February 22, 2012

Obama's "Romney Playbook" Refutiated

Many election analysts have noted that President Barack H. Obama, who appears to want another term, has worked with his grand viziers, his mullahs, his Council of Experts, and assorted hatchet peeps to develop two distinct election playbooks, one for each of the two most likely nominees:

• For Rick Santorum, the Obamunists plot to smear him as a religious fanatic who wants to erect a theocracy on American soil, and as an ultra-social-conservative lunatic who wants to disenfranchise the entire female sex, burn gays at the stake, and reinstate official government racism, if not the return of slavery itself.

  Alas, Santorum plays right into this strategy by his increasingly hysterical denunciations of Obama as "not a Christian;" he may well not be a Christian -- I think his religion is Progressivism; but as electoral strategy, attacking your opponent as irreligious is not calculated to reassure the mushy middle that you're fit to serve as POTUS.

• For Mitt Romney, their scheme is both simpler and more complex: The Kingpin of gangster government intends to "smear" Romney for being a wealthy man.

  This is simpler, in that nobody can deny that Mitt Romney would be the richest GOP presidential nominee of all time (that is, since the Republican Party was founded in 1854); he's worth between $190 and $250 million. (JFK -- Kerry, not Kennedy -- is probably the richest nominee ever; but he doesn't count as a counterexample, since he's a Progressivist Democrat, hence by definition busy saving the world, man!)

  But the strategy is also more complex, in that Obama must show not only that Romney is rich, but that there is something disreputable about this; and he must convince tens of millions of voters who are not already "Occupiers" and "99 percenters."

I don't really care about Santorum's response to the inevitable Obamic attacks; I doubt he'll be the nominee; and if he is, having seen him in action now, I believe he'll win only if the economic climate is such that any Republican would win... a pious hope, but unlikely.

Thus, Obama will be forced to pivot his slanderous traducements from "evil conservative!" to "one percenter!", and he's stuck with trying to explain to the American people why multi-millionaire Republicans like Romney are inherently unfit to command, while multi-millionaire Democrats like Al Gore and John Kerry (and Barack Obama) are inevitably great leaders.

And that last is the chink in Obama's playbook, meaning no disrespect to Jeremy Lin; it lies within Romney's power, if not within his will, to utterly destroy that meme of attack -- or better, to drive it right back into Obama's court with an overhead smash. He can! But will he?

Will a Capitalist nation (sort of) implicitly reject anybody who's rich? Egad, I hope not; I can only hope that America has not sunk so low that it treats wealth itself as suspect, and sees liberal Fascism as its cure. Rather, I believe Americans admire achievement; and I believe they understand that wealth "inequality" is precisely what drives the economy, while enforced income equality would kill it... just as water that is all at the same level can do no work: Hydraulics requires some of the water to be higher than the rest; that's what makes the waterwheel, or the turbine, go round and round.

Romney need never apologize for his wealth; instead, he needs to say something along these lines:

My opponent accuses me of being successful and wealthy -- "rich" is the term he uses, I believe. All right, I confess; I am wealthy; I am rich. And you now how I got to be that way? By following the American dream.

My friends, I inherited a lot of money from my dad, George Romney, who worked for decades in the automobile industry in Detroit, Michigan. I also inherited a first-rate education. I kept the education, but I gave my entire inheritance to my alma mater... not because there's anything wrong with money or with parents passing along the fruits of their labors to their kids, but because I wanted to be my own man, to see what I could accomplish on my own. So I can honestly say I've earned every dollar I have.

Unlike my opponent, nobody gave me a suspiciously huge book contract when I was an obscure law student at Harvard; when I was an obscure law student at Harvard, I was simultaneously an obscure business student at Harvard; and I didn't have time to write a dream book about my father, anyway... or put my name on some radical professor's book, as the case may be.

I also never got a sweetheard land deal from a lobbyist and campaign fundraiser who was later convicted of fraud, bribery, and money laundering. So you see, I didn't have the advantages growing up that my opponent did.

Instead, I worked hard, played by the rules, and kept faith with my family, my friends, my competitors, and my God. And I succeeded, as so many others have done before and after, some more, some less. I thank God everyday for the United States of America, for liberty, and for the Capitalism that allows not only the privileged but the downtrodden to rise to heights limited only by their own talent, drive, persistence, and their refusal to accept artificial limits on achievement. Just ask Justice Clarence Thomas.

My opponent is a great believer in limiting achievements. Four years ago, all he could talk about was vague "hope and change," and how his presidency would heal the Earth, calm the oceans, and how the lamb would lie down with the lion. A pocketful of stimuluses, ObamaCares, and trillions of wasted spending later, not too many folks think they're better off now than four years ago. Except the lion, who got a nice rack of lamb on the deal.

This time, all my opponent can talk about are the few minor things he did that more or less worked, tiny islands in a vast sea of failure, diminished expectations, and a long, steady collapse of the American dream and of America itself... if we let him.

Let's not.

Yeah, I'm rich. And I want all of you here, everyone hearing these words, to become rich too -- or to write the great American novel (without a ghostwriter), or invent a molecule-sized computer, or design the most beautiful shopping mall ever built, or become a Justice of the United States Supreme Court. Whatever your dream happens to be, never be ashamed or apologetic about succeeding. Be joyous! Be proud! I'm proud of the companies I helped save when I worked at Bain Capital and made a pile of money; and I kick myself for the companies that we couldn't save.

But that's Capitalism: In order to earn the right to succeed, you must accept the right to fail. Failure can be painful, but it teaches us to do it better next time.

There have been times I've failed, and times I've succeeded. On the whole, I like winning better than losing, not just for me but for everybody.

I guess that makes me both a Republican and an American!

All right, all right, I got a little carried away; but I was having fun cheering and defending achievement, wealth, and Capitalism with joyous abandon; I never apologize for anything but not doing my best.

Barack Obama is my political antiparticle, forever begging forgiveness for the achievements of his betters.

I reckon that makes him a liberal.

Cross-posted on Hot Air's rogues' gallery...

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, February 22, 2012, at the time of 2:19 AM

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