Losing campaigns have a certain feel to them: They go negative hard, try out new messaging very late in the game, hype issues that only their core supporters are focused on, and try to turn non-gaffes and minor slip-ups by their opponents into massive, election-turning scandals. Think of John McCain’s desperate hope that elevating Joe the Plumber would change the shape of the 2008 race, and you have the template for how tin-eared and desperate a losing presidential campaign often sounds — and ever since the first debate cost Obama his air of inevitability, he and his surrogates have sounded more like McCain did with Joe the Plumber than like a typical incumbent president on his way to re-election. A winning presidential campaign would not normally be hyping non-issues like Big Bird and “binders full of women” in its quest for a closing argument, or rolling out a new spin on its second-term agenda with just two weeks left in the race, or pushing so many advertising chips into dishonest attacks on its rival’s position on abortion. A winning presidential campaign would typically be talking about the issues that voters cite as most important — jobs, the economy, the deficit — rather than trying to bring up Planned Parenthood and PBS at every opportunity. A winning presidential campaign would not typically have coined the term “Romnesia,” let alone worked it into their candidate’s speeches.
Ross Douthat’s Aura of Deceit
Ross Douthat has a posting, here, titled Obama’s Aura of Defeat. According to Ross, Obama’s campaign is sucking wind:
So, Obama’s gonna lose, huh? Well, not exactly. This sloppy, tacky campaign “may just be the way that Obama has to win, if win he does. But if so, it won’t look like the winning re-election campaigns we’ve seen in the recent past, and that reporters have grown accustomed to covering.” This is just Ross’s pissy way of pissing on the President’s campaign—which, far from being “tin-eared and desperate,” has been shrewd and effective, except for the night when the President forgot to show up for his own debate. What Ross is really saying is that the President doesn’t look like a loser, he looks like a winner.
