Obama's Negative Campaign Against Success

X
Story Stream
recent articles

Every election has some negative campaigning, which is natural, normal, and desirable. In addition to telling us why he would be (or is) a good president, each of the candidates also has to tell us why the other guy would be (or is) a bad president. But this is shaping up to be a contest dominated and defined by negative campaigning, and its attack-ad style is only intensifying.

This has been a negative campaign mostly on the part of the incumbent against the challenger, and it is negative on three different levels.

The Obama campaign's basic calculation is that they can't win this election by building up their guy. If it were "morning again in America," they would be running on that. But it isn't, so they can't. So the only way they can win is to tear down the other guy, to make Mitt Romney seem like an unacceptable alternative.

So far, we've seen attempts to delve into Romney's past as an alleged high-school bully, which is as far back as you have to go to find dirt on a guy whose personal life is squeaky clean. And we've seen attacks on his years as a businessman at Bain Capital for allegedly laying off workers and outsourcing jobs to China. The flavor of these personal attacks can be summed up by the latest one: that Romney allegedly lied about leaving Bain in 1999, when he took over management of the 2002 Olympic games.

Here's the context for that one. Romney has dismissed criticisms of some of Bain's investments by pointing out that they happened after his departure in 1999. But then some far-left sources dug up paperwork that seemed to show he was still running Bain as late as 2002, which would indicate that he lied, and not just to the press. In other filings with the SEC, Romney had also declared that he left Bain in 1999, so Obama campaign spokesman Ben LaBolt got carried away and speculated that Romney could be a "felon" for lying to the SEC.

It turns out that this story had already been addressed and quite thoroughly refuted elsewhere. (The paperwork merely reflected the confusion created by Romney's sudden departure to save the 2002 Olympic games.) But the fact that the Obama campaign seized on it, and stuck their necks out so far--and that various allies in the press are still chewing on this bone--is an indication of how desperate they are to find something, anything to stick to Romney that will seem to disqualify him for office.

But the negative campaign Obama is running is not just about isolated personal attacks. It has a clear ideological pattern and target. These attacks are tied to a specific electoral strategy and rooted in a deeper moral philosophy.

The attacks on Romney are supposed to appeal to voters along the lines of race, class, and gender.

On gender, Katha Pollitt extols the benefits of Obamacare for women, in an attempt to maintain his strong advantage among single women.

On race, I need only quote one particularly outré example: Michael Tomasky's denunciation of Mitt Romney as a "race-mongering pyromaniac." Romney's crime? He gave a speech to the NAACP. How, exactly, is that evidence of racism? Because Romney got booed for telling the audience that he planned to repeal Obamacare, and because he used the word, "Obamacare." According to Tomasky, "You don't go into the NAACP and use the word 'Obamacare' and think that you're not going to hear some boos. It's a heavily loaded word, and Romney and his people know very well that liberals and the president's supporters consider it an insult.... Romney and team obviously concluded that a little shower of boos was perfectly fine because the story 'Romney Booed at NAACP' would jazz up their (very white) base."

By the way, one of the unreconstructed rednecks who has had the bad taste to use the racial epithet "Obamacare" is--you guessed it--Barack Obama.

You may wonder at the presumptuousness of notable persons of pallor like Tomasky, Nancy Pelosi, and Howard Fineman appointing themselves as uninvited arbiters of racism on behalf of the NAACP. But don't bother to examine a folly, ask only what it accomplishes. Given the transparent absurdity of this line of attack, one can only view it as an act of psychological projection. It is Tomasky who is the incendiary race-baiter, using a trumped-up charge of racism in order to "jazz up" the Democratic Party's base.

James Taranto points out that this fits into a widely articulated long-term Democratic political plan. "Barack Obama's election seemed to vindicate the 2002 book The Emerging Democratic Majority. John Judis and Ruy Teixeira argued that demographic changes made Democratic dominance inexorable, as racial and ethnic minorities and highly educated professionals grew as proportions of the population." So it is the Democrats who have a political strategy based on appeals to racial identity.

That's not exactly breaking news, but it is being carried out with an open brazenness that turns President Obama's promise of a "post-racial politics" into a grim joke.

Yet the real focus of the left's negative campaign is on the issue of economic class. Paul Krugman, for example, mocks Romney's "VIP" donors in the Hamptons--who aren't down-to-earth regular folks like, say, Anna Wintour--and describes Romney as seeking "government of the 0.01 percent, by the 0.01 percent, for the 0.01 percent."

"Class" is the term the left uses for this, as an archaic leftover of Marxist theory. What they are really attacking is wealth and success. And there is no gap here between rhetoric and policy. As we enter the main stretch of the campaign, President Obama has chosen the central policy issue around which he hopes to rally his campaign: raising taxes on the rich, which he defines as anyone making more than $250,000 per year.

What is most notable is what this tax proposal would not do. It would not do anything to revive the economy. It has no connection to a plan to boost economic growth or employment. So in taking up this plan, during the fifth year of a long and brutal recession, Obama is signaling that his goal is not to boost the economy and make everyone prosperous. He wants us to forget about raising ourselves up and focus instead on knocking somebody else down.

Don't believe me? National Journal's Ronald Brownstein profiles precisely the kind of voters that Obama is hoping to reach. Brownstein interviews swing voters in Colorado and concludes that some of them are inclined to support Obama, despite the poor performance of the economy, because they have given up expecting a good economy.

"Those sticking with Obama believe that he's produced all that can be asked against the headwinds of a turbulent new normal. Ironically, if the candidate of hope from 2008 survives, it may be partly because many Americans, after a grueling decade, view both the presidency and the economy with lowered expectations."

This is the scariest thing I've read about the election all year, not because some voters have decided to give Obama more time--which could be excused by widespread confusion about economics--but because they have resigned themselves to a fate of permanent stagnation.

This is an ominous clue to the warped world view created by the moral code of altruism. By "altruism," I don't mean benevolence, the idea that it's nice to help other people out now and again. I mean the hard-core ethics of sacrifice, the idea that your only legitimate purpose in life is to give up your values for the sake of others. I mean the view that it is better to sacrifice wealth than to produce it and better to prop up someone else's failure than to make yourself into a success.

If you accept this view, you will regard the imperative of sacrifice as more important than the possibility of success and achievement. So if you see that the economy is stagnant and no one can move forward and improve their lot in life, that's not important enough to fight against. That's just life. It's the "new normal." But if someone tells you that the rich aren't paying enough taxes, that they are not sacrificing enough of their wealth--well, by God, we've got to do something about that.

That is the mentality Obama's negative campaign is appealing to. The more I think about, the more it strikes me that the kerfuffle about when Romney left Bain really captures the whole essence of the campaign. The real story behind it is that Romney had a spectacularly successful career creating enormous wealth for himself and his investors, and he left it in order to turn around the troubled preparations in Salt Lake City and save the 2002 Olympic games. Whatever you may think of Romney's political career, his career in the private realm is a story of unusual competence and achievement. Yet it is precisely that story that Obama wants to deny, disparage, and even criminalize.

Obama is pushed into this negative campaign because of his own lack of success. If voters don't like the job you're doing in office, your only hope is to make them like the other guy even less. But it is also consistent with his basic outlook and convictions. This negative campaign against success is the ugly reality of an altruist code that glorifies failure, helplessness, and sacrifice.

The question in November is how many voters will accept this warped message--how many will be like Brownstein's swing voters--and how many will be repulsed by it. That, in turn, will depend on what Mitt Romney does to fight back, not just against the details of the negative attacks on him, but against the world view behind them.

 

 

Robert Tracinski is senior writer for The Federalist and editor of The Tracinski Letter.

Comment
Show commentsHide Comments

Related Articles