In today’s Morning Jolt, Jim Geraghty puzzles over the White House tactic of making House Minority Leader John Boehner the target of their attacks: “The economy’s a shambles, and Obama wants Americans to focus their ire on . . . that guy? Him? The orange fella who looks like a hardware-store owner who’s managing a House caucus small enough to meet in a phone booth?”
But I think it’s a bigger problem than this. Those of us who follow this stuff tend to forget that only a tiny fraction of likely voters — and an even tinier fraction of Americans overall — have even heard of John Boehner. In the entire nation, there are probably only a few thousand people who would recognize him if they tripped over him on the street. Even among the minute fraction of the electorate that listened to, read, or saw on the news excerpts from Obama’s speech in Cleveland yesterday, some significant share had no idea who this “Mr. Boehner” the president kept criticizing is.