Coming out of Tampa, the Republican nomenklatura was happy, upbeat and ready to go. After the Democrats wrapped their Charlotte convention, though, those same beltway denizens reverted to type:
Mitt’s bounce had disappeared. Bill Clinton had worked his magic yet again, conjuring a lead in the polls for Mr. Obama. Cue the anonymous GOP back-biters, who seem to have waylaid Byron York in the Washington Examiner lobby:
“I thought the Ryan choice was a clear announcement of a new strategy,” says one well-connected Republican not associated with the campaign. “But what seems to have happened is the campaign has drifted back to the position that this is just a referendum on Barack Obama. At some point, you have to earn the presidency.”
Well-connected…yet too gutless to put his or her name to a truism. That’s how insiders roll.
Here on the outside, though, there are reasons to wonder if the panic among the salaried Republicans is just a reflex response. A WaPo poll of likely voters finds that the President and Mr. Romney are in a statistical tie, “virtually unchanged from a poll taken just before the conventions.”
This helps explain the frustration in the Romney campaign, which calls as the fluttering over an Obama surge “horsesh*t.” In particular, they take issue with the idea that Ohio is slipping away from Romney (based on a poll from the Democratic firm of PPP):
PPP has these polls that just put chum in the water for the media. Sometimes I think there’s a conscious effort between the media and Chicago to get Republicans depressed. And I hope our friends realize that all these media analysts out there are Democrats WHO WANT US TO LOSE. And the more Washington DC controls our economy, the more important inside-the-beltway publications are and the more money they make. The 202 area code is dominated by people who will make more money if Obama is reelected, so it’s not just an ideological thumb they’re putting on the scale for him, it’s a business interest.
And it should be noted those interests are bipartisan. A Romney loss opens all sorts of doors, and checkbooks, for Republican seers who saw the November disaster coming.
Some are eager to get ahead of the game, as Ira Stoll does in this piece for Reason. But Stoll takes the doom a step further than most (which is always excellent for gaining the notice of bookers on MSNBC) and lays part of blame for what could happen at the feet of those mooching voters:
The third possible explanation is one I hope is not true, but that lurks as a fear in the minds of many of those dismayed by the polls. That is that the “takers” have started to outnumber, and outvote, the “makers.” Add together the 46.7 million Americans on food stamps, the 8.7 million Americans receiving Pell Grants, the 7.6 million unionized government employees, and weigh them against the top 5% of income earners, the roughly 7 million taxpayers making more than about $154,000 a year, who earn about 32% of the adjusted gross income and pay about 59% of the nation’s individual income taxes. We have all kinds of systems and laws in America for protecting the rights of unpopular minorities, but no one has quite figured out how to prevent an election from devolving into “four wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch.”
Margaret Thatcher said socialists “always run out of other people’s money.” Charles Prince, then head of Citigroup, said in 2007, “as long as the music is playing, you’ve got to get up and dance. We’re still dancing.” A worst-case scenario is that the 2012 election will be remembered as one in which voters thought the music was still playing and danced away, only to discover before long that the other people’s money had run out.
The President’s been playing the (really) long game. Increase the dependent rolls, reap the electoral benefits. Mitt, the poor thing, never had a chance.
It’s easy to surrender to the bad news — real, imagined or just plain made up. It’s particularly enticing for conservatives, who have a natural tendency to view everything as going to hell, sooner rather than later. It’s in their bones, and for some, it’s in their interests.
But before we all begin looking for new clever new places to bury the family silver, or begin laying bets on the 2016 presidential field, it’s worth recalling this little bit from history (via the Drudge Report). It’s from 1984 — pre-history for many of the most worried of worry warts. The headline says it all:
“Mondale, Ferraro Lead Reagan, Bush in Latest Poll.”
For those who can’t recall the outcome of that contest, the surging Mondale/Ferraro ticket went on to lose 49 states.
