy than does "Tippecanoe and Tyler too". In recent months the most common application of “Yes, we can!” has been by used-car dealerships that tell people with fecal credit ratings that the dealership can get people into jalopies that replace the current junkers.
Campaign mode and governing mode cannot be the same.
No more youth movement.Of course the GOP has done much to excite young voters to vote for an agenda that will doom most to lives of poverty, repress their sex lives, narrow opportunities to temporary jobs that pay badly, accelerate the ravaging of the environment for quick bucks that most people will never get, and implies diplomatic bullying and wars for profit.
"While it’s unlikely that Romney will get a larger share of the youth vote than McCain did, it’s equally unlikely that Obama will get as many votes from this pool as he did four years ago."
What President Obama has failed to excite young voters the GOP has done even more effectively to alienate. This could be a partial re-enactment of the elections of 1964 or 1972 in which the incumbent's campaign successfully depicted the Other Side as dangerous and capricious extremists.
Blue-state big business has moved on. Undeniable. President Obama, much like FDR in 1932, got a mandate to save the capitalist order from its own worst tendencies and succeeded. If tycoons and executives have returned to the GOP, employees still distrust people who have 'moved on' back to the old GOP agenda of tax cuts for elites only, harsher workplace discipline, and more transformation of manufacturing companies into importers.
Tycoons and executives can still vote against the President as they largely did in 2008. But their employees may think much as they did in 2008. American workers still distrust their employers; large numbers of people are heavily in debt and have no desire for deflationary and elitist economics. This isn't the 1950s in which the common man is confident about his economic future and trusts his employer and is more concerned about keeping and growing his savings. Debtors tend to go Left; creditors tend to go Right, and I see no cause for any change in that pattern.
Selecting a campaign message will be a zero-sum choice."General Motors is alive and Osama bin Laden is dead" already circulates.
This may be a choice of sobriety against madness, consistency against unreliability, or proven achievement against wild promises. The President isn't at a loss for words, and he surrounds himself with people who can put words together. It may be what Mitt Romney does that creates the style of the 2008 campaign, but the President can do very well in defining himself.
Campaigning is the easy part -- cheerleading for things that everyone likes. Governing and legislating imply zero-sum choices.
Obama is no longer the master of his fate. Of course. An economic meltdown or a diplomatic or military debacle can wreck a Presidency and still can wreck this one. Such made President Obama possible to begin with.
