Saturday, October 27, 2012

Lie, Hide and Spend: GOP Strategy

It's the Romneyryan strategy for the rest of the campaign: lie, hide and spend.

Lie: Romney can barely open his mouth without lying.  They are tactical lies, as when he said in Ohio on Friday that Jeep was thinking of sending all its American production jobs to China.  It's a lie.  Jeep is actually hiring more Ohio workers, and is exploring opening production plants in China for cars to be bought in China. 

The Romney campaign strategy is to lie, and later "correct" the lie by an officially issued campaign statement that nobody but the media sees.  In the above case, the lie hasn't been corrected, because Romney prefaced it with "I read someplace..." and indeed he might have.  Some right wing blog misinterpreted another report and made this allegation, which Chrysler (owner of the Jeep brand) immediately denied, calling it a fantasy.  As Rachel pointed out, if Romney believed what he read in a right wing blog without further checking, that's even scarier for a potential president than a deliberate lie.

The second part of the strategy is to hide.  Vp candidate Ryan, the most extreme and least qualified vp candidate since--well, Sarah Palin-- is being hidden in fundraisers and rabble-raising in the deep South.  Romney does an event or two a day, and hides from media interviews.  That way he gets to sound his packaged themes without explaining or defending them, or aspects of his campaign, or anything about his policies, and certainly nothing about his lies.

Spend is the third element.  The Romney campaign and its superpacs are finally going to unleash their unprecedented ad barrage in the final week.

Their conceptual strategy from the beginning was to make President Obama the issue, and Romney as the empty suit alternative.  Thanks to a poll that showed a large percentage in favor of major change, they've found a theme: big change.  They're banking on people wanting  a new product without caring very much what it is.  And this at least isn't a lie.  Romney would be a big change.  A change back to Bush, and beyond.

So there are two questions out there now.  First, can Romney sway enough undecided voters--enough low-information white and largely women voters--to win enough states to win?  Second, will enough of the much larger potential Obama support translate into actual votes, and sweep him to reelection?

We won't know until after election day, because we won't know the effect of this Romneyryan strategy, which is all carefully calibrated to peak on November 6.  Right now it is pretty clear that President Obama is ahead.  Swing state polls released on Friday are favorable.  And there's this:

  [E]xperts predict that at least 35% of those who vote in this election will cast an early vote this year, up from 30% in 2008. And in crucial swing states like Florida, Colorado, Iowa and Ohio, that number might be much higher. "Colorado is one where 85% of the votes are going to be cast prior to election day," says Michael McDonald, an associate professor of government and politics at George Mason University. "Florida is going to be close to two-thirds. In Ohio, they're on pace for 40-45% early voting."

Ezra Klein is more blunt:
Absolutely everything I’ve heard suggests the Obama campaign is meeting and exceeding its early voting targets. You can see some on-the-ground evidence of this from Jon Ralston’s look at early voting in Nevada, which is showing huge numbers for the Democrats, and the Time poll of Ohio, which showed a huge lead for Democrats among early voters. Democrats also appear to lead in early voting in North Carolina.
 
 Nate Silver has increased President Obama's likelihood of winning to about 75%.  President Obama is campaigning feverishly, I think mostly to reignite the enthusiasm of his voters as well as to remind those previously for him but tempted by Romney, why they were right in the first place.

Apart from all this, there are the decisions to make on the better candidate to be President of the United States, and why.  The Chicago Tribune has endorsed only one Democrat in its long history: Barack Obama in 2008.  And it does so again in 2012:

 Bolstered by his steadiness in office, cognizant of the vast unfinished business before him, we endorse the re-election of Barack Obama.

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