Over at PJ Media, the Vodkapundit, Stephen Green, picks up on on something I’ve been saying for a while now:
Obama, unlike Bush ’04, has enjoyed a mostly friendly press. He — and his Chicago/Axelrod Machine — still hasn’t really been tested. The United States is not Chicago. A national race is not a Democratic primary. The fresh-faced challenger is now the dour incumbent with a crappy record. And a friendly media doesn’t mean what it once did, now in the age of Twitter.
That’s why we saw David Axelrod flop-sweating on Fox News Sunday. That’s why almost every Democrat in America has put distance between themselves and OWS. (Did I say “distance”? Roseanne’s dipping pool covers less acreage.) And now we see War after senseless War — and none of them causing much damage to Mitt Romney. Romney has taken some hits, sure, but Obama has gained zero traction (Obama eats dogs, cough, cough). In fact, there’s some evidence that these left-wing attacks are doing the impossible — getting the GOP base excited about Romney.
“Excited about Romney.” That has got to be some kind of oxymoron. And yet, Team Obama is making it real. See, you can always rile up the Democratic base with a fictional “War on Women.” But the nation as a whole won’t buy it. But Team Obama just doesn’t have enough real-world, battle-tested experience to understand this simple fact of politics.
So I think I’d better shut up now, before I give the game away.
I’ve been pretty outspoken in my belief that Mitt Romney will lose to Obama this fall — unless he learns to turn the Left’s dreary litany of tawdry smears back against them. And, on current evidence, he has. Jim Treacher may have been the originator of the #ObamaEatsDogs meme — accomplished by the simple expedient of actually reading “the best-written memoir ever produced by a politician” (and almost certainly ghost-written by somebody else — why doesn’t some enterprising MSM reporter track down Obama’s former literary agent, Jane Dystel, and ask her who really wrote Dreams From My Father? It’s not like she’s in hiding) — but the campaign has been smart to let it take its viral course, instead of tut-tutting about it, the way McCain would have.
#more#The entire “progressive” edifice is a Potemkin village, a Hollywood set, that looks formidable from the exterior. But in reality, there’s no there there, except the liberal fascists’ standard naked will to power by any means necessary. Because their tactics are always the same (smear, bully, intimidate, whine, and complain), they’re something of a humorless bore, really, although a dangerous humorless bore — a fanatic constantly in search of force majeure. Team Romney must simply and forcefully reject the premises of their argument — Democrats good, Republicans bad — and refuse to play by their MSM-enforced rules.
Like Primo Carnera, whose every fight was fixed until he found himself in the ring with someone who didn’t get the memo, the lefties overestimate their own potency, and are undiscouraged even when their temporary successes (Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union) come crashing down with body counts in the high millions. It’s never the ideology, but always the execution. Practical atheists nearly to a man, they have a zealot’s faith in their own diabolical ideology, and a troglodyte conservative’s unwillingness to let go of the tried and untrue. Talk about “internal contradictions“!
Which is why the dog meme has legs. Derision is wolf bane to the Left; “The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn,” said Martin Luther. Or, as St. Thomas More noted, “The devil . . . the prowde spirite . . . cannot endure to be mocked.” It’s a punch, thrown right at Barry’s midsection, and the whoosh of the air going out of both man and myth is rushing across the land.
By the way, here’s what happened to Carnera when he finally faced someone who wasn’t afraid of him: