You should ask questions, but the biggest issue is an incumbent when one is up for reelection. The challenger only needs to meet a minimum threshold of acceptability to win most of the time and Romney should easily meet the threshold. I think Obama’s team knows he meets that threshold, and further they know they can’t win on their record. So it’s all about tearing Romney down. Practicing the very politics Obama condemned in 2008.
People can decide the biggest issue is who makes the best beer or whose wife drives the coolest car if they want to. But neither of my suggestions have any more merit than your suggestion that we all decide if the challenger meets a threshold and go with him if he does.
And aside from being a terrible basis for deciding who to vote for, you can’t make anyone else follow it anyway just by stating it as if it were a fact.
-
then why do most incumbents win reelection?
-
I’m voting for Obama based on his record, so I don’t think it’s fair to say the Obama team “cant win on their record.” Their record is good.
-
Even if I were unhappy with Obama, I don’t think Romney meet the “minimum threshold of acceptability.” Not with his VP pick, and his complete lack of convictions.
People can vote however they want, but most incumbents who are proud of their record run on that record. Reagan and Clinton didn’t have to pillory their opponents, they barely had to acknowledge them. Senate and House incumbents won’t even mention their opponents by name or even acknowledge their existence when they are confident that their incumbency already justifies reelection.
When an incumbent switches to trying to make the election about something other than his own performance, that’s usually a bad sign.
In 2008 my congressman was running against a woman who was so inept that in their debate she mistakenly said two major local banks had failed. The news station had to bleep her, a pretty huge step considering it was an official debate and they should have stayed neutral. But the banks were perfectly fine and they feared this congressional candidate saying on television that they failed would cause a panic, so they decided to bleep her rather than let the names of the mistaken banks get out.
That was the worst example of a string of incredible blunders from a terrible candidate.
Do you think the incumbent congressman ignored her and ran on his record? He didn’t; he spent the entire campaign attacking her colossal weaknesses and completely trounced her. It would’ve been insane to run on his record just because he was proud of it when he had a weak unlikable candidate who he could easily out campaign.
Obama has plenty of positives to talk about before the election. But he wisely started out by destroying Romney’s main selling point: That he was a brilliant businessman whose entrepreneurial skills would lead the country back to prosperity. Now Romney’s business record is so toxic that he’s begging Obama to stop talking about it. Obama didn’t SWITCH to make the election about his opponent out of desperation. He OPENED WITH IT to knock Romney’s legs out from under him. Now, with Romney firmly defined in the minds of most of the public as Evil Uncle Moneybags, Obama can back off and talk about what a great President he’s been.
Shows how much you know about elections. In any competitive race, an incumbent is virtually always well-served by making the election a choice between two candidates, rather than a referendum on his/her time in office. This is literally taught in Campaign 101.
This is conservative GOP S.O.P. Remember what Bush did to McCain in their primary battle- McCain became an out of control hothead.
Apparently not only do you take your opponent’s strength and lie it into a weakness, you take your base’s weakness and tar the opponent with it. (Really, think about those town hall meetings and tell me who the desperate hotheads are again.)
Eh? I’m too young to remember '84, but Clinton rather famously tried to focus on Dole as early as possible (primarily by claiming he was Newt Gingrich’s lackey), to give the voters a bad image of him before Dole was able to get his own narrative out there. Bush did the same to Kerry, and now Obama is doing it to Romney. It seems like SOP for incumbent Presidents.
And it makes sense. Voters already know about the incumbents record, for better or for worse, and already have an opinion on it by the time the election comes around. No amount of campaign advertising is likely to change that. But most “gettable” voters have pretty vague notions of who most challengers are. Their opinions regarding Romney or Dole or Kerry are still malleable, and so it makes sense for an incumbant to focus effort there rather then trying to push against an opinion of the incumbent voters have spent the last four years forming.
Here’s Mark Penn, on the '96 campaign against Dole:
So even when the economy was doing relatively well and the incumbent was popular, both campaigns focused on defining the challenger.
Actually, that’s pretty much exactly what it is; also a referendum on the incumbent if there is one, but always a referendum on any challenger.
That is absurd. And desperate. 
It is not a matter of the incumbent being perfect or almost perfect and the challenger being minimally competent. It is about who can do a better job, with each voter deciding what that constitutes.
What is really desperate is that the response of one side when a reporter or ad brings up an off-message topic is “that’s not what the voters want to hear.” They don’t get to decide what the voters want to hear, no matter how much they’d like to. If the Republicans don’t have an answer to questions about their anti-woman pro-rich person position, they should get some and not blather like Sarah Palin.
And after four years of tearing down Obama, the Republicans are hypocrites of the highest order to complain about tearing down Romney. Remember, one of Romney’s first ads was showing Obama quoting McCain and making it sound like Obama originated the quote. When confronted with this lie, Romney said too bad, elections are tough. Now that the little bully is getting hit back, he goes crying to momma. The party of Rove ceded the moral high ground a long time ago.
As for the economy, don’t you think Romney owes us an explanation of where he will find the loopholes he will close. Don’t you think we deserve to know if he supports Ryan’s budget or not? Challengers have the advantage of having no record, so they can offer a secret plan to balance the budget. It is perfectly okay to try to force the details out of them, and to think they are lying about their plan if none are forthcoming.
FYI, I’m stealing this. Not sure what I’m going to do with it, but it’s mine now.
Don’t remember where I stole it. Hell, maybe I didn’t!? Wow. Far out.
How’s the strategy working so far?
Obama +1.0
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2012/president/us/general_election_romney_vs_obama-1171.html
How much did they spend on negative ads again, while Romney built up a warchest?
Your thesis is that Obama is desperate and your evidence is that he’s…winning? And has been ahead since last November?
That was before the wild enthusiasm generated by the VP nomination of whats-his-face, and then securing the support of the rabidly “pro-life” partisans, the vast majority of American voters.
Thaw it out and make tuna sandwiches?
Still not mentioning fivethirtyeight.com anymore?
Vote Romney in 2012. He meets the minimum threshold of acceptability to win!