Obama vs. Romney: The ‘anti-election’

last updated 8 January 2015

“Does either Barack Obama or Mitt Romney really want to win this election?” asked Fred Hiatt in The Washington Post. With only a hundred days to go until the election, both President Obama and challenger Mitt Romney are running “joyless, grinding campaigns” devoid of a positive vision for the nation’s future. Four years after he electrified the nation, Obama “is waging a diminished, conventional campaign” based on appeals to interest groups and attacks on Romney as a dangerous, right-wing ideologue who’d favor the rich over everyone else. Romney, meanwhile, has provided “an uninformative mix” of attacks on Obama’s economic policies and clichéd homages to American greatness. This is less an election than an “anti-election,” said Robert Reich in HuffingtonPost.com. Rather than propose bold ideas for getting the economy moving again and the jobless back to work, both Obama and Romney are settling for the same, dispiriting central message: “The other guy would be worse.”

So far, Romney’s strategy isn’t working, said Nate Cohn in TNR.com. Yes, polls show him trailing Obama by just 47 to 45 percent. But history shows that 45 percent is the Republican “floor”—the percentage of Americans who’ll vote for any Republican. Even John McCain got 45.9 percent in the midst of an economic meltdown in 2008. The fact that Romney is stuck at 45 percent, despite the anemic economy, shows he’s having real trouble “winning over the undecided swing voters.” Obama isn’t wowing anybody, either, said Charles Blow in The New York Times. A recent Gallup poll found only 39 percent of Democrats saying they were “more enthusiastic about voting than usual,” compared with 51 percent of Republicans. The “lack of enthusiasm” in his own base means Obama could lose a narrow election.

The lack of enthusiasm for both candidates is hardly surprising, said David Brooks, also in the Times. “Romney has run the closest thing to a policy-free race as any candidate in my lifetime,” while Mr. Hope and Change is content to smear Romney with the old liberal caricature of the “corporate tool who wants to take away grandma’s health care.” All in all, it’s an “incredibly boring” race. Worst of all, another three months of these “polarizing, negative tactics” will leave nearly half the electorate horrified that such an evil and dangerous man will occupy the Oval Office. Get ready for four more years of bitter partisanship and gridlock.