Mud on "his" hands

Obama had one strategy this campaign: character assassination. But thanks to a voter backlash, Romney’s optimism may well win the day

• By KYLE SMITH
• Last Updated: 4:33 AM, November 4, 2012
• Posted: 8:05 PM, November 3, 2012

Kyle Smith

Blog: Movies

Watch the campaign news segment with the sound turned down. You can see what’s happening in their faces: Mitt Romney is earnest, optimistic and forward-looking. Barack Obama is sour with sarcasm, peevish, defensive and even downright angry. Nineteen-sixty John Kennedy has turned into 1974 Richard Nixon.
Whatever could be bothering this former apostle of light?
By downgrading its adulation, the country has let President Obama down, and the president, whose bizarre dislike for people was compared by one of his own aides to Bill Gates somehow achieving supremacy in the world of software without liking computers, can barely conceal his fury.

His base loves this supposedly “engaged and commanding” Obama because they’re equally inflamed about prospects that the statist train of Progress is derailing once again. But it’s hard to picture independent voters failing to notice the bitterness. “He seems to smolder with resentment,” wrote George Will, “that he must actually ask for a second term.”
When the history of Campaign 2012 is written, let it not be forgotten that Barack Obama has spent more money on character assassination than anyone at any time in the entire history of humanity. The man who once predicted that Republicans would say about him, “He’s got a funny name. And did I mention he’s black?” has run a campaign based on exactly that level of substance. The shrinks call this “projection.”
For the most part, Obama hasn’t even tried to campaign on his actual accomplishments, because voters made it clear they didn’t think much of them at the time and haven’t changed their minds. He doesn’t mention the $800 billion of wasted stimulus, barely talks about ObamaCare and omits mention of how he ignored the recommendations of his own blue-ribbon debt-reduction commission.
He even cut the “al Qaeda on the run” line from his standard speech, because in fact al Qaeda is on the prowl and Obama would rather voters not be thinking about how terrorists on Sept. 11 attacked the US consulate all night long in Benghazi while he did nothing.
Nor, for the most part, has Obama run on Romney’s actual record, because he’d rather not encourage the fact-check mafia to mention that during the Romney governorship, the Massachusetts unemployment rate went from 5.6% to 4.7% while the budget was balanced.
Instead, Obama, whose campaign strategists have been up front about their strategy from Day One (Politico, after talking to the president’s minions, headlined its Aug. 9, 2011 story, “Obama Plan: Destroy Romney”) has deployed hundreds of millions of dollars primarily to create a fictitious Romney, a heartless jobicidal monster who hides his money in shadowy offshore accounts and is, as the infamous ad put it, “Not one of us.” A Romney ad that said the same about Obama would, of course, be racist.

http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/mud_on_hishands_NA71TsiHETfol9DjZi7KfO