Ed Morrissey @ The Week:
It’s the kind of dumb statement that candidates make when they get tired. It’s the kind of lame utterance that campaigns dread when it’s their candidate who makes it, and exploit for all its worth when their opponent gives them a gift. All of the above happened on Friday, when a crowd at a rally for Barack Obama booed the mention of Mitt Romney. “No, no, no. Don’t boo, vote,” Obama responded, quieting the crowd. “Voting’s the best revenge.”
It didn’t take Mitt Romney long to work that into his closing message of the campaign this weekend. “Did you see what President Obama said today?” Romney asked a crowd later that evening, setting up the slam dunk. “He asked his supporters to vote for ‘revenge.’ For ‘revenge.’ Instead, I ask the American people to vote for love of country.”
Within 24 hours, the Romney campaign had a television ad featuring the contrasting final messages playing in swing states. The Obama campaign didn’t have much room for rebuttal except to attack Romney for highlighting Obama’s remark. That didn’t have much effect, except to confuse Chris Matthews of MSNBC into thinking that it was Romney who called for revenge — and promptly declaring the argument racist.
Sure, it would be easy to dismiss this as a minor stumble. Candidates make verbal gaffes in the course of a campaign. It wasn’t that long ago, for instance, that a video of Romney making dismissive comments about the 47 percent surfaced, and the Obama campaign exploited that for weeks. Obama even brought up the 47 percent during the final debate in his closing comments. Romney eventually walked those remarks back, but some credited Obama’s polling gains in September to the damage done by the video.
However, Obama’s “revenge” remarks are at least as revealing about this campaign, and of Obama’s approach to both this election and to public policy, as were Romney’s 47 percent statements. The president, in both his campaign and his administration, has gone fully populist, attempting to divide the country along class lines as a distraction from his record in his term in office. In fact, the best description of Obama’s politics since September 2011 is “the politics of revenge.”
It started with the collapse in summer 2011 of a “grand bargain” that Obama wanted as part of a debt-ceiling deal. As Bob Woodward’s book later made clear, Obama ended up angering both Democrats and Republicans, and blew a deal with John Boehner by attempting to up the ante on tax hikes at the last minute. Obama’s budget director, Jack Lew, finally proposed that Congress punt the ball a little longer by passing a debt limit to stave off the acute crisis in exchange for “sequestration” — automatic cuts that would take place in the absence of bipartisan budget reform. Boehner and Harry Reid accepted Lew’s framework, but largely cut Obama out of the loop otherwise.
