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The inevitable Romney campaign constructs the clear formula for the next 13 months, POTUS Obama's struggles with the GDP against Mitt Romney's struggles with the GOP. The revelation this weekend that the new new Obama re-elect campaign strategy is to attack Romney as a tool of Wall Street, to embrace #OWS and lead a children's crusade against the corporate villains who Romney serves, is as despairing as the last two new new strategies: running the 1948 Truman campaign against the Do-Nothing Congress, or running the Rovian 2004 Bush campaign that veered sharply to the partisan base, in Obama's case, to the Progressives and the Democratic interest groups. The New New #OWS campaign ploy combines these two ambitions into a culturally trendy face of young people facing off against the plutocrats. It is risky, but then, any strategy is and will be with the GDP flat-lining and the jobless number at 9%. There is also the problem of overseas violence, such as in Rome and Athens, framing the domestic story into one of lawlessness and anarchy. Better to bash Romney as Daddy Warbucks and Scrooge. Silly season. The winter weather closing in without a payoff will let #OWS go back to class and wait on the Spring. POTUS is lost in search of a magic wand that will change the direction of the GDP. Europe's bank crisis is not vulnerable to White House palaver or media polls. The PIIGS are sinking into recession; they will drag Britain, France and Germany with them. The slowdown already darkens China's growth, and the slowdown is already here in the wariness toward our banks by investor class. Meantime, the secret of the #OWS is that it does not belong to either party or any candidate -- see live stream from NY Times Square and so forth--, and an attempt to co-opt it will lead to chagrin. The Zuccotti Park youth, adding the young, college people in Boston, Ann Arbor, Portland, SF and so forth, are ambitious, talented, impatient, iconoclastic, global, curious -- all the attributes they have been taught these last twenty years of expansion into Asia. Good for them, and time to celebrate their gifts and health. The election of 2012 is as inconsequential an event in their lives as the election of 1968 is today in mine. Was Hubert Humphrey the man to change the direction of the country profoundly rather than Richard Nixon? What's the difference now? Would Humphrey have made Ronald Reagan more or less likely? In 1976 or 1980? What fun it is to speculate, and how futile to make conclusive statements on the basis of one election. POTUS Obama is inadequate for the job. POTUS Obama is a good campaigner. The presumption remains that he will win re-election. Butterfly rules (below) from the #OWS is that even in politics there is whimsy. The mistake we make about Zuccotti Park is to make more of it than it is, joy for the young who have the strength to sleep in a crate and still make noise the next morning.
"as inconsequential an event in their lives as the election of 1968 is today in mine."
Mmmmm. Interesting.
FLUNG DUNG
Years ago, the news showed video of how Italian police dispersed a crowd with farming equipment. The farming equipment threw manure on the crowd.
The unwashed OWS crowd poses an opposite threat: If it does a sit down strike, the police won't want to pick them up.
Supposedly, the best way to disperse a crowd is with police on horseback. However, many years ago when the police tried to take back Tompkins Square Park in the East Village, people in the crowd threw cherry bombs under the horses -- which dispersed the horses. That park was only occupied for a short time before those living in the area complained. Not many people live in the Wall St area. Battery Park City doesn't count, as it's in its own land-filled world.
I don't have as optimistic a view of the OWS as JB above. My fear is that it will turn violent. I'm surprised the Van Jones and Soros connection isn't being covered.
"... the Van Jones and Soros connection isn't being covered."
except by Aaron Klein.
"except by Kevin Klein"
And Glenn Beck...
"Mmmmm. Interesting."
As I get older, I'm becoming more conservative. JB seems to be becoming more liberal.
Joy to the world.
Joy to one and all.
Joy to the fishes in the deep blue sea.
Joy to you and me.
Three Dog Night
"The revelation this weekend that the new new Obama re-elect campaign strategy is to attack Romney as a tool of Wall Street...."
This has been very clear for a very long time:
http://johnbatchelorshow.com/jb/2011/06/romney-spoiler/
WHAT HURTS WALL ST WILL HURT ROMNEY
I wonder if the DOJ's recent decision to go after Goldman Sachs is the first shot in the class warfare tactics that will be used in 2012.
Can we fairly judge from what we see of JB? Ratings depend on controversy.
What I found interesting is that the idea that the 1968 election could be far from the thoughts of any political junkie.
From Johnson we got the Great Society, one element of which devastated inner city blacks, another of which visited upon us the fiscal nightmare of Medicare; and the Vietnam war, whose shadow overcasts every military engagement since; and the candidacy of George Wallace, who curiously enough garnered the majority of voters in the under 35 demo, and an embittered youth wing of the Democratic party determined to destroy the Democratic Party. (How do you think the latter have done so far now that the party has been rendered unfit for responsible human habitation?)
From Wallace’s candidacy we get the political awakening of the southern values voters, who have come to dominate the Republican party, and a plurality presidency in Nixon. From Nixon we get a stubbornness in Vietnam that killed 25,000 more Americans, and Watergate, the disgrace of the Republican Party that many of the youth of my era still use as a yardstick for sleazy politics, and Americans’ loss of faith in government to an unprecedented degree since the Hoover administration.
From Watergate we get the measure of feckless government and the champion of declinism in Carter, a Congress run amok in degrading American foreign policy and defense policy, and the suppurating wound in the Iranian revolution which has unleashed misery world wide.
And of course from Carter and the destructive Democratic realignment, we get Reagan, the thoughtful colossus who bestrides Republican, American, and world history. From Reagan we got a consciousness-raising that has lead to a reordering of American politics, the strengthening of the values-voters, the living image of a foreign policy based on strength, not conciliation with evil, the renewal of our commitment to freedom, the Laffer curve, and proven techniques for reviving a staggering economy.
I could go on, but I’d have to think about it deeply, and right now I’m trying to rally folks to overthrow the city government where I live. It’s rather time consuming. My point is, there’s hardly a major political theme today that isn’t a tree whose acorn is found in the 1968 election. I just can’t conceive of it being a remote event in any political junkie’s thoughts.
From Mead:
Authoritarian Virus Spreading in Europe
A new anti-democratic plague is spreading across Eastern Europe, suggesting that the inevitable march toward democracy may be a little more complex than ideologues wish. Last week it was Ukraine’s jailing of opposition leader Yulia Tymoshenko; this week it is developments farther west that are making the news.
The New York Times discusses the situation in the Former Yugoslavian Republic of Macedonia:
The patriotic politics of [governing party] I.M.R.O. have generated a public debate about “real Macedonians” and “traitors,” said Vasiliki Neofotistos, an anthropologist from the State University of New York at Buffalo studying identity politics in Macedonia. “People are afraid, and they are very divided.”
Growing concerns about a decline in press freedoms climaxed when the government revoked the license of A-1 television on July 30, perhaps the most openly critical media voice. While the government defended the closing on the basis of violations of tax laws, critics argued that pro-government media have never been audited.
Three newspapers owned by the same media group stopped printing earlier the same month after facing a similar investigation.
The government is one of the biggest advertisers in Macedonia, and its weight in the advertising market is also used to control the media, analysts say.
At least the F.Y.R.O.M. is on the outside of the European Union — reports from Hungary shows that even EU members are not immune. The Washington Post reports:
Lately, though, things have cooled — a lot. Maybe it’s Orban’s increasingly anti-democratic antics. Just the usual stuff — cracking down on the media, curbing the independence of the judiciary, attacks on minorities and a drift toward one-party rule.
Or maybe it’s his annoying praise of Chinese investment and aid along with his constant denigration of Western Europe and predictions of the decline of the West. This from a country that’s a member of NATO and the European Union.
Despite human rights groups’ increasing criticism of Orban’s governing style — a sort of Lukashenko-lite policy along the lines of autocrat Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus — the premier generally has continued his ways.
The political crisis of democracy and democratic institutions in parts of Europe underwrites the challenge that the EU faces in bringing very different countries and cultures into some kind of union. Danes and Greeks, Bulgarians and the Dutch, Germans and Italians often don’t see eye to eye.
Unfortunately, many countries in Europe lack the historical experiences and strong institutions that support healthy and durable democratic growth. We are going to see the political as well as the economic foundations of the European project tested in coming years.
___________________________________________________________________________
I guess they are getting ready to welcome their Russian liberators. Interestingly, Wiki records that in 1992 Mead wondered out loud:
In an article in 1992, Mead famously wrote,
But what if it can't? What if the global economy stagnates—or even shrinks? In that case, we will face a new period of international conflict: South against North, rich against poor. Russia, China, India—these countries with their billions of people and their nuclear weapons will pose a much greater danger to the world than Germany and Japan did in the '30s.
Good call. I hope the NGO crazies will have sobered up at the end of the next war that they will not be able to stop, abate, modify, or "proportion" to death.
Very nice summary.
"... an embittered youth wing of the Democratic party determined to destroy the Democratic Party."
The far left loonies of the 60s are now the whole Democrat Party. The Kerry run for the presidency was an absurd re-fight of Vietnam -- yet that strategy got Bush re-elected. Our educational system is a complete failure. The MSM completely biased. The protesters want me to pay for their college educations. Yet, the funny thing is, they don't even know that if they work for the gov't, we WILL have to pay -- thanks to Obama.
The proverb doesn't say: "May you live in dangerous times." But we are. The 60s were interesting. The future is just scary. And the scariest of all is a Barry re-elect. As Hank Williams Jr just recently put it: "Y'all can keep the change".
Sooner or later these kids will learn that it's easier and a lot more lucrative to join than fight, get law degrees, and move to K Street, just like my 2 30-something cousins did.
Did I mention they're both redistributionist holier-than-thou liberals born and raised in Connecticut?
I had been going to Philadelphia City Hall (I commute through the train station a block away) and hand out tourist literature for San Francisco, hoping that once it gets cold they'd all decamp west, but maybe now I'll promise them warmth and sun in Storrs, CT.
"The far left loonies of the 60s are now the whole Democrat Party. "
The good news is that they are mortal.
We look back on the 50s as halcyon days untroubled by the things that blight us today. But that was the era of "duck and cover." When the 11th century began, it was very likely that society would look the same at the dawn of the 12th. Maybe we've been nervous since change accelerated. I think since the Renaissance revealed that society could change in the blink of an eye, the future has been unsettling.
"hand out tourist literature for San Francisco"
You are a naughty, naughty boy, MD.