Dan Henninger from WSJ lays out what he thinks Obama's reelection strategy will be, based on his SOTU speech: "An Economy Built to Last" (you have no idea how hard it is to type that with a straight face).
Bemused election-year observers remarked that both ObamaCare and the nation's entitlement bomb passed unmentioned. In his reply, Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels noted that we are not going to be able to outrun the simple math on entitlement spending. That's true. We can't. But Mr. Obama just may for the next 10 months.
How? By exploiting political vulnerabilities in the Republicans' case against his presidency. Republicans think it's all about the bad economy. It is. But Barack Obama is going to do something his opposition wouldn't think possible. He's going to take ownership of the American economy. Not the real one, but the one he's just made up, "the economy built to last." It won't last long, but long enough.
You should
read the whole thing. Basically, Obama will run against the current economy situation, hawking solutions based on plans that created the economy in the first place. And the scary part is, it just might work.
Gilda Radner's Emily Litella famously said "Never mind," and you would too if you had to run on this economy. Thus, the Obama solution: Run against the economy. This effectively means Mr. Obama is running against himself, but . . . never mind.
Mr. Obama may not know much about the private economy, but he knows a lot about the uses of human anxiety. Proposing to replace his own bad economy with a virtual substitute "built to last" allows Mr. Obama to place himself outside the White House and on the street making common cause with the genuine economic anxieties of the American people. It also lets this president put in motion what he thinks he knows best—empathy. In "The Audacity of Hope" he put empathy "at the heart of my moral code." Practice makes perfect.
No comments:
Post a Comment