“Some Ten Thousand People day after day after day.”
Romney is attracting such enthusiasm that not even the NYT can play down the crowd size. Jeff Zeleny calls it “Obama-sized crowds.”
Meanwhile, a debate-humiliated Obama secludes himself at a golf course and prepares to go negative. Don’t worry, Romney, always the overachiever, is both campaigning hard and studying up for the next debate on Tuesday night:
Romney is practicing, too, for the second debate, which will be held at Hofstra University near New York City on Tuesday, though he is squeezing debate preparation into his daily campaign schedule.
Are human beings just advanced chimpanzees? In body language, it seems little has changed.
First, look at this picture carefully:
I think it fairly well captures the power dynamics on display in Denver last Wednesday night. The social cues — Romney’s dominance and Obama passivity — was glaringly on display. Although Romney won on words as well as optics, it may have been Obama’s beta presence which contributed to his weak performance.
Consider Peggy Noonan’s words:
“It wasn’t just Mitt Romney’s strong performance. It was President Obama’s amazingly weak one. He’s never been punctured before. But by debate’s end Wednesday night, if you opened the window this is what you could hear: Ssssssss. The soft hiss of air departing from a balloon.
And—amazingly again—he did it to himself. He didn’t fight, he didn’t show, he wasn’t awake and hungry. He just said the same-old-same-old and let it go. He couldn’t even meet Mr. Romney’s gaze, never mind his arguments.” [emphasis added]
Notice the words she employes: strong, weak, punctured, couldn’t meet Romney’s gaze. Because Obama is emotionally fragile, the presence of the confident Romney changed the center of gravity in the room. Now check out this video by Harvard Business School professor, Amy Cuddy. She studies body language and power, and interestingly the first minute shows Obama in his element, surrounded by his acolytes — and he displays shockingly different body language, not the naughty school boy being lectured by his domineering father.
Considering Obama’s submissive body language, it’s no wonder then that Peggy Noonan thinks that “The impact of the first debate is going to be bigger than we know. It’s going to affect thinking more than we know, and it’s going to start showing up in the polls, including in the battlegrounds, more dramatically than we guess.”
In recent weeks the following Democrats have gone off the Obama reservation, at times directly challenging Dear Leader in ways that regurgitate for days in the news cycle much to his horror:
Cory Booker, Mayor of Newark, who is now “dead” to the Administration for having the utter honesty to tell a TV reporter that he was nauseated by the attacks on Bain;
Ed Rendell, former Pennsylvania governor, who, while making the rounds promoting a book and promoting Hillary Clinton, appears to savor opportunities to challenge Obama;
Artur Davis, former Alabama congressman, who proclaimed that “this is not Bill Clinton’s party” as he announced that he’s becoming a Republican;
Sen. Diane Feinstein, Democratic Chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, who has excoriated the Obama Administration for sensitive security leaks; and of course…
Bill Big-Dawg Clinton, who has had to walk back so many Obama digs in the past week, aids are now suggesting he’s senile. (Oh, sure. If Bill Clinton is senile then Barack Obama really is the smartest president evah. Whatever).
There are more. There are so many Democratic critics speaking out so often that I’m losing track: Gov. Deval Patrick of Massachusetts; former Obama “Car Czar” Steve Rattner; former Obama advisor Van Jones (of all people!); former Tennessee Rep. Harold Ford; Sen. Chris Coons of Delaware — all of whom have publicly defended Mayor Booker. Fearlessly, I might add.
And now Lanny Davis, former Special Counsel to Bill Clinton, today said this:
“We’re both (speaking of Clinton and Davis) concerned about the tactics (Obama’s) campaign is employing….(He should) talk about his record rather than going negative on Mitt Romney…
“This is how bad it is….Koolaid drinking people — meltdown!”
Surely I’m not the only one who’s noticed that most of these rogue party poopers are Hillary Democrats. What on Clinton’s Earth is going on?
“Anyone who sees and paints a sky green and fields blue ought to be sterilized.” — Adolph Hitler, German Chancellor and Nazi Party leader (1889-1945)
“If Romney thought it was good to say the sky was green and the grass was blue to win an election, he’d say it.” — David Plouffe, Obama 2008 Campaign Chairman, October 30, 2011 on Meet The Press
You don’t need to be a scholar to understand what Hitler meant: Anyone who challenges Dear Leader should be exterminated. And it’s not surprising that Obama’s team finds a rich source of quotable concepts in Hitler’s archive of speeches. Here are a few more:
“How fortunate for governments that the people they administer don’t think.”
“I use emotion for the many and reserve reason for the few.”
“If you tell a big enough lie and tell it frequently enough, it will be believed.”
“It is not truth that matters, but victory.”
And this one, of course:
“The broad masses of a population are more amenable to the appeal of rhetoric than to any other force.”
I don’t know how much credibility Schoen and Caddell have as Democratic advisers, but the very fact that the Washington Post is publishing this proposal is odd at minimum, if not stunning.
One and done: To be a great president, Obama should not seek reelection in 2012
By Douglas E. Schoen and Patrick H. Caddell
Sunday, November 14, 2010
If the president goes down the reelection road, we are guaranteed two years of political gridlock, at a time when we can ill afford it. But by explicitly saying he will be a one-term president, Obama can deliver on his central campaign promise of 2008, draining the poison from our culture of polarization and ending the resentment and division that have eroded our national identity and common purpose.
~~
The best way for him to address both our national challenges and the serious threats to his credibility and stature is to make clear that, for the next two years, he will focus exclusively on the problems we face as Americans, rather than the politics of the moment – or of the 2012 campaign.
Quite simply, given our political divisions and economic problems, governing and campaigning have become incompatible. Obama can and should dispense with the pollsters, the advisers, the consultants and the strategists who dissect all decisions and judgments in terms of their impact on the president’s political prospects.
Obama himself once said to Diane Sawyer: “I’d rather be a really good one-term president than a mediocre two-term president.” He now has the chance to deliver on that idea.
~~
Obama owes his election in large measure to the fact that he rejected this approach during his historic campaign. Indeed, we were among those millions of Democrats, Republicans and independents who were genuinely moved by his rhetoric and purpose. Now, the only way he can make real progress is to return to those values and to say that for the good of the country, he will not be a candidate in 2012.
Should the president do that, he – and the country – would face virtually no bad outcomes. The worst-case scenario for Obama? In January 2013, he walks away from the White House having been transformative in two ways: as the first black president, yes, but also as a man who governed in a manner unmatched by any modern leader. He will have reconciled the nation, continued the economic recovery, gained a measure of control over the fiscal problems that threaten our future, and forged critical solutions to our international challenges. He will, at last, be the unifying figure globally he has sought to be, and will almost certainly leave a better regarded president than he is today. History will look upon him kindly – and so will the public.
It is no secret that we have been openly critical of the president in recent days, but we make this proposal with the deepest sincerity and hope for him and for the country.
I can’t imagine the Post publishing such an “opinion” without cause. Ideas anyone? Do you think this is related to the WSJ’s bizarre suggestion a couple of weeks ago that Obama had not yet decided whether to run for re-election? Why Would Donors Be Wondering in Nov. 2010 Whether Obama will Run for Re-election
The blue-collar voters who supported Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential run deserted the party in droves on Tuesday, according to a new poll.
Democrats’ support from white, non-college-educated male voters dropped 12 percent from 2008, according to a survey Greenberg Quinlan Rosner conducted Nov. 2-3 for Democracy Corps and Campaign for America’s Future.
Only 29 percent of blue-collar men support Democrats in 2010, down from 41 percent last cycle, according to the survey of 1,000 2008 voters, of which 897 voted on Tuesday.
“These are gigantic losses,” Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg, whose firm conducted the survey, said on a conference call with reporters Friday.
Shocking, right? The “Hillary voters,” everyone will recall, are mainstream moderate Democrats, in the lineage of “Reagan Democrats.” These are the voters who Donna Brazile dismissed in 2008 when she boldly declared on CNN in her role as an “impartial commentator” that the new Democratic coalition was younger, more urban, and less blue collar. In other words, “F**You Hillary Democrats!”
It’s so amusing, in the aftermath of Tuesday’s mid-term slaughter, that political reporters have dialed up the chatter about a 2012 primary challenge to Obama from the far-left wing of Democratic Party (as if Obama weren’t liberal enough for them, lol). Reviewing the results of Greenberg’s poll showing a gigantic exodus of blue-collar Democrats, how do the brilliant pundits think a more liberal candidate would re-capture Hillary’s white working class voters? They know that Deaniacs are the high-income elites who already support Obama.
The Politico set is in denial. They refuse to articulate the obvious: It will take a more centrist Democrat to win back independents and the lost coalition, the “unwashed” middle of the country who turned out 18 million strong to vote for Hillary Rodham Clinton in 2008. So, Hillary may insist that she’s not running — that is no doubt true — but if the Democratic Party is truly interested in holding onto the presidency for a bit longer, it would be wise to correct course and draft her.
Buried in election-day frenzy, there was this surprising sentence written by John Fund in the Wall Street Journal on Tues., Nov. 2:
Key donors have told the White House that the president should decide for certain whether he’s running for re-election by the end of December.
So…..Obama has NOT decided for certain whether he will run for re-election?
Isn’t that curious, and isn’t it even more curious how no one else in the Media has seemed to pick up on Mr. Fund’s finding.
Is it typical for a President to be uncertain about whether he will seek re-election by the end of the second year of his first term, or has Mr. Fund uncovered something more significant?
UPDATE: It appears from a Google search that Huffington Post logged a story about this very question on Nov. 2, then scrubbed it.
Amidst all the flyover Iowa posturing by Romney, Palin, Gingrich, Jindal, Pawlenty and the rest of the GOP yawners who haven’t a prayer in 2012 — and all the pundit pontification about their (non-existent) chances — the American people are quietly and steadily drafting the Republican who can — should the GOP put its full force behind him — boot President BoBo from the White House.
That Republican, the one who stands a chance in 2012, is Governor Chris Fix-It Christie.
President Hillary Rodham Clinton would be my first choice but that won’t happen unless Barry BoBo is unable or unwilling to run for re-election, and we all know that narcissists never step down, so……
Let’s draft the anti BoBo who can actually win. Ladies and Gentleman, meet Number 45, President Christopher James Christie:
