One of the groups participating in CarolinaFest — the event for today hastily scheduled after the original plan to hold Monday’s events at the Charlotte Motor Speedway was cancelled, likely because of the Democrats’ convention fundraising woes — was “Patients Over Politics.” Curious, I took their group’s paper … and quickly discovered that they considered putting “patients over politics” equivalent to being on Barack Obama’s side. On their website, they are promoting a petition that begins with this paragraph:
We, the undersigned, demand our politicians put Patients Over Politics. We must work together to build on the Affordable Care Act with further reforms and commit to a future where everyone can get health care when they need it.
Very non-political.
Otherwise at the Democratic convention area so far, I was struck by the amount of Obama-mania remaining, something that Matt Welch and Dave Weigel both had smart takes on. For instance, this sand sculpture is almost impossible to pass without ducking to avoid all the cameras, and there’s generally a person or two posing in front of it as well:
At the Democratic convention, one person reinterpreted Rosie the Riveter to celebrate the stimulus:
And at the official Obama shop, Obama’s making his pitch to Southern voters this way:
There just wasn’t anywhere near this level of merchandise at the RNC. Welch speculates that’s partly because the RNC was so set apart from Tampa, whereas the DNC is being held in the heart of downtown Charlotte, and it’s not just delegates and media wandering about. Perhaps so. But it also struck me that while I saw a lot of Americana — red, white, and blue clothing, etc. — at the RNC, I didn’t see a lot that was personality-driven. Maybe if four or eight years from now, the party nominates someone like Marco Rubio, who seems to generate excitement, that will change. But if I were betting, I’d err on the side of not.
This Obama fever isn’t a new phenomenon: we’ve seen in poll after poll, that even as approval of the job Obama’s done ebbs, many people still like him, no matter how aware they are of life in the Obama economy. Republicans somehow have to make the case that you can like Obama, perhaps even more than Romney, and yet still decide to vote for Romney. Rubio tread that line in his speech, saying, a few lines after praising Obama as a good family man, “No matter how you feel about President Obama, this election is about your future, not his.” Expect that to be a theme that Republicans keep returning to in the countdown to Election Day.