As Obama gets relentlessly pummled, some free campaign advice.

The last couple of weeks have seen some ominous developments in the presidential race as David Axelrod seems to have lost control of the political narrative and Romney surrogates have emerged to savagely bash and batter Obama like a pack of hallucinating Dingoes going after a wounded bandicoot. 

It’s interesting to watch as Tim Pawlenty and Jeb Bush and other prominent conservative voices serve up a strident defense and long-winded interpretations of republican orthodoxy and dogma in place of Romney, who can’t seem to keep his tassel loafer out of his mouth.  

In the aftermath of the Wisconsin recall election, he took to the stump with a wildly off base explanation of Scott Walker’s victory and a barely coherent attack on Obama’s call for an economic policy that stops the bleeding of government jobs and maintains funding for public safety workers, teachers and infrastructure.  His bleating speeches in front of Obama haters were reflexively cheered and applauded, until even Scott Walker himself had to demur and gently disagree with Mitt’s enthusiastic but empty headed ridicule of Obama for wanting to hire more cops and firemen.  Walker may be a union busting fascist but even he knows that, no matter how disgusted the public may be with union over-reach and sense of entitlement, they don’t want fewer cops on the street or people manning the fire stations around town or even teachers to try to educate their children. 

Aside from the consistent blame-the-awful-negro-for-everything strategy barely hidden beneath the surface of much of conservative super-PAC advertising there is also the repeated refrain of failure, failed policies, failed presidency, fail, fail, fail.  And the news that triggered this choking avalanche of overheated rhetoric is last month’s employment report, showing a net job creation of only 69,000 and, worse, extended a downward trend that wiped out the good vibes generated over the winter and which had made Obama look like an easy winner over whoever emerged from the savage slap-fight that the republican primaries devolved into.  

Axelrod seems to be content with a strategy of turning the other cheek, staying calm and carrying on, and that is admirable.  But in the face of this sustained onslaught of lies, hyperbole, distortion and more lies, being presidential and dignified will only keep you from utter disaster and that is not a very promising prescription for winning the election in November.  So in the interest of getting Obama re-elected and fending off the specter of living in a mind-numbing plutocracy for a significant portion of the rest of my life, I am going to help Dave focus on the task at hand and – more importantly – show him how to keep the rats from slowly and viciously eating his candidate’s face while he sleeps.

 Republicans calling Obama a failure while they actively work to obstruct his every initiative and make sure he is a failure is something that needs to be pointed out as the despicable treachery it is.  How can they say his policies failed if they never allowed his policies to be tried?  Isn’t that what elections are for?   If a president’s program is put in place and doesn’t work, that one thing.  Fair enough – let’s try something else.   But since the 2010 mid-term elections Obama’s initiatives have essentially been stopped dead in the water so how can they be deemed to have failed?  Of course, to the Right this is a purely rhetorical question; they’ve failed because we say they have failed and we’re damn proud of it too.

 So certain things need to be pointed out again and again and again over the next six months until even the most dull-witted Faux News consumer can’t help but have the audio running through his head.   Key points the Obama campaign needs to make repeatedly can be divided into three general categories; what I did, who tried to stop me, and who supports my program.   Let’s take the last one first.  

People who support the idea that there has been a fundamentally damaging shift in income and increase in the inequality of income distribution and feel that reforming the tax code to correct this will help the economy include Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel Prize winner, Paul Krugman, Nobel Prize winner and Robert Reich, Labor Secretary under Bill Clinton and professor of economics at UC Berkeley who helped craft economic policy the last time we had a surplus in the Federal budget.   All three of these able men have written that the obsession over the deficit while simultaneously cutting taxes and spending is exactly the wrong thing to do to rev up the economy.   

On the other side we have Grover Norquist, former Nixon-youth, earnest supporter of Ollie North and hater of taxation in any form with or without representation, corporate water-boy Paul Ryan, who has a BA from Miami of Ohio and a Delta Tau Delta pledge pin and whose mysteriously vague budget plan has been enthusiastically endorsed by Mitt Romney for its merciless stripping of any public benefit involving tax money in favor of more corporate largess and assistance to the uber-wealthy, and Michelle Bachman, who has voices in her head and not much else.   The Congressional Budget Office has concluded that Ryan’s budget proposal would be a disaster in terms of public policy for the vast majority of Americans and that Romney’s plan would vastly increase the size of the deficit boogie-man which is allegedly the inspiration for the Right’s current economic prescription.  I think Obama’s team wins this one – they just need to go out and repeat the correct prescription relentlessly.  And they’re not…

Now as to what he can point to as significant achievements, there is a long list and, in one of the many perplexing developments of Obama’s campaign to date, they seem to have a very difficult time coherently laying them out in any kind of easily understood narrative.   I cannot understand either the difficulty or the reluctance to highlight these accomplishments other than the certain knowledge that they will illicit immediate and fiery ridicule – much like the orgy of slash and burn ridicule being ladled onto Obama for an innocuous but clumsy comment attempting to highlight the fact that public sector job loss is an anvil-like drag on the economy due to the deficit cutting frenzy in congress but the private sector is continuing to create new jobs.   As a matter of fact, the private sector has created 3.7 million new jobs since the president took office – the strangulation of the public sector has lost 500,000. 

Bob Cesca, of The Hufffington Post, laid out the balance of the positive side of the ledger quite concisely recently so, rather than re-inventing the wheel;  "GDP is growing steadily, though still sluggish. Jobs are being added every month. Unemployment is slowly declining. The deficit is shrinking. Middle and working class taxes are lower. Inflation is nearly an entire percentage point below the average that began in the middle 1920s (long term average is 3.43%, while our current rate is 2.3% and dropping). The price of oil dropped below $90 last week and stockpiles are huge -- the highest level in 22 years. New home sales are up by 10 percent over a year ago. Moody's Analytics called this a "genuine rebound" in housing, and mortgage rates remain tantalizingly low. Consumer debt is declining and corporate profits -- despite the president's false reputation as a profit-hating commie -- are nearly double what they were in the boom times of 1999. 9.75 percent at the end of 2011, compared with 5.7 percent in the final quarter of 1999. The Dow has doubled since the deepest, darkest days of the Great Recession and some analysts suggest that the DJIA should be around 20,000, not 13,000, given all of these positive indicators."  That seems pretty clear – why aren’t they able to put this into a speech to counter-act all of the determined republican dissemination of fear and doom and failure?  Obama’s administration has the lowest annualized rate of growth in government spending of any modern president – look it up.

And the third – and, I think, crucial leg of this stool is to highlight the willful obstructionism of the republican party as an institution since the day he was elected.  As a matter of fact, the plan to fight everything Obama proposed probably started among the pale underbelly of the republican party the day a delirious John McCain proudly announced Sarah Palin as his running mate.   The full extent of this traitorous behavior is almost too much to get one’s arms around.  But just to scratch the surface, on January 20^th, 2009, a meeting was held in Washington and attended by the leading lights of the republican congressional delegation, along with Newt Gingrich.  At this meeting it was decided that they would do everything in their power to sabotage Obama at every turn, regardless of the consequences.   They vowed to challenge the democrats on every single bill and show unyielding and complete opposition to every Obama policy proposal.   The same cabal of republicans who supported all of the Bush/Cheney policies leading to the economic crisis; the Bush tax cuts, war in Iraq and Afghanistan with no way to pay for it, and completely unregulated financial markets ,now reversed themselves, even opposing Obama's national security initiatives.  According to the Dailey Kos,

“Senators: Jim DeMint, Jon Kyl, Tom Coburn, John Ensign, and Bob Corker have:

- Filibustered more Bills (over 300) than any Congress combined in US History.
- Voted NO on every single piece of Legislation brought to the Floor including:

NO on Al Franken's Anti-Rape Amendment,
NO on Lilly Ledbetter,
NO on Fair Pay Act,
NO on Anti-Outsourcing Bill (2010)”

In addition, there’s this, also from The Dailey Kos report; “Representatives: Paul Ryan, Eric Cantor, Kevin McCarthy, Rep. Pete Sessions, Jeb Hensarling, Pete Hoekstra and Dan Lungren have voted NO on every single piece of Legislation including:

NO on increasing FEMA during natural disasters

This opposition seems almost unbelievable coming from the same people who form a cock-a-mamie Greek Chorus filling the airwaves every day with incessant criticism and the idea that Obama’s policies are ruining the economy.  Sadly it’s a strategy that seems to be working.  The last week or so has seen the media – perhaps sensing Obama’s vulnerability – practically teeing up questions for these right-wing liars and handing them the driver.  And there seems to be a determined attempt to rehabilitate the Bush family's image.  Even as George the Dull has the lowest post-presidency approval rating of the modern era - and well deserved - brother Jeb goes on Charlie Rose and defends him as best he can for god knows what reason.  Poppy is treated like some kind of weird elder statesman instead of the sinister criminal he really is.  It's all part of the same attempt to convince American voters that even the foulest examples of republican duplicity and irresponsibility are "good guys".   

If Obama’s campaign people were able to effectively counter all of this blather with a sustained response it wouldn’t be so frightening.  But they have seemed remarkably inept and unfocused and have ceded the high ground to Mitt Fucking Romney of all people, the most vacuous, empty, unprincipled republican nominee I can ever remember who wanders bug-eyed from event to event, tie carefully loosened, spewing the chosen nonsense of the day with impunity.   

Meanwhile it was reported today that republican-supporting PACs, billionaires and supporting organizations have exceeded the fund raising of their democratic counterparts by 8 to 1, virtually insuring that their message will continue to prevail unless we all get off our asses and do something about it.  I, for one, intend to do just that.