fbpx
Politics Foreign Affairs Culture Fellows Program

Attacking Romney’s Phoniness Isn’t “Swift-Boating”

Jonathan Tobin thinks the plan to attack Romney’s character is bound to fail because it contradicts Obama’s original campaign message: As difficult as Obama’s re-election prospects may seem today as the economy continues to sink, the 2008 candidate of “hope and change” can’t be re-elected by “swift boating” his opponents. As I said, attacking Romney […]

Jonathan Tobin thinks the plan to attack Romney’s character is bound to fail because it contradicts Obama’s original campaign message:

As difficult as Obama’s re-election prospects may seem today as the economy continues to sink, the 2008 candidate of “hope and change” can’t be re-elected by “swift boating” his opponents.

As I said, attacking Romney in this way isn’t going to work for Obama, but not for this reason. Candidates have won the Presidency partly on vacuous messages of cooperation and unity and then gone on to run for re-election using just these sorts of attacks. When Bush ran the first time, he promoted himself as the candidate of bipartisan compromise. He was, as he never stopped telling us, “a uniter, not a divider.” Starting in 2002, Bush abandoned these pretenses and largely pursed policies that were designed to stoke the support of his party base. Polarization worked for Bush, and Ramesh Ponnuru thinks that it could work for Obama, but there is nothing inherent in exploiting political polarization that should harm Obama.

After all, what is it that most disaffected liberals and Democrats find so infuriating about Obama? It is that he is always striving for accommodation and consensus, and they prefer someone who engages in polarizing partisan fights. If Obama followed through on attacking Romney’s character, this would be an example of the “tough” political tactics that they believe have been lacking in Obama so far. Democrats regard “swift-boating” as an ugly tactic mainly because it was used against them, and because they saw it as a scurrilous, unfounded attack. Seen that way, Obama can’t really “swift-boat” Romney without accusing him of fabricating something that has been a central part of his public persona. That isn’t what Obama’s campaign is proposing to do. The attack on Romney’s “weirdness” has much more in common with attacking Al Gore’s “reinventions” than it does with the effort to attack Kerry’s war record.

Advertisement

Comments

The American Conservative Memberships
Become a Member today for a growing stake in the conservative movement.
Join here!
Join here