The Amateur (29 page)

Authors: Edward Klein

Axelrod’s update of the Clifford strategy is aimed at solidifying the Democratic Party base, reclaiming the middle, and dividing the country through class warfare against “millionaires,” “fat cats” and “the owners of yachts and corporate jets.” There are, however, several problems with this approach. To begin with, despite the conventional wisdom, Truman’s campaign against the Republicans in Congress was not the main factor in his come-from-behind victory against Republican Thomas Dewey in 1948. The economy had a lot more to do with it. The unemployment rate in 1947 and 1948 was a more than acceptable 3.5 percent, and the American economy was growing at a sizzling 6.8 percent in the first half of 1948. Compare that with Obama’s situation today, when unemployment is above 8 percent, and the economy is growing at an anemic 2 to 3 percent.

Second, in 1948, the Democratic Party was still the dominant force in American politics. Franklin Roosevelt was dead only three years, and many Americans still had fond memories of him and his New Deal. The Republicans, by contrast, were burdened by the albatross of “Hooverism”—a reputation for being indifferent to the plight of the poor and the struggling middle class. About 40 percent of the country identified with the Democrats back then. Today, only 33 percent identify as Democrats—and that number is declining all the time.

Third, “If Obama were a Republican, he could win with this sort of strategy: Repeat your party’s most orthodox positions, and then rip your opponent to shreds,” writes columnist David Brooks. “Republicans can win a contest between an orthodox Republican and an orthodox Democrat because they have the [mistrust] in government issue on their side. Democrats do not have that luxury. The party of [big] government cannot win an orthodox vs. orthodox campaign when [only] 15 percent of Americans trust government.... It’s suicide.”

Fourth, a strategy of class warfare threatens to damage the coalition that Obama put together in 2008. “The president won the lion’s share of everyone making under $35,000,” notes Mark Penn, a Democratic pollster.

He then did very poorly with middle class voters, but he got a remarkable half of the 26 percent of voters whose households make over $100,000. Never before have so many voters fallen into that category and never before had so many of them voted Democratic. Even [a majority of] the so-called top 1 percent making over $200,000 ... voted for Obama. Without similar support from those upper-income voters, Obama has no way to recreate the numbers that sailed him to victory.... What was so brilliant about the Obama 2008 election was that it brought together the upper and lower classes in a common mission of hope and change. Today, he is smashing apart that coalition....

When voters are asked in 2012, “Are you better off today than you were four years ago?” they can give only one possible answer: “No!” Therefore, the only way Obama can win a second term in the White House is by diverting attention from his incompetence and sliming his Republican opponent.

“Over $15 trillion in debt,” writes Joe Hagan in
New York Magazine
, “[more than 8] percent unemployment, yawning structural problems, a severely gridlocked government—Obama is in a box, and there is only one way out of this box: the low road.”

Obama knows this, and he is gearing up for a campaign that will in no way resemble his inspirational “hope and change” campaign in 2008. This time around, his goal is to raise an overwhelming $1 billion campaign chest, unleash super-PACs backed by the unlimited financial resources of such leftwing billionaires as George Soros, and get down in the mud and wage the ugliest campaign in modern American history.

“It’s a deeply pessimistic time,” says Steve Schmidt, who served as senior strategist to the presidential campaign of Senator John McCain in 2008. “Neither party is talking honestly or directly about the country’s problems and challenges. It’s going to be an extremely mean-spirited campaign, filled with nonstop attack ads. The whole focus will be on disqualifying the alternative, not on the country’s future. It will be very much the opposite of the hope-and-change theme of four years ago.”

Obama’s strategy will be to convince voters that
he
isn’t the issue—that his Republican opponent is the issue—and that, as France’s Louis XV famously said, “After me, the flood.” The idea will be to frighten voters away from the “scary” Republican alternative.

“This is a choice about who we are and what we stand for,” Obama declared, “and whoever wins this next election is going to set the template for this country for a long time to come.... The alternative I think is an approach to government that would fundamentally cripple America in meeting the challenges of the 21
^stCentury.”

Cripple America
. Strong words that suggest a Republican president would devastate, ruin, and destroy the United States. One can just imagine David Axelrod sitting in his war room in Chicago and screening the infamous 1964 anti-Barry Goldwater TV commercial, which was created for President Lyndon Johnson by Tony Schwartz of Doyle Dane Bernbach, and which showed a little girl picking petals from a daisy while an ominous-sounding male voice counted down to the launch of a nuclear missile. As the camera slowly zoomed in, her eye was filled with an atomic mushroom cloud. The implication was that Goldwater would start a nuclear war and
cripple America
, destroy it. A voiceover from Johnson stated, “These are the stakes! To make a world in which all of God’s children can live, or to go into the dark. We must love each other, or we must die.” Then another voiceover, this one from sportscaster Chris Schenkel, said, “Vote for President Johnson on November 3. The stakes are too high for you to stay home.”

It’s a pretty safe bet that David Axelrod will try to devise an updated version of the “Daisy Girl” commercial in 2012, and that Barack Obama’s mantra will be:
The stakes are too high for you to vote for that frightening Republican.

“[Obama] is determined to make the election a contest between two policy alternatives, deliberately omitting the issue of competence,” says Dick Morris. “He’s like an incompetent employee hoping to save his job by advocating a broad-based shift in his corporation’s philosophy in the hopes that his bosses will ignore his own poor performance.”

To win reelection in 2012, Barack Obama must divert the country’s attention from his record of incompetence and amateurism. He doesn’t want to remind people that America lost its triple-A credit rating on his watch—a downgrade that Republican Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina called a firing offense.