This has struck me as bizarre as well:
The Democrats also don’t seem to have fully considered what their excuses are communicating about Romney’s agenda. Romney advanced a series of principles and policies in the debate, and rather than argue that these are bad for the country, the Democrats are basically arguing that Romney’s ideas are too good to be true—so good, moderate, and sensible that they couldn’t really be Mitt Romney’s, and therefore that Romney is not telling the truth about his agenda. These charges of dishonesty aren’t just false (though they are false), they’re also downright strange. A Republican candidate stands before 60 million voters and commits to an agenda and his opponent responds that this isn’t really his agenda, and that voters should instead look to Democratic attack ads and liberal think-tank papers to learn what the Republican is proposing. That’s the strategy?
One explanation for this bizarre (though surely temporary) breakdown on the left would have to be what psychologists call projection. On Face the Nation, David Axelrod said Romney “walked away from his record” in the debate. On Thursday, the president himself said “The man onstage last night, he does not want to be held accountable for the real Mitt Romney’s decisions and what he’s been saying for the last year, and that’s because he knows full well that we don’t want what he’s been selling for the last year.” Walking away from his record and trying not to be held accountable for his unpopular decisions—does that sound like anyone you know?
The real devastation to the Democrats’ campaign from the debate was that it not only blew up their strategy (on which they spent many months and millions of Chinese campaign donations over the summer) of portraying Romney as a coal-miners’-wife-killing, likes-to-fire-people, dog-torturing plutocrat, and spinning tall tales about his proposals, but it also destroyed both their and the media’s credibility. Axelrod is basically saying at this point, “Who do you believe about Mitt Romney, us, or your lying eyes”? Some in the media will try to continue to help them, but they know that their own credibility is finally at stake in a very real way. They’ve reached the point at which they have to come up for a little air from the Obama tank if they don’t want to lose whatever little semblance of objectivity they might still have among the low-attention types.
[Update a few minutes later]
The Obama campaign’s post-debate negativity shows that he has nothing to say. And they’ll say it loudly no doubt, on Thursday and at the next debate with Romney.
It would appear that the Democrats (in public, at least) believe their own strawmen arguments. They’re so ignorant about what Republicans in general and Romney in particular believe that anything different from their own strawmen must be a lie. They really are that stupid but that’s what happens when you live in an echo chamber.
“It would appear that the Democrats (in public, at least) believe their own strawmen arguments.”
Indeed. This would explain most of the Obama Zombies posts on this blog.
By the way, Gerrib, Jim, Bob-1, Godzilla: you might want to check with a physician:
http://pjmedia.com/instapundit/153042/
Of course, more importantly, their hero should be checking with the White House physician on this problem. It would explain a lot.
I have never owned a cat, or been in prolonged contact with one. But many people here have owned cats. Presumably, conservatives who live out in the country are the ones most likely to have cats which have eaten mice or tangled with wildlife. Look up the terrifying mind controlling powers of Toxoplasmosis Gondii, although, if you’re infected, you’ll disagree that it is truly terrifying.
Sure, that’s the point, Bob-1.
Of course not; all good Obamists prefer dog.
It doesn’t take too much discussion with hard-core liberals to realize that their public positions are completely divorced from reality. The question always is, “Do they really believe what they’re saying?”
I’ve wondered about that a lot over the years. But the Trayvon Martin case has convinced me that most of them do. That case had too much evidence contrary to the Narrative in the public record (police reports, court records, public testimony) to ever keep out of the public eye, especially after they hyped the case up. They had 3-1/2 weeks to determine the truth and prepare their presentation, but they still went with the Narrative.
They went with it because they believed it. It’s the only logical explanation at this point.
The same is true of their thoughts about Romney.
It also illustrates, yet again, why Obama is unsuited to the job he holds.
Even if Romney was inconsistent, even if he was lying then, or lying now, a President has to engage the opponent where he actually stands, not where he had been standing, and not where the President wishes he was standing, and especially not where the President has been pretending the opponent stood.
Too often Obama’s foreign policy is conducted against strawmen that Obama constructed in his own little head, and now we see that he’ll actually act as if those strawmen where the reality. Tel Aviv could be a smoking hole and Obama would still be yakking about Iran’s inconsistent statements about its peaceful nuclear energy program. Our consulates and embassies go up in flames and Obama insists that the attackers were his offended Muslim strawmen. His foreign policy is aimed at engaging the fairytale leaders in his own head, where the imaginary characters are better protected from inconvenient facts than if they were hiding in Saddam’s deepest bunker. There’s no way for reality to penetrate his brain and inconvenience his self-absorbed narratives.
It’s a dangerous state of affairs, and one too obvious to foreign leaders to avoid taking advantage of.
Romney as a coal-miners’-wife-killing, likes-to-fire-people, dog-torturing plutocrat
Romney’s not a plutocrat. Haven’t you heard? Romney is not sufficiently wealthy to be President.
That reminds me of the Lefty professor in a college that I attended at the height of “[Lefty] Student unrest” and the beginning of the Radical Chic era, when upper-crust socialists–the Park Avenue Pinkos, Beverly Hills Bolshies, etc.–teamed with the urban lumpenproletariat to gang up on the middle-class. This professor, a sponsor of the campus chapter of SDS , said only very rich people should be in positions, because the middle-class were too fixated on increasing their wealth. He’d probably agree that Romney was too poor to be president. You know, as opposed to that uncannily successful businessman Obama.