Following the unmitigated disaster of President Barack Obama’s performance during Wednesday’s first presidential debate, there will be some strategy changes. However, where the campaign’s "strange" pre-debate strategy of “lowering expectations” hit them upside the head like a boomerang, there are multiple reasons why “Obama's new message” – which The Associated Press described as an effort to cast Mitt Romney as “a liar” – will also backfire.
“Gov. Romney may dance around his positions,” Obama swiped during a post-debate campaign speech in Denver, CO, “but if you want to be president, you owe the American people the truth."
Following admissions by CNN and head propagandist for Obama's "Truth Team," Stephanie Cutter -- as shared by Ace of Spades -- that Obama's repeated "$5 trillion tax cut" waltz during Wednesday's debate was a blatant lie, the strategy to call anyone else "a liar" has its obvious flaws.
Considering the “mountains of lies” still being stacked by Obama and his administration regarding the embassy attack in Libya – which left Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans dead -- the word “strange” seems woefully inadequate to describe the “new message” Team Obama wants to push heading in to a debate that will cover foreign policy.
While no one can prove that Obama’s last-minute executive order was an effort to hide documents that may prove coordination between the White House and the Department of Justice regarding details of Fast and Furious, his administration’s botched gun-running program -- which provided the guns used by drug dealers to kill United States Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry and to slaughter 13 Mexican teenagers -- it will be interesting to see how he spins the lie he told on Univision.
“I think it’s important for us to understand that the Fast and Furious program was a field-initiated program begun under the previous administration,” Obama said to Univision co-host Jorge Ramos in the video posted by The Daily Caller.
When Eric Holder found out about it, he discontinued it. We assigned an inspector general to do a thorough report that was just issued, confirming that in fact Eric Holder did not know about this, that he took prompt action and the people who did initiate this were held accountable.
It’s a reiteration of the lie Obama Press Secretary Jay Carney and DOJ Attorney General Erick Holder started pushing back in June.
Simply put, either “the smartest president ever” has Fast and Furious confused with a quite different operation from the George Bush administration known as "Wide Receiver" -- or he lied.
Squaring his claims of domestic policy success with reality will also pose problems for Obama.
While he continues to tout the $50 billion bailout of General Motors (GM) as a successful example of his administration's policies, Examiner already exposed that ‘it’s all a lie.”
Then there’s the administration’s “hastily developed” pet green car -- the Chevy Volt.
In June, Edward Neidermeyer of The New York Times explained how “quantifying just how much taxpayer money will have been wasted” on that debacle would be next to impossible.
Add the billions wasted on Solyndra – and 14 other failed stimulus companies – and the challenge for Obama to align the reality of his many domestic economic policy failures with the stories he’s been telling the American people becomes even more perilous.
Perhaps while Obama tries to explain his claims that Romney “’shipped jobs’ overseas” -- which Fact Check.org has already determined to be baseless -- he can also explain why one of his May campaign ads touted his $299 million stimulus investment in a company that he knew had downsized American jobs and “outsourced” an entire factory to Hungary as a "success."As Romney pointed out during Wednesday's debate, Obama vowed during his 2008 campaign that he would "reduce the cost of health care premiums by $2,500" per year during his first term.
According to the 2012 annual Kaiser Family Foundation employee health benefits survey, premiums have increased by $2,370 since Obama was elected.
What's more, premiums climbed faster in Obama's four years than they did in the previous four under President Bush, the survey data show.
During his 2008 presidential campaign, Obama also vowed that he would not raise taxes on the middle class.
“And I can make a firm pledge: under my plan, no family making less than $250,000 will see their taxes increase - not your income taxes, not your payroll taxes, not your capital gains taxes, not any of your taxes.”
"I want to be very clear," he reiterated on July 18, 2009 during a weekly address to the nation. "I will not sign on to any health plan that adds to our deficits over the next decade."
"And I mean it" -- he said again at a Town Hall in Shaker Heights, OH five days later, and again before a joint session of Congress -- "period" -- two months later.
That Obamacare raids $716 Billion from almost-insolvent Medicare to pay the $2 trillion price tag, increases national healthcare spending, increases the deficit, exacerbates the national doctor shortage, is insanely costly and difficult to comply with and will still leave 30 million people without health insurance, it will be fascinating to hear how he attempts to once again convince Americans that his healthcare overhaul is a good thing for the country and its citizens.
It will also be interesting to hear how he wiggles around the Sept. 19 Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report that said Obamacare will saddle an estimated six million Americans with $7 billion in taxes in 2016, with each of the 6 million people paying at least $695 per year.
According to the report, the majority of those six million Americans are in the middle class -- 4.7 million of whom have incomes “500 percent of the federal poverty level” -- which the CBO projects will be “$60,000 for individuals and $123,000 for families of four by 2016.”
Add the multiple taxes that will hit small businesses -- owned by middle class Americans -- and the challenge Obama will face in preventing the “liar” strategy from backfiring gets even more tricky.
The effort to explain his administration's effort to pressure government contractors to ignore the 60-day notice requirement of the WARN Act -- and telling those contractors that the American taxpayer will foot the bill if they are sued for breaking that law -- will require Obama to be as nimble as a contortionist in a Cirque du Soleil performance.
The most curious thing about this whole "new message" strategy -- of painting Romney as “a liar” -- is nothing “new” at all. This "new message" is the same "old message" the campaign has been pushing against Obama's GOP challenger all along.
In July, Examiner.com exposed that all of the charges made against Romney and his career at Bain Capital by Obama and his campaign operatives had been repeatedly and certifiably proven as false.
In August, Examiner reported how the Obama campaign's additional claims -- that they had no knowledge of the details regarding the accusation made in an ad by the the Obama super PAC, Priorities USA, that Romney was responsible for the death of Joe Soptic’s wife from cancer and are, therefore not complicit – were also lies.
Let’s be blunt. The motivation behind this "new message" is pure and simple. Obama hates Romney.
“One factor made the 2012 grind bearable and, at times, even fun for Obama,” wrote Glenn Thrush in the third of Politico’s e-book series on the 2012 presidential race, "he began campaign preparations feeling neutral about Romney, but like the former governor’s GOP opponents in 2008 and 2012, he quickly developed a genuine disdain for the man."
That scorn stoked Obama’s competitive fire, got his head in the game, which came as a relief to some Obama aides who had seen his interest flag when he didn’t feel motivated to crush the opposition.
In the words of Socrates:
From the deepest desires often come the deadliest hate.
Considering the embarrassing public wedgie Romney gave Obama during Wednesday’s debate, make no mistake – Obama wants to “crush” Romney.
This ‘new message’ is all about revenge and, as a seventeenth century English cleric named Jeremy Taylor once said:
Revenge is like a rolling stone, which, when a man hath forced up a hill, will return upon him with a greater violence, and break those bones whose sinews gave it motion.
In the end, the volatile combination of “hate” and “revenge” may not only backfire, but has the potential to detonate a politically lethal explosion.
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