Tuesday, October 02, 2012

Romney is so pathetically desperate he intends to play the Jimmy Carter card on Obama

By Michael J.W. Stickings

With time running out, Romney is getting more and more desperate. He needs something, anything, to stick, some late-campaign "game changer" (an overused but appropriate term) to give him a boost. But just how desperate is he? This desperate:

According to a highly reliable source, as Mitt Romney and President Barack Obama prepare for the first presidential debate Wednesday night, top Republican operatives are primed to unleash a new two-pronged offensive that will attack Obama as weak on national security, and will be based, in part, on new intelligence information regarding the attacks in Libya that killed U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens on Sept. 11.

The source, who has firsthand knowledge of private, high-level conversations in the Romney camp that took place in Washington, D.C., last week, said that at various times the GOP strategists referred to their new operation as the Jimmy Carter Strategy or the October Surprise.

Ridiculous, as Andrew Sullivan explains:

What's amazing to me is that they are still trying to reconjure Reagan's 1980 campaign! The man has been turned into a God and his policies and electoral tactics are like some kind of eternal creed to which these lost souls subscribe. But using the recent mess in Libya as Obama's equivalent of Carter's helicopter crash? Please. Obama had one such moment -- and he killed Osama bin Laden, something Dick Cheney couldn't do however many people he had tortured.

Basically, it seems, this "October Surprise" will amount to accusing the Obama administration of... of what? Confusion? Poor communications? I'll admit that Obama handled part of the aftermath poorly, specifically with respect to explaining who was responsible for the attack in Libya, but that's about it. It was Romney, remember, who tried to take advantage of a tragic situation to score political points, and who was slammed for it. And it's Romney who's been an utter embarrassment on foreign policy throughout the campaign who has projected ignorance and weakness, and who has proven to be unfit for the presidency.

Unless Obama personally ordered the ambassador's killing -- which, who knows, may well be the next arrow in the Republicans' quiver of lies -- I don't quite see how this works.

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1 Comments:

  • This is the echo chamber effect. Everyone they know sees the clear analogy: Obama = Carter. So they can't imagine that others wouldn't think this was a brilliant observation. This isn't new; they've tried to use Obama as Carter for a long time. Even if people cared, I don't see how it could help. At this point, most people think of Carter as a good man who is great at international affairs.

    By Anonymous Frankly Curious, at 1:37 PM  

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