You may have missed the big report on Obama's campaign strategy from John Heilemann in New York Magazine when it landed on Memorial day.
But we just wanted to highlight two paragraphs that show how the Obama campaign plans to win. No more soaring speeches about coming together. No more friendly, transcendent rhetoric. Instead be prepared to be made scared of Mitt:
They will pummel him for being a vulture-vampire capitalist at Bain Capital. They will pound him for being a miserable failure as the governor of Massachusetts. They will mash him for being a water-carrier for Paul Ryan’s Social Darwinist fiscal program. They will maul him for being a combination of Jerry Falwell, Joe Arpaio, and John Galt on a range of issues that strike deep chords with the Obama coalition. “We’re gonna say, ‘Let’s be clear what he would do as president,’ ” Plouffe explains. “Potentially abortion will be criminalized. Women will be denied contraceptive services. He’s far right on immigration. He supports efforts to amend the Constitution to ban gay marriage.”
The Obama effort at disqualifying Romney will go beyond painting him as excessively conservative, however. It will aim to cast him as an avatar of revanchism. “He’s the fifties, he is retro, he is backward, and we are forward—that’s the basic construct,” says a top Obama strategist. “If you’re a woman, you’re Hispanic, you’re young, or you’ve gotten left out, you look at Romney and say, ‘This [expletive] guy is gonna take us back to the way it always was, and guess what? I’ve never been part of that.’ ”
My own view is that the most important part of this strategy will be what Obama will say about Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan's plans to reform Medicare.
Even in a down economic time, many of retirees or people who planned on retiring soon see Medicare as the only thing standing between them and immesierating poverty in their old age.
With the huge glut of oncoming retirees in the Baby Boom generation, this issue has gone from an important issue, to a nuclear-level threat for many voters.
