U.S. 2012 Election

[Rifleman62]

I noticed that the sign was sponsored by a guy from Gainesville , Texas . Gainesville is about 45 miles North of Dallas and was recently voted "MOST PATRIOTIC TOWN IN THE NATION" by USA Today.

 

[observor 69]

Very interesting, in our country I think this sign could lead to an arrest. Amazing the level of division and emotion between the various political, and even amongst, groups in that country.

 

[Rifleman62]

Very interesting, in our country I think this sign could lead to an arrest.

Who are you kidding? If the NDP, Liberals. or the Greens put up a similar sign against the current government do you think charges would be laid against free speech?

How about a bill board from The Council of Canadians?

 

[The Bread Guy]

Very interesting, in our country I think this sign could lead to an arrest.

Who are you kidding? If the NDP, Liberals. or the Greens put up a similar sign against the current government do you think charges would be laid against free speech?

How about a bill board from The Council of Canadians?

I agree it wouldn't necessarily result in an arrest here, but if someone, say, Tweeted/blogged that same wording after, for example, a critical Tweet/mention about the president, I wouldn't be surprised if the Secret Service gave that Tweeter a call to find out more about how an incumbent president should be "removed" the same way the SEALS "removed" Bin Laden.

 

[a_majoor]

When you want to know why the campaign is so negative, you don't need to look very far:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/michael-gerson-obamas-betrayal/2012/08/16/f165cc14-e7d9-11e1-8487-64e4b2a79ba8_story.html

Obama’s betrayal
By Michael Gerson,
Published: August 16The Washington Post

In the innocent, bygone days of February, President Obama told NBC News that the campaign would get negative against him, but provided this assurance: “I think that you will be able to see how we conduct ourselves in the campaign. I think it will be consistent with how I conducted myself in 2008 and hopefully how I have conducted myself as president of the United States.”

Not since Gary Hart urged reporters to follow him around because “they’d be very bored” has an assurance been more of an indictment. The Obama campaign has targeted and intimidated Republican donors on an Internet enemies list. It has engaged in the juvenile mockery of Mitt Romney’s singing. It has suggested, without evidence, that Romney may have committed the felony of falsifying Federal Election Commission documents. It has speculated, without proof, that Romney has avoided paying taxes. When Joe Biden engages in racially charged hyperbole, he is awkwardly but accurately reflecting the spirit of the 2012 Obama campaign.

But the most vivid accusation (made by a closely associated PAC and embraced by the campaign itself) is that Romney’s ruthless business practices were responsible for the closing of a firm, the loss of a couple’s health insurance and thus the death of a woman from cancer. Except that Romney wasn’t connected to the closing of the firm, the woman continued to have health insurance from another source and her cancer was diagnosed five years after the plant shut down.

Which represents the crossing of an ethical line. If the conduct of the Obama campaign team were universalized, candidates would no longer require any evidence to accuse one another of complicity in a death. To accept this as a new political norm would be to define defamation down.

Obama’s defenders assure us that everyone does it. But not everyone does this. It is one thing to exploit a misstatement; another to exploit a tragedy. It is one thing to mischaracterize a federal waiver; another to accuse an opponent of being the Angel of Death.

For the Obama campaign, this is not an aberration; it is a culmination. The demonization of Romney is a main element of its strategy, pursued by Obama’s closest associates and former employees, not by loosely affiliated partisan groups. Deniability is not even remotely plausible, but it doesn’t remotely matter. Even when exposed, the Obama campaign never retracts, never apologizes — convinced that the news cycle will quickly erase inconvenient memories.

It seems to be working, at least for the moment. Obama’s recent polling gains are mainly explainable by Romney’s rising negatives, particularly among independents. Even as political journalists point out distortions by the Obama campaign, they tend to praise its boldness, coordination and momentum. And each new controversy succeeds in distracting attention from Obama’s economic stewardship.

There is, however, some collateral damage. Obama increased the turnout of young voters in 2008 by more than 2 million over the previous election. But the level of trust by young people in public institutions, including the presidency, has been declining. Youth interest in politics has waned. Some of this is a function of understandable economic discontent. But apart from the most partisan, what young voters have had their sights and spirits lifted by the current campaign? Having introduced a generation to political idealism, Obama seems intent on taking it back.

Ronald Reagan expressed distrust of government while paradoxically improving its image and standing. Obama has placed boundless faith in government while trust in public institutions has declined to all-time lows. It is the legacy of Obama’s liberalism: expanding the state while helping discredit the political process.

The Obama campaign is veering toward antinomianism. Since it regards its own motives as pure, it feels it can dispense with the normal rules of accuracy, civility and decency. So we get the political methods of Spiro Agnew combined with the moral self-regard of Woodrow Wilson. It is not an attractive mixture.

Speaking in Canton, Ohio, a week before the 2008 election, Obama said, “Some of you may be cynical and fed up with politics. A lot of you may be disappointed and even angry with your leaders. You have every right to be. But despite all of this, I ask of you what has been asked of Americans throughout our history. I ask you to believe.”

I am admittedly a sucker for rhetorical idealism. But it can’t be a small thing, a typical thing, a trivial thing, to ask for belief and then betray it.

michaelgerson@washpost.com

 

[observor 69]

A little context on Michael Gerson:

Prior to joining the Bush Administration, he was a senior policy advisor with The Heritage Foundation, a conservative public policy research institution.[5] He also worked at various times as an aide to Indiana Senator Dan Coats and a speechwriter for the Presidential campaign of Bob Dole before briefly leaving the political world to cover it as a journalist for U.S. News & World Report.[6] Gerson also worked at one point as a ghostwriter for Charles Colson.[7]
In early 1999, Karl Rove recruited Gerson for the Bush campaign.



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Gerson

 

[Brad Sallows]

Notwithstanding his potential for partisanship, Gerson is correct.

There may be a lot of misrepresentations, misunderstandings, outright lies, and other invective generated about Romney's and Ryan's plans, but at least people are talking about actual policy proposals.

I know the Obama campaign has policy promises up on its website, but...

If there is any substance there, Obama and Biden don't seem to talk much about it.

If the candidates are talking about it, reporters don't seem to be reporting much of it.

If some of it is surfacing in small publications and behind the "front" pages, the prominent bloggers and commentators are not dissecting it (in either fair or unfair terms).

What the Obama campaign and its supporters seem to be executing is a campaign chiefly of character assassination and fearmongering.  It is more than peculiar that a Chicago pol can attack two bland, inoffensive gentlemen, and the focus remains on trying to wring wrongdoing out of the latter rather than former.

 

[tomahawk6]

When you cant run on your record,you obfuscate.

 

[cupper]

And all the GOP supporters are pissed off because the strategy is working.

Romney has so far run a campaign that is suffering from the political equivalent of ED. And all the Viagra in the world will not get it up.

They bring in Ryan to strengthen his cred with the base, but at the same time castrate him by not allowing him to talk about the details. And Romney can't seem to decide if he's going to promote the Ryan plan, his own plan, or just not talk about any plan.

And the continue to spout off proven lies and misrepresentations as absolute truths.

He has to stop campaigning for the votes from the right, and start running for votes from the middle, or he will not get to 270 in November.

Does anyone remember the last time Romney has talked about the economy?

 

[cupper]

And I'm going to enjoy the next three weeks back in Canada getting away from this election crap. k:

 

[Haletown]

And all the GOP supporters are pissed off because the strategy is working.



Does anyone remember the last time Romney has talked about the economy?

Yesterday.

 

[a_majoor]

Now Governor Romney and Congressman Ryan have another issue to talk about; Medicare reform. (That is actually a subset of the economy, so you can chalk that in the "Talking about the economy" multiple times a day from now on  ) Thr article points out the Dem's assault on the Republicans Medicare proposals are baseless and provide a very clear line of attack against the Administration's record and plans:

http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/give_em_hell_mitt_fight_obama_smears_bKrR6k0wvrMa25cIQbhgBJ

Give ’em hell, Mitt: fight Obama’s smears

On Medicare, the Romney campaign is borrowing the strategic logic of a long-ago military legend.

Taking command of the French Ninth Army in 1914 as it retreated before the Germans, Marshal Ferdinand Foch uttered his immortal words: “Hard pressed on my right. My center is yielding. Impossible to maneuver. Situation excellent. I attack.”

The best Mitt Romney ad of the campaign is the current spot on President Obama’s cuts to Medicare. It points out that the president took $700 billion from Medicare to fund “ObamaCare,” robbing one unsustainable entitlement to create a new one. The ad is truthful, unadorned and — for any senior who feels protective of Medicare — damning.

In the Medicare debate, schoolyard rules apply: Punch the bully in the mouth twice as hard.

It’s impossible to have a reasonable discussion with people who insist you are going to “kill people” (Paul Krugman’s words). If Vice President Biden hasn’t yet said that the Romney-Ryan Medicare premium support plan will lead to the reinstitution of chattel slavery, just wait until the next time he gets worked up before a largely African-American audience.

Never before, though, have Democrats passed the largest Medicare cuts in history immediately prior to launching their tried-and-true assault. This time, it is a case of the pot calling the kettle a danger to America’s seniors.

Confronted with Obama’s Medicare cuts, Democrats and their friends in the media resort to denial.

On “Meet the Press” the other day, I asked Rachel Maddow if she supported the $700 billion in cuts, and she simply wouldn’t say. Here was the Oxford-educated pride of liberal punditry professing to have no opinion on a primary means of funding what she considers a glorious legislative achievement.

Others pooh-pooh the significance of the cuts. They supposedly hit only “nonessential services.” This may be the first time in the debate over entitlements that Democrats have deemed anything related to Medicare “nonessential.”

What Democrats mean is that $156 billion of the cuts fall on the Medicare Advantage program. They have always hated this feature because it gives seniors access to private-sector coverage options. But seniors like it.

The Obama cuts also rely on grinding, year-after-year reductions in payments to doctors and other providers. This is a way to maintain that there are technically no changes in “benefits,” though access to and quality of care inevitably will be affected.

No one concerned with the health of Medicare would go about it in this fashion. But “Obamacare” was helter-skelter legislating, a desperate attempt to make the numbers temporarily add up.

Medicare’s actuaries consistently sound the alarm about the consequences. A May 2012 report by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services said, “The large reductions in Medicare payments rates to physicians would likely have serious implications for beneficiary access to care.”

It also noted the punishing effect on hospitals, nursing facilities and home-health agencies, which “would have to withdraw from providing services to Medicare beneficiaries, merge with other provider groups or shift substantial portions of Medicare costs to their non-Medicare, non-Medicaid payers.”

Oh, is that all? If a Republican president had done this, The New York Times would have called for impeachment proceedings.

Is the Republicans’ counter-assault on Medicare hypocritical? No. How — not whether — to restrain Medicare is the question. The Democratic approach, now and in the future, is blunt-force price controls. Republicans want to get savings through competition and choice.

This is how the popular Medicare prescription-drug program works. The cost of the program is 40 percent below projections, as James Capretta of the Ethics and Public Policy Center points out, and the $30 per-month premium is only $6 more than in 2006.

Even if it stays on offense, the Romney campaign is on perilous ground with Medicare. But there is no heading back. Best to take more inspiration from old Ferdinand Foch: “A battle won is a battle which we will not acknowledge to be lost.”

comments.lowry@nationalreview.com

Read more: http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/give_em_hell_mitt_fight_obama_smears_bKrR6k0wvrMa25cIQbhgBJ#ixzz23wCNf6ag

 

[tomahawk6]

It has been said that Medicare is the third rail of American politics. Seniors vote its that simple. Medicare reform is necessary but no one wants to tackle the problem. Over time the benefits will be reduced and the retirement point will be pushed back. Some wags think that Obamacare will solve the problem by killing off the old lessening the burden on the program.If media reports are accurate this is already happening in the UK.

 

[a_majoor]

I'm not entirely sure I understand how Twitter is supposed to revolutionize politics. Issues like the economy and Medicare reform simply cannot be reduced to 140 character texts (it's bad enough when trying to explain things on a TV 30 second soundbite; I actually enjoy watching political stuff on YouTube or reading articles in Atlantic, the Economist or National Review since there is more time to get into the meat of things).

OTOH, perhaps the very lack of detail is what makes Twitter interesting to politicians; people like President Obama or Premier McGuinty are probably quite pleased that no one can press them for detailed answers on Twitter </cynical>.

I'm also wondering if the people promoting Twitter even understand what is going on; the "Arab Spring" model does not seem like a good fit to me, since there you had an old and established "underground" movement (the Muslim Brotherhood) using social media tools to enhance a deep and well organized ground game. Contrast this with the loss of the Iranian "Green Revolution"; they had the Internet but lacked the depth, organization, logistics or even the "safe zones" that insurgencies need to succeed. Social media tools got them farther than they otherwise would have gotten, but they still could not achieve their goals. China used the "Great Firewall" and the formidable power of the State security apparatus to snuff out even the first flicker of the putative "Jasmine Revolution"; even if it was only a rumor that is all it ever remained.

This article talks about how Twitter is being used in the US election:

http://news.nationalpost.com/2012/08/18/obama-romney-twitter/

The head of Twitter’s governmental team has just the thing for the next age of political interaction
Matt Hartley | Aug 18, 2012 4:08 PM ET
More from Matt Hartley | @thehartley

Adam Sharp, head of Twitter's government, news and social innovation team at Twitter's headquarters in San Francisco, California on Wednesday, March 1, 2012. He is responsible for helping bring power brokers in Washington, D.C. (where he is based) into the Twitter world, working with folks on both sides of the aisle as well as non profits, religious groups and media organizations

About 676,000 people can claim U.S. President Barack Obama follows their tweets and observations on Twitter.

But Adam Sharp is one of the few to have the most powerful man in the world literally looking over his shoulder while posting 140-character messages to the social networking site.

Last July, Mr. Sharp was in the White House’s Green Room preparing for a Twitter Town Hall with the president, when he heard a distinctive voice: “All right, I’m ready to Tweet!” Mr. Obama said as he bounded into the room.

While the president’s staff and Twitter employees scrambled to finish setting up the Town Hall, Mr. Sharp looked up to see Mr. Obama standing over him, watching the messages rolling through Tweetdeck on his computer screen.

“He understands Twitter. There are a lot of institutional challenges to the president tweeting himself regularly, but he gets it,” said Mr. Sharp, head of Twitter’s government, news and social innovation team.

The same cannot be said for many other politicians in the U.S. capital, where tradition and bureaucracy tend to slow the speed of progress. But Twitter believes it can burst the bubble of Washington and reinvigorate the political world.

The White House ✔@whitehouse in order to reduce the deficit,what costs would you cut and what investments would you keep - bo
6 Jul 11 ReplyRetweetFavorite

Tweets from the White House and Barack Obama accounts with “—bo” at the end are from Obama himself
It will take the likes of Mr. Sharp to introduce an older generation to a social media tool that can connect voters and politicians, and which has been adopted in other parts of the world, manifesting itself in phenomena like the Arab Spring.

“A politician on [Capitol] Hill is not going to take to this as naturally and organically because they’re very much digital immigrants. [What] you had in the Arab Spring were digital natives, and they didn’t need to have the tools explained to them because it was a part of their DNA,” said Jennifer Evans, CEO of Toronto’s Sequentia Environics, a social media marketing and consulting company.

What the Arab Spring represented was an organic movement, [while] with this, the question is how do you build something you can use, even if you don’t have that natural inclination to use the tools yourself?
Mr. Obama and his staff have maintained a keen interest in Twitter ever since he entered the White House in January 2009. He was one of the first high-profile political adopters of Twitter — he joined the service in March 2007 — and it played a key role in his 2008 campaign.

Today, he is the most-followed political figure in the world and the No. 6 most-followed person on Twitter (Lady Gaga is No. 1).

Now, four years later, on the eve of another U.S. presidential election, Twitter is no longer a curiosity reserved for early adopters in Silicon Valley and political elites, but a worldwide communications network Mr. Sharp believes will one day be woven into the fabric of the U.S. political process.

Twitter is already playing a role here, whether it’s instant polling of voters at home during the South Carolina Republican debate this year, or White House communications director Daniel Pfeiffer using the service to indirectly inform the world Osama bin Laden had been killed by tweeting “POTUS to address the nation tonight at 10:30 PM Eastern Time,” once rumours about the terrorist leader began flying last May.

“This is the year Twitter has really emerged as the real-time index to politics,” Mr. Sharp said.

For many politicians who work with him, Twitter offers a sort of nostalgia, a return to the one-on-one relationships between voters and elected officials.

“Politics used to be, ‘Shake the hand, look them in the eye and ask them for their vote,’ but the country got too big for that,” he said.

“A lot of members have indicated that their favourite thing about Twitter is that it gets back to that old-school model of being able to have a direct relationship with their constituents. To have a conversation with them, to engage with them, to answer their questions and be a party to these conversations that — when you’re in the bubble of Washington, D.C. — you can be sheltered from.”

As head of Twitter’s government, news and social innovation team, Mr. Sharp is the San Francisco-based company’s man on Capitol Hill. This means he has the job of training politicians and their staffers, along with non-profit organizations and any other members of the political machine in the ins and outs of Twitter.

During the last presidential campaign, Twitter was significantly smaller, its reach limited to early adopters, political elites and media. On election day in 2008, about 1.8 million tweets were sent. Today, Twitter relays that many messages in a matter of minutes.

But despite its growth as a medium — the site boasts more than 140 million active users sending 340 million tweets a day — estimates say fewer than one in five Americans use it.

“What it really represents is a vanguard,” Ms. Evans said. “You have the influentials on Twitter; the media and the early adopters … It’s a smaller audience, but it’s a very influential one and one that has a lot of impact on public perception.

“When media outlets are covering the campaign now, Twitter is a part of their commentary. So it not only is a place where the opinions are voiced, but it becomes a place where the perception of what is being said is driven. That is an absolutely critical role, and that’s why politicians are jumping on it so fast. They realize the power it has to get a message out.”

In January 2011, when the 112th Congress was sworn in, only about a third of the members of the House of Representatives and the Senate were on Twitter. Today, roughly 90% of them are, Mr. Sharp said.

Observers say Twitter’s decision to send Mr. Sharp to Washington also makes business sense.

“If you’re a celebrity or another kind of public figure, you’ve already got this platform, so this idea of executive coaching in social media is very smart,” said Sidney Eve Matrix, a media professor at Queen’s Universty in Kingston, Ont., who specializes in social media.

The service’s real-time nature has also helped turn the site into a leading indicator for pollsters and those who rely on their insights. While tracking polls can take several days to measure voters’ views, Twitter’s data can often detect changes much more rapidly.

“If you look back to December when [Republican presidential hopeful] Newt Gingrich ascended to his front-runner status for a while, you saw this daily rate of gaining new followers start to grow several days ahead of the inflection point in his poll numbers,” Mr. Sharp said.

“Which again is not surprising. If you see a candidate and they have a good performance in a debate, you might follow them, you might start engaging with their account and flirting with the idea of changing your mind, but you’re not going to tell a pollster who calls at the dinner table that night that you’re now a Gingrich person.”

 

[tomahawk6]

The cover of Newsweek.If the media turns on the President he's done.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2012/08/19/niall-ferguson-on-why-barack-obama-needs-to-go.html

 

[GAP]

Oooohhhhh.,....that's gotta hurt......

 

[Journeyman]

And now for something completely different.....

Someone's got wa-aay to much free time on their hands.  ;D

 

[The Bread Guy]

From @DRUNKHULK on Twitter:

SINCE ROMNEY IS MORMON! DRUNK HULK WONDER IF RYAN COOL WITH ROMNEY HAVING OTHER VICE PRESIDENTS!

 

[a_majoor]

An inside look at the Obama campaign machine. It may not be surprising that there is discord and friction, especially given the large size of the operation and the stakes involved, but the lack of focus is pretty ominous for the campaign. The remark about Super PACs:

Obama still believes Citizens United, the 2010 Supreme Court decision that unleashed the super PACs, poses a huge threat to representative democracy by equating the largesse of self-serving billionaires with free speech.

is particularly ironic considering the way the 2008 campaign was financed and the boastful $1 billion target Obama himself declared as the amount he was going to raise for the 2012 election. All in all very interesting, and I look forward to seeing the inside of the Romney campaign whenever that comes out:

http://dyn.politico.com/printstory.cfm?uuid=4E3FDD5B-2632-40C1-B5AA-7CD1B8E8A2C8

POLITICO e-book: Obama campaign roiled by conflict
By: Glenn Thrush
August 20, 2012 04:23 AM EDT

President Barack Obama’s campaign team, celebrated four years ago for its exceptional cohesion and eyes-on-the-prize strategic focus, has been shadowed this time by a succession of political disagreements and personal rivalries that haunted the effort at the outset.

Second-guessing about personnel, strategy and tactics has been a dominant theme of the reelection effort, according to numerous current and former Obama advisers who were interviewed for “Obama’s Last Stand,” an e-book out Monday published in a collaboration between POLITICO and Random House.

The discord, these sources said, has on occasion flowed from Obama himself, who at repeated turns has made vocal his dissatisfaction with decisions made by his campaign team, with its messaging, with Vice President Joe Biden and with what Obama feared was clumsy coordination between his West Wing and reelection headquarters in Chicago.

The effort in Chicago, meanwhile, has been bedeviled by some of the drama Obama so deftly dodged in 2008 — including, at a critical point earlier this year, a spat that left senior operatives David Axelrod and Stephanie Cutter barely on speaking terms — and growing doubts about the effectiveness of Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz.

The e-book, produced as part of a two-month reporting project that included interviews with two dozen current and former members of Obama’s team, illuminates how the mood and character of the 2012 reelection effort is flowing from the top — with Obama’s own personality and values shaping his campaign just as powerfully as he did four years ago.

This has produced a campaign being animated by one thing above all. It is not exclusively about hope and change anymore, words that seem like distant echoes even to Obama’s original loyalists — and to the president himself. It is not the solidarity of a hard-fought cause, often absent in this mostly joyless campaign. It is Obama’s own burning competitiveness, with his remorseless focus on beating Mitt Romney — an opponent he genuinely views with contempt and fears will be unfit to run the country.

Obama is sometimes portrayed as a reluctant warrior, sorry to see 2012 marked by so much partisan warfare but forced by circumstance to go along. But this perception is by most evidence untrue. In the interviews with current and former Obama aides, not one said he expressed any reservations about the negativity. He views it as a necessary part of campaigning, as a natural — if unpleasant — rotation of the cyclical political wheel.

Obama’s trash-talking competitiveness, a trait that has defined him since his days on the court as a basketball-obsessed teenager in Hawaii, was on display one night last February, when the president spotted a woman he knew was close to Sen. Marco Rubio in a Florida hotel lobby. “Is your boy going to go for [vice president]?” the president asked her. Maybe, she replied.

“Well,” he said, chuckling, according to a person who witnessed the encounter. “Tell your boy to watch it. He might get his ass kicked.”

Other passages of the book reveal:

• Obama personally dispatched senior West Wing aides to Chicago — led by David Plouffe and Pete Rouse — to better coordinate operations between the White House and Chicago. He was especially irritated by what he viewed as self-promotion by subordinates — and fumed that ad consultant Jim Margolis had appeared in a New York Times profile on Obama’s negative ad operation. Margolis sent a mea culpa to Obama and the staff, but Obama remained miffed.

The president’s less-than-stellar appraisal of his own team’s efforts has been a recurring motif of 2012.

In late May, what was intended as a clever campaign stunt — dispatching Axelrod to Boston to personally make the case against Romney on the steps of the State House — went awry.

As Axelrod was greeted by pro-Romney hecklers chanting “Axel-Fraud,” Obama was in the West Wing watching with growing disgust as the event unfolded on cable news. The scene, he scoffed to a nearby aide, was an ill-conceived “spectacle.”

“We aren’t going to do that kind of thing again, are we?” he asked peevishly, not a question but an order. Obama has no qualms about throwing a punch, his close intimates say, but can’t stand looking foolish when he does.

• Biden’s misstep, also in May, in announcing his approval of gay marriage — which forced Obama to do the same before he intended — caused greater disharmony in the White House than was reported at the time.

Biden blamed Campaign Manager Jim Messina for “throwing him under the bus” with the media during the gay-marriage flap — a charge that turned out to be untrue. In an emotional one-on-one meeting with Obama, Biden apologized profusely and said he’d been betrayed by Obama’s aides.

The president tried to calm him down, saying, “Look, Joe, there are people who want to divide us. You and I have to be on the same page from now on. You and I have to make sure that we don’t get divided.”

Plouffe and other West Wingers were even angrier that Biden had screwed up his boss’s carefully laid plans to announce his position before next month’s Charlotte convention — even as Biden previously had counseled against weighing in on the issue for fear of alienating battleground-state independents.

• As Team Obama was gearing up to face Romney after the GOP primaries, Axelrod and Cutter — close friends who oversee the campaign’s massive messaging and communications operations — clashed over a minor incident that left them barely on speaking terms during a critical early part of the campaign.

The spark, according to people close to the situation: Axelrod suspected Cutter of taking a network TV appearance he had been asked to do. The conflict, well-known inside Obamaland but not outside the inner circle — was really the reflection of a grinding campaign, Cutter’s propensity for stepping on toes, and Axelrod’s elliptical and disorganized management style.

But to many on the inside it reflected a dangerous divergence from the 2008 all-for-one ethos. The pair patched up their differences and coordinated an effective attack against Romney’s Bain Capital connections and his refusal to release a dozen years of tax returns — but subordinates found the tension unnerving.

• Many of Obama’s advisers have quietly begun questioning whether they should have picked Wasserman Schultz, an outspoken Florida congresswoman, as his DNC chairwoman. She has clashed with Chicago over her choice of staff and air-time on national TV shows — and they think she comes across as too partisan over the airwaves.

Obama’s brain trust secretly commissioned pollster David Binder to conduct an internal focus study of the popularity of top Obama campaign surrogates. Number one was former press secretary Robert Gibbs, followed by Cutter. Traveling press secretary Jen Psaki, who was added to a second study, was third. Axelrod, Plouffe and current White House press secretary Jay Carney were bunched in the middle. Wasserman Schultz ranked at the bottom.

Amid the challenges, Obama maintains confidence and is his campaign’s biggest cheerleader, exhorting downcast aides to buck up — he always knew they would “go into a barrel” at some point, he’d tell them. Still, he was concerned enough to privately order his top advisers to “tighten” things up, and fast.

It is Romney himself who provides a rallying point for both the candidate and his team.

Obama really doesn’t like, admire or even grudgingly respect Romney. It’s a level of contempt, say aides, he doesn’t even feel for the conservative, combative House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, the Hill Republican he disliked the most. “There was a baseline of respect for John McCain. The president always thought he was an honorable man and a war hero,” a longtime Obama adviser said. “That doesn’t hold true for Romney. He was no goddamned war hero.”

Time and again Obama has told the people around him that Romney stood for “nothing.” The word he would use to describe Romney was “weak,” too weak to stand up to his own moneymen, too weak to defend his own moderate record as the man who signed into law the first health insurance mandate as Massachusetts governor in 2006, too weak to admit Obama had done a single thing right as president.

The two things Obama fears most about a Romney victory: A 7-to-2 conservative Supreme Court within a few years. And the equally unbearable possibility, in his mind, that Romney will get to take a victory lap on an economic rebound Obama sees as just around the corner. “I’m not going to let him win … so that he can take credit when the economy turns around,” Obama said, according to an aide.

Obama has himself to blame for what has, arguably, been the greatest unforced error of his political career: his team’s failure to adequately form a strategy to deal with the avalanche of unregulated cash crashing down on him from GOP and Romney-allied super PACs.

Many on his team now regret not dispatching an aide of Plouffe’s stature to the cause in 2011, someone better equipped to go toe-to-toe with the likes of Karl Rove. People around Obama originally floated the idea of tapping Chicago billionaire Penny Pritzker to run the effort, but Obama personally waved off aides who pestered him about it.

Obama still believes Citizens United, the 2010 Supreme Court decision that unleashed the super PACs, poses a huge threat to representative democracy by equating the largesse of self-serving billionaires with free speech.

Axelrod agreed, but also saw a political benefit to the high-mindedness. He believed trashing the super PACs was a messaging winner for Obama — a stance vehemently opposed by Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Messina. “We’re going to lose this [f-ing] thing. Why don’t they get it?” Messina said of Axelrod and Obama.

By early 2012, the GOP super PAC floodgates had opened, and Obama reluctantly agreed to endorse a group friendly to his cause, Priorities USA Action.

But when Priorities’ founders — former White House aides Bill Burton and Sean Sweeney — struggled to fund that group, Democrats close to Obama considered tapping Gibbs for the job. They quickly realized it could raise legal problems stemming from Gibbs’s paid work for the campaign. Gibbs would have said no anyway.

Even in the slog of a reelection, Obama’s aides tried to inject some of the 2008 spirit of innovation into the campaign, with varied success.

Bored with the traditional one-city format for national conventions, they briefly considered a groundbreaking plan to stage four nights of events in four cities in 2010. The plan turned out to be a logistical nightmare, and would have cost the party and networks millions more. It was quickly scrapped.

During secret Sunday Roosevelt Room meetings with his top political and White House advisers, Obama has expressed concerns that the enthusiasm gap between his 2008 and 2012 support could cost him the election. He often peppers participants with pointed questions about campaign metrics — he’s especially interested in gauges of base enthusiasm, including the latest reports on volunteer enrollment in swing states and college campuses.

Obama remains frustrated with the bickering by Hill Democrats. During a closed-door meeting in June, he told House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid that Republicans were trying “to delegitimize me,” and implored them to put his own reelection over competing political priorities.

“Look, guys. I plan on winning this race,” he said, according to a person briefed on the interaction. “If I don’t win, then anything we say now doesn’t matter. I plan on winning this race. So let’s figure out how to win this race.”

Despite Obama’s all-in commitment to the campaign, there have been signs of strain. And people close to him detect, from time to time, a yearning for the high ground. It is most often reflected during his drafting of speeches — a therapeutic, clarifying exercise for a politician with a writer’s impulse to reconciling contradiction through narrative.

To give Obama a break from the relentless negativity of the campaign, friend and senior adviser Valerie Jarrett quietly set up a salon/dinner for Obama over the summer — which lasted more than two hours, a huge block of presidential time.

On hand were Jarrett’s friend and Steve Jobs biographer Walter Isaacson, Facebook billionaire and new New Republic Publisher Chris Hughes, and Apple executive Scott Forstall, who led the team that developed the iPhone.

One of the topics?

Civility and political discourse.

© 2012 POLITICO LLC

 

[Redeye]

The cover of Newsweek.If the media turns on the President he's done.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2012/08/19/niall-ferguson-on-why-barack-obama-needs-to-go.html

Not only do I have to wonder what the cover will do to Newsweek's readership (I know a few people who have just cancelled their subscriptions), but as I recall they also did the Bachmann Crazy Eyes cover.

The article inside, however, is complete and utter drivel. Not only does Niall Ferguson use some ridiculous stats about the economy for his attack (start points a year before President Obama took office!), he ends with suggesting that Americans have a "choice", as though Romney has some brilliant alternative way forward. Reading about how things like Ryan's medicare gutting are going over in places like Florida, I'm not sure Americans are all that happy with that choice, and Ferguson definitely doesn't build any sort of case for Romney.

And then they've got Akin and "legitimate" rapes. Yet more poison for female voters, I'd think, which the GOP are scrambling to distance themselves from while the Dems will probably keep it heavy in the press as best they can.