President Obama's line of attack

E.J. Dionne picks up on the president's line of attack:

What Romney has going for him is a journalistic presumption that he is either a closet "moderate" or so opportunistic that he is altogether lacking in a coherent worldview. The first is wrong. The second is unfair to Romney. What he believes matters, and it is the biggest obstacle between him and the White House.

I somewhat differ with Dionne in that it seems to me there exists not even the remotest relationship between the politician "Mitt Romney" and actual "Beliefs." Romney is, hands down, the most ruthlessly cynical pol since Aaron Burr; he never believed what he claimed to believe when he ran for the Senate or served as a governor--offices that were but useful desiderata on his professional path of an idée fixe, which Romney is now trying to fulfill.

Yet I do, of course, quite agree that what Romney says he believes matters, which is President Obama's truer line of attack, as he sketched it out for Rolling Stone magazine:

I don't think that their nominee is going to be able to suddenly say, "Everything I've said for the last six months, I didn't mean." I'm assuming that he meant it.

What Team Obama has adopted here is what we might call the academic approach. To explain ...

When I was a grad student, my chief interest within the broader study of American political history was, specifically, the practice of demagoguery--an ancient virtuosity which rests mostly on bullshit. Not always, but usually. Anyway, a rhetorical studies professor offered some valuable advice in my pursuit of demagogic perspectives: The academic discipline of rhetorical studies doesn't care what a politician might have said, which at any rate a good spin artist can reinvent or on wiser reflection the pol can later "clarify"; it can only know what the pol actually said. So stay away as best you can, Carpenter, from the interdisciplinary voodoo of psychobabble and all that. Just concentrate on what the demagogue said--actually said.

And that, it goes without emphasizing, is how Obama has chosen to attack. Let us not agonize over the "true" Mitt Romney. All we can honestly do is go about "assuming that he meant" whatever he has already so precisely said.

Comments

[AnneJ]

I am not the most articulate or intelligent commenter to this blog, but I must say that Mitt Romney just flat out gives me the creeps. It's not his lack of warmth or social graces around ordinary people that bothers me. It's something about that smile and that laugh, that just seem to say "This is going to happen you might as well just accept it because I'm entitled to win this thing." I think he is just a flat out mean person as shown by the way he spent so much money tearing his primary opponents (who let's face it were pretty low hanging fruit) to shreds, almost an overkill. He seems heartless by the way his company took over other companies and eliminated jobs with no thought whatsoever to the real people he was hurting and were having their livelihood taken away from them. I personally have no interest in electing a president that you can have a beer with. But a president with an understanding of what the average person has to deal with on a day to day basis. That doesn't mean I necessarily want someone who was born poor and workded their way up to get to where he is now. But I do believe that President Obama is the very embodiment of what Americans can achieve. And we have had presidents that were born rich but had a sense of empathy and responsibility towards the less fortunate and enacted policies to help them. I see no evidence of that in Mitt Romney. And why is it that every time he thinks someone is critcizing him for being rich and what he calls "successful" he always brings his dad into it?

[Susan Zoon]

Mitt Romney is a narcissistic sociopath. From his carefully groomed handsomeness to his nobody home eyes, and social ineptitude, he is the poster boy for narcissism. He will say anything to further his needs and use anyone in his path ruthlessly to achieve his goals.
Far from the garden variety sociopath,W- who was merely a conscienceless amoral vessel to be filled with the aspirational lies of others (Cheney et al) and convinced that they were his own; Romney knows what he wants and how to get it.
Very dangerous and ruthless. ELect a President Romney and it will always be what is best for Romney and NEVER what is best for the American people. The American people are simply a means to an end.

[AnneJ]

Susan, you said it much better than I did and in a lot fewer words.

[priscianus jr]

To assume that somebody actually meant what he said: how quaint, how pleasantly refreshing.

[john horse]

re:I don't think that their nominee is going to be able to suddenly say, "Everything I've said for the last six months, I didn't mean." I'm assuming that he meant it.

When Obama ran for president four years ago, I assumed he meant what he said. Unfortunately, there has been a disconnect between what he said he would do and what he has done (sigh). I'm still voting for Obama (think Supreme Court) but I just wanted to say that Romney isn't the only politician who has a problem with being held accountable for what he has said.