"...He’s right on the edge of a self-fulfilling downward spiral.”
http://nymag.com/news/politics/powergrid/mitt-romney-middle-east-unrest-2012-9/Don’t Say “Desperate”
By John Heilemann
Muslim unrest has created a challenge for Obama and the nation—and a different kind of crisis for the Romney campaign.
Illustration by Oliver Munday
(Photo: Melina Mara/The Washington Post via Getty Images)
snip//
For Romney, the first blaring sign that his reaction to the assault on the consulate in Benghazi had badly missed the mark was the application of the phrase “Lehman moment” to his press availability on the morning of September 12. Here was America under attack, with four dead on foreign soil. And here was Romney, defiantly refusing to adopt a tone of sobriety, solemnity, or seriousness, instead attempting to score cheap political points, doubling down on his criticism from the night before that the Obama administration had been “disgraceful” for “sympathiz{ing}” with the attackers—criticism willfully ignoring the chronology of events, the source of the statement he was pillorying, the substance of the statement, and the circumstances under which it was made.
That the left heaped scorn on Romney’s gambit came as no surprise. But the right reacted almost as harshly—with former aides to John McCain, George W. Bush, and Ronald Reagan creating an on-the-record chorus of disapproval, while countless other Republican officials and operatives chimed in anonymously. “This is worse than a Lehman moment,” says a senior GOP operative. “McCain made mistakes of impulsiveness, but this was a deliberate and premeditated move, and it totally revealed Romney’s character; it revealed him as completely craven and his candidacy as serving no higher purpose than his ambition.”
This bipartisan condemnation would have been bad enough in itself, but its negative effects were amplified because it fed into a broader narrative emerging in the media across the ideological spectrum: that Romney is losing, knows he is losing, and is starting to panic. This story line is, of course, rooted in reality, given that every available data point since the conventions suggests that Obama is indeed, for the first time, opening up a lead outside the margin of error nationally and in the battleground states. So the press corps is now on the lookout for signs of desperation in Romney and is finding them aplenty—most vividly in his reaction to Libya, but even before that, in his post-convention appearance on Meet the Press, where he embraced some elements of Obamacare (only to have his campaign walk back his comments later the same day).
The peril to Romney’s candidacy of being seen through the lens of desperation can’t be overstated. The paramount strategic objective of any campaign is to maintain control of the candidate’s public image—and if the media filter begins to view his every move through a dark or unflattering prism, things can quickly spin out of control, to a point where nothing he says or does is taken at face value. “Romney is in a very bad place,” says another senior Republican strategist. “He’s got the Republican intelligentsia second-guessing him, publicly and privately. The party base has never trusted him and thinks that everything bad it ever thought about him is being borne out now. And he’s got the media believing that he can’t win. He’s right on the edge of a self-fulfilling downward spiral.”
more...
http://nymag.com/news/politics/powergrid/mitt-romney-middle-east-unrest-2012-9/
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Last edited Mon Sep 17, 2012, 08:34 PM - Edit history (1)
...please explain how come we not only didn't see his poll numbers crater thereafter, but he actually gained ground in the polls since then?
My guess is that few average voters noticed or cared...but, for a few, it resonated with the memes of Obama and the Democrats as "soft on defense" and maybe not really patriotic enough that have been the Republican stock-in-trade since the days of Nixon-Agnew.
Once again, I have to warn my fellow Democrats against premature celebration -- so far, Robme has taken a whole host of supposedly self-inflicted wounds, but he's still standing. Like it or not, this election's going down to the wire...and there's yet no guarantee of the outcome.
P.S.: I should note that I wrote and posted this just before hearing about the 47% comment. Will this be the self-inflicted wound that stops Robme in his tracks? Maybe, but I'm still skeptical -- I get the feeling that anyone who might get offended by that remark was already a firm vote for Obama before today. And, for those who might actually qualify for the 47% and vote Republican. I'm sure they'll find a way to rationalize how it doesn't really apply to them. Remember "keep your government hands off MY Medicare," anyone?
