Obama has been narrowing his targets for attack and derision ever since the 2008 campaign.
Everywhere he looks, he finds some group to hold up for public scorn, and that group has narrowed from the top 5% to the top 2% to the top 1% to Wall Street to the 400 or so people to be affected by the Buffett Rule
But as I predicted, even that group of 400 is too broad for a political flogging.
Now the Obama campaign is singling out a small number of donors to Mitt Romney’s campaign for public scorn, via Kimberley Strassel:
This past week, one of his campaign websites posted an item entitled “Behind the curtain: A brief history of Romney’s donors.” In the post, the Obama campaign named and shamed eight private citizens who had donated to his opponent. Describing the givers as all having “less-than-reputable records,” the post went on to make the extraordinary accusations that “quite a few” have also been “on the wrong side of the law” and profiting at “the expense of so many Americans.”
These are people like Paul Schorr and Sam and Jeffrey Fox, investors who the site outed for the crime of having “outsourced” jobs. T. Martin Fiorentino is scored for his work for a firm that forecloses on homes. Louis Bacon (a hedge-fund manager), Kent Burton (a “lobbyist”) and Thomas O’Malley (an energy CEO) stand accused of profiting from oil. Frank VanderSloot, the CEO of a home-products firm, is slimed as a “bitter foe of the gay rights movement.”
The intense need for Obama to run against a group has been evident for years. It goes beyond politics, it’s a part of his political persona.
Maybe Obama personally is a “nice guy” as Mitt Romney says, but he doesn’t play one in politics.
Barack Got Enemy I wrote on March 1, 2009. He still does.
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“Barack Got Enemy”
Count me in.
As to the sliming of GOP donors, I have a two word rebuttal…
John Corzine.
Let’s start with Corzine and do the same thing. If they want to play, so can we.
I MIGHT consider it…but I do not think that stink washes off…
Obama is projecting his “inner Nixon.”
But it’s really just part of the “Chicago Way”
I really think it goes beyond his political persona. It borders on how he seems to define himself…by the ever increasing list of enemies. Most teenagers outgrow the “stick it to the man” mentality as they realize its unhealthy to allow others to define who we are.
Healthy people can accept how other folks think and behave without giving them rent free space in their heads.
Obama uses this rather skewed worldview to attract other unhappy/unsatisfied people to persue an agenda of get even politics.
History is full of examples of leaders who thrived on scapegoats and imagined crisis.
with this little stunt by Obama I predict that Romney will drop the “he’s a nice guy” line from future speeches …
, he is going to do a McCain campaign, being careful NOT to pick a patriotic American for a runningmate this time out.
I hope so, but truthfully,I doubt it. The GOP wants to be “liked” rather than do the right thing.
True, these next few months are going to be muddy, bloody and down right scary as ‘The One’ pulls out a deck of cards with 52 aces, and throws everything, including the kitchen sink. Tricky Dick has nothing in comparison to what is about to happen.
And then there’s the unions…..
…and the media….
… And a tinder box about to ignite in Florida…
.. But most of all… Get ready to watch OWS make last year look like a tiny sparkler compared to the fireworks about to be unleashed.
DocWahala shudders to think about the storm to be unleashed when all of this comes together – ,no longer will it be said, “will it happen?”
Uh oh. When you’ve lost the breathless, melodramatic, RINO Obamabot columnists like Peggy Noonan … David Brooks can’t be too far behind:
“There is a growing air of incompetence around Mr. Obama’s White House.”
“Republicans feel an understandable anxiety about Mr. Obama’s coming campaign: It will be all slice and dice, divide and conquer, break the country into little pieces and pick up as many as you can. He’ll try to pick up college students one day and solidify environmentalist support the next, he’ll valorize this group and demonize the other.”
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:vRyJ9rRDnsUJ:online.wsj.com/article/declarations.html+peggy+noonan&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=firefox-a
I was just reading that article – here’s my favorite part:
Maybe the 2012 election is simpler than we think.
It will be about Mr. Obama.
Did you like the past four years? Good, you can get four more.
Do the president and his people strike you as competent? If so, you can renew his contract, and he will renew theirs.
If you don’t want to rehire him, you will look at the other guy. Does he strike you as credible, a possible president? Then you can hire him.
Republicans should cheer up.
I know I’ll be getting behind Romney – no 4 more years of Obama for me.
OOPS – that last sentence was mine, not Peggy Noonan. Her quote ends at “Republicans should cheer up.”
alan,
It’s a good column. I can read Peggy, but I can’t stand to watch her on TV.
When she was a toddler, my sister would cry every time she saw Florence Henderson on TV. Kinda like that, I guess.
Peggy has been “disillusioned” for some time now.
She coined the phrase, “Obama made it worse”.
Which, as short, concise statements go, is pretty hard to beat.
[…] Michelle Malkin, Stacy McCain, Andrew Malcolm, The Hot Air duo of Allahpundit and Ed Morrissey, William Jacobson, and of course […]
Please tell me that you understand that this sentence
“Maybe Obama personally is a “nice guy” as Mitt Romney says, but he doesn’t play one in politics.”
is a palindrome?
As in, switch the placement of Obama and Mitt Romney in the sentence and it applies equally?
Romney may be a nice guy personally but he doesn’t play one in politics.
His operatives, under his direction, are nasty, dirty, rotten campaigners.
Those of us who keep trying to tell folks that there’s precious little difference between Obama and Romney are speaking truth.
His folks have been doing his dirty work, under his direction, since at least 2008.
Romney is about Romney.
Not the country.
I sent an email to the prez offering to donate $100 to Mittens if he’d put me on his enemies list. I haven’t heard back for some reason.
I predict this will backfire like everything else he’s done to date.
Sounds like a new hash-tag waiting to get written…!!!
It may be a matter of his “persona” but that in turn is decided by the ideology and its needs and compulsions, which trace back to the beginning, to Jean-Paul Marat, perhaps the original Alinskyite. This is just Leftism. Obama is a pure Leftist. He was cleverly different in that he was smart enough to embed himself in the elite culture, among those who on one hand welcomed his coy radicalism, and on the other who would never be so gauche as to call him, a Harvard-educated black man, a radical.
No Reven .
This ‘leftism ‘ is unique. There are no parallels .
It is a truism that you guys must get to grips with.
You must develop a new analyses.
How so?
Of course, Obama’s leftism is “unique” in a sense of having adapted to the time. But the basic impulsions of Leftism are the same. Invariably, unalterably, endlessly. Both things must be understood: the history and basic unchanging impulses and needs of the Left, and how they adapt to their political moment. If you read Alinksy, it is simply a modernized version of Marat: discredit, dehumanize, destroy (politically, existentially, in whatever way one can) the character and viability of the “other”.
We don’t teach this anymore. Leftism is not taught or understood in this historical and psych-pathological sense. The average Republican in Washington doesn’t rally think in terms of the “Left” as a historical movement, or as a motivating ideology to the modern democrat. Why should he, unless he took this education upon himself. Once this is understood, then one is better able to realize how Obama works and makes it work, and the extent of the corruptions within the political system needed to conceal his ideology.
I’m hesitant to make (over)simplified historical comparisons, but have there ever been two presidents who more alike in terms of personality, temperament, and degree of insecurity than Obama and Woodrow Wilson? Two petty tyrants who have (or still) habitually exercised forms of “soft” demagoguery. And if they hadn’t been constrained to some extent by the “American system,” which both of them loathe(d), that soft demagoguery would have (or still will) turn into the hard version in a “progressive” minute.
In the future (OK, very near future) we will all get to be Emannuel Goldstein for two minutes, provided the President thinks he can get any votes out of it.
My guess is that when people refer to Obama as a “nice guy” they are referring to the public persona the man puts on for the adoring crowds, joking and crooning while his agents work behind the scenes to destroy this country. He adopts this as a a way to deflect criticism from the disastrous policies; it’s a shell game and lots of people are dumb enough to fall for it.
So Malkin is calling him out on that act he puts on, and upbraiding people for supporting it by calling him a “nice guy.”
He’s an actor. Nothing more.
I never understood the fuss about Richard Nixon . He looks a lot more honest than Obama or Clinton & a better executive than GWB.
In all my throwouts one of the few things that stayed is a little neon pink badge that says-
Nixon now more than ever. ( bought in a knickknack store in California about 79.)
It is one of my prized items. One day I thought – it will be right.
Pull back the Obama curtain and see who is there: Saul Alinsky, Bill Ayers, Rev. Wright. Fr. Pfleger, Rahm, Bill Maher, [drum roll] Joe Biden and so many other progressive socialists that My head hurts just trying to remember them all.