Jonathan Bernstein (seemingly dumbing down his punditry for Greg Sargent’s audience) argues the GOP is trapped in its echo chamber, running against a fantasy Obama or two. The first is basically a fraud who never held a job before he somehow wound up the Democratic nominee in 2008. The other is a scheming, nefarious, stealth left-winger who any day now is going to unleash his radical socialist agenda.
As many have noted, these two Obamas are somewhat at odds with each other. But the more important point is that neither version builds a convincing case against supporting Obama in 2012. No one is going to buy that Obama is too inexperienced to be president; no one is going to buy that he has some secret agenda that remained secret during four years in the White House.
This is fairly rich, given the Democrats spent about a decade painting George W. Bush as an incompetent ideologue. Moreover, Bernstein here falls back on the Obamaesque habit of beating strawmen.
When Mitt Romney says of Obama, “It’s hard to create a job if you never had one,” anyone outside the Democrat bubble recognizes it as Romney contrasting his business experience with Obama’s lack thereof. The vast majority of jobs Obama has held have been government jobs, including the top one… and how’s that working out for everybody? The Obama recovery is among the worst in modern history — andnot because we had a sharp recession due to a financial panic.
Consider Obama’s big economic ideas. Obama and top Democrats hyped their government stimulus plan, but field studies bear out the general perception that itfailed. Indeed, the stimulus became the butt of a joke from Obama himself, not Mitt Romney. Many Americans, from the unemployed to those whose taxes were wasted, found it unfunny.