The outside story of the Obama campaign

There is a certain quality to the Obama campaign. Howie Carr captures it this morning in “Be afraid, be very afraid of RNC (say the Dems).” The whole constellation of alleged crime, rapine, murder, and felony murder goes over the top. It reeks of desperation. And this is just for openers. The authors of the campaign are trying to dig their way out of a hole.

Obama’s stump speech this time around is also off in tone. It lectures. It hectors. It whines. Toby Harnden derides the Obama campaign as “a joyless slog.” Andrea Tantaros observes its “relentless negativity.”

Obama makes one thing perfectly clear, as Richard Nixon used to say. It ain’t morning in America, and it’s not getting better any time soon.

The Obama campaign gives us a jumble of falsity. Yuval Levin takes apart the campaign’s latest Medicare ad. Grace-Marie Turner adds “More Obamacare fiction.”

By the lights of the campaign, our enormous deficit problems can be meaningfully addressed by raising taxes on the rich. And the campaign is sure not to say much about such signature accomplishments as Obamacare and the trillion-dollar stimulus from hell.

Reading my hard copy of the New York Times yesterday, I came across this little detonation by James B. Stewart of the “Romney didn’t pay any taxes” business. Based on a review of Romney’s public 2010 tax return, containing foreign tax data going back ten years, Stewart writes:

The good news for Mr. Romney is the forms suggest that he paid at least some federal income tax every year, as he has said he did. He used the foreign tax credit every year to offset his taxes in the United States, and American taxpayers can’t use a tax credit if they owe no federal income tax. This casts even more doubt on the claim by the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, attributed to an unnamed Bain Capital source, that Mr. Romney paid no income taxes during that time.

But Reid’s charge made on behalf of Obama campaign is, of course, close enough for campaign work.

Best of all, we have the alleged Republican women for Obama. The Obama campaign gives us a two-and-a-half minute video featuring four or five women who claim to be Republicans, or to have been Republicans until recently, and who are appalled by Mitt Romney.

The women faithfully recite the Obama campaign’s “war on women” talking points. The first thing to observe about these talking points is their fraudulence. They are a campaign fabrication for which Private George Stephanopoulos dutifully prepared the battle space at one of the Republican debates this past January. Now the Obama campaign has followed up. Katherine Kersten’s deconstruction of the phony war in this morning’s Star Tribune is the most recent.

And that’s not all. As John demonstrated yesterday, at least two of the “Republican women for Obama” are ringers. They are lefty women who supported Obama in 2008. The video is a Hollywood production starring impersonators playing Republican women. The Obama campaign didn’t even bother to populate a two-and-a half minute video with authentic turncoats. It’s probably wrong to say they couldn’t have done so, but you have to wonder.

By contrast, the varmints at Citizens United have produced a one-hour film — “The Hope and The Change” — full of former Obama voters declaring that they refuse to pull the lever for Obama this time around. The film is set to play at the GOP convention this week. Sean Hannity previewed the film in this segment. According to Peter Boyer, the film is to go into theatrical release in selected cities in September, and play several dozen times on a cable channel right up to election day. Below is the film’s official trailer.

Quotable quote: “The party’s over. The smoke has cleared.”

If Andrew Breitbart were alive, I think he could safely offer $100,000 to anyone proving that the voters in the Citizens United film are something other than what they say they appear to be. To say the least, the film presents an interesting contrast with “Republican women for Obama.”

I’m going to go out on a limb and say it: the Obama campaign so far does not bear the hallmarks of a winning presidential campaign.

UPDATE: I see my thinking trails that of John Nolte and Erick Erickson, who are less wary than I am about giving voice to my intuition.

Via Ed Driscoll.

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