This week we read how Obama's campaign strategy has shifting from focusing on traditional bell weather states like Ohio (which is driven primarily by those pesky Blue Dogs) and is instead focusing on states like Colorado. They are calling it the Colorado-Strategy. This strategy makes perfect sense to me, Obama is once again dividing the country into two pieces. He strongly dislikes those traditional conservative value oriented, blue collar, white voters who reside in the mid-West and Appalachia, and would much rather rely on the "I went to college, therefore I'm really educated, but I actually got a communications degree from a third tier state school, so I pretend to be a pseudo intellectual and mimic what trendy liberals say" crowd. I'm fine with this, but let's not have any delusions here, he's just another smart guy manipulating the less intelligent.
This phenomenon likely explains why Obama's approval rating is much higher than any of his policies. He's trendy so he's liked, and hey supporting him makes you look very faux intellectual, but even these people don't think he's getting his policies right. It also explains why, even though Obama constantly blasts the Republican Congress for everything wrong with the world, voters still favor them by a 7 point margin...
But this new focus on the upper-middle class and their herd instincts to follow whatever someone says is trendy, is probably why the president could potentially lose an essentially uncontested primary in Arkansas. In Obama's mind, these are the people who just cling to God and Guns and will never support his ideological vision of America as another Europe.
But this is probably also why Pennsylvania might be in play in 2012.
Alas, all this struggle with the middle of the country leaves some wondering if perhaps Obama is losing this election. Despite Romney's lack of cult of personality, like Obama, the middle of road just doesn't seem terrified of his policies.
The middle of the road isn't terrified of Romney's policies because he has said absolutely nothing about what he would actually do. He talks about putting Americans back to work - because who wouldn't while running in a sluggish economy - but has offered no solutions and will not even specify what spending he would actually cut. That's because while Americans oppose the notion of government spending in the abstract (largely due to demagoguery on the part of Republicans), they support all of the individual elements that Romney would have to cut in order to get anywhere near his already ridiculously unrealistic budget and deficit targets.
ReplyDeleteAs for your rant on the upper middle class, do you think we can do a poll on everyone who got a communications degree from a 'third tier state school' and find out what that incredibly thin slice of the population actually thinks? Conservatives are very good at creating caricatures that greatly exaggerate reality (welfare queens anyone?), but maybe, just maybe there are some people out there who don't want their future sold down the river because Mitt Romney wants to give more $ to millionaires while gutting the support that made the middle class the middle class.
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