Barack Obama is foreign.
Oh yeah? Mitt Romney is a bully.
Think the U.S. presidential election will be about the economy? Think again.
On the economy, both presidential candidates are marked with indelible vulnerabilities.
President Obama first. He inherited the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. He has presided over a weak and fitful recovery.
During the recession of 2008-09, the U.S. lost more than 8 million jobs, net. Since 2009, the U.S. has gained only about 4.5 million jobs, net. Yes, the unemployment rate has improved somewhat since January 2009 -- but largely because so many people have quit searching for work. Among Americans of prime working age --16 to 54 -- the percentage in work today is the lowest since 1983, near the very beginning of the mass entry of married women into the workforce.
So Obama cannot run a "morning in America" campaign for recovery. Too many Americans are still shrouded in the pre-dawn murk.
Yet challenger Mitt Romney finds himself not much better positioned than incumbent Barack Obama.
His own job-creation record as governor of Massachusetts was not especially impressive. As a CEO, he was better known for downsizing purchased companies than for new hiring. And he has been pressed by his party to campaign on a platform that emphasizes radical spending cuts for the young and the poor and another big round of upper-income tax cuts on top of the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003.
No wonder that both campaigns are looking for something else to talk about.
Over the past couple of weeks, they have found it -- or, more exactly, it's been found for them.
On Thursday, the Washington Post reported an incident that occurred at Mitt Romney's prep school back in 1965. Romney, then an 18-year-old senior, had led a group of students in a hazing of a younger boy who wore his long hair dyed blond. "That's just wrong," Romney supposedly said. The Romney-led group pinned the boy to the ground. As the boy cried and called for help, Romney forcibly clipped his hair.
Stack that story on top of previous stories about Romney "liking to fire people" and caging his dog atop the roof of his car, and a narrative is born! The sober, responsible Romney has been transformed into Biff from Back to the Future to Jack from Lord of the Flies.
The anti-Obama side, meanwhile, has a constructed narrative of its own.
In Obama's long memoir, Dreams From My Father, he mentions that his Indonesian stepfather introduced him to dog meat. That old story was dusted off last month as a new revelation, kicking off an explosion of jokes about #obamadogrecipes and #obamaeatsdog.
Obama had a Kenyan father and an Indonesian stepfather. Raised in Indonesia and then Hawaii, he did not set foot on the American mainland until his freshman year in college. As a student at Columbia, his closest friends were from Pakistan. One of his most admired professors was a militant Palestinian. When he settled in Chicago, he joined a church presided over by a radical black pastor. Now dog meat.
A 2007 memo by Hillary Clinton's message guru, Mark Penn, articulates what this record can be made to mean: "[Obama's] roots to basic American values and culture are at best limited. I cannot imagine America electing a president during a time of war who is not at his centre fundamentally American in his thinking and values."
The campaigns subtly appeal to these negative images in their messaging.
Mitt Romney's stump speech warns: "President Obama has said he wants to transform America. I don't want to transform America. I want to restore America."
The liberal Super-PAC PrioritiesUSA action meanwhile represents Romney as a super-greedy super-bully in its ad, "If he wins, we lose."
We'd like to imagine that elections are decided on the issues, by voters responding rationally to competing policy proposals. But myth and narrative are stronger than reason -- and strongest of all when, as now in the U.S., times are hard and solutions are lacking.
This blog is cross-posted at the National Post.
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Leo W. Gerard: What's It All About, Romney?
This time, Obama may not win. I hope to God he does win, but he may not. I will be voting for him. I am only one person and my vote probably will not matter, but I will be voting for him. I plan to vote for Obama because another Republican presidency is a nightmare that this country does not need. Until and unless the Republican party starts treating women like people, quits trying to shove Fundamentalist Christianity down the throats of disinterested others, and starts working for the welfare of all the people, not just the 1%, I will not be voting Republican.
"He presided over a weak and fitful recovery." This statement would lead most readers to infer that the recovery is proceeding independent of the President's actions. Nothing is further from the truth. If you meant to say "the recovery under the Obama administration has been weak and fitful," you'd still be using indirect speech, but would also convey a kernel of truth to your audience.
And yet... some of the Bush Speechwriter remains behind, eh?
You said: "Obama had a Kenyan father and an Indonesian stepfather. Raised in Indonesia and then Hawaii, he did not set foot on the American mainland until his freshman year in college."
Ok, this is just not an accurate or honest presentation of the president's life. First of all, he only spent a total of 4 years of his life living outside of the US.
4 years.
He was born and raised in the US, and spent the vast majority of his life in the US. To suggest that he was "raised in Indonesia" is a bit of a stretch... it is a writer's tool to emphasize a perceived negative (to some who read this) by making it sound like he spent the majority of his life living in a country that one side of the political fight does all it can to paint as a "dark and dangerous country that does not share our values..."
Secondly, by saying that "he did not set foot on the American MAINLAND until his freshman year of college" is technically true, but is only important if you do not consider the state of Hawaii as part of the US.
The election is not about the economy in the sense that it is not about the -real- economy; it is about the various fictional economies that the campaigns and their surrogates are telling the public about.
Start with the fact that most people don't understand the economy and don't understand macroeconomics. Their knowledge, understanding and perception of The Economy™ comes from whatever their favorite "news" and "information" sources tell them, combined with whatever their voting preference requires them to believe in order to validate that preference.
The campaigns and their surrogates understand this, so whatever they say about the economy doesn't have to be moored to any objective facts or observable reality because they have supporters and fans who will enable them and never hold them accountable. Every incumbent can be expected to say that the economy is doing well and getting better; every challenger will say that the economy is terrible and getting worse. Since any true, meaningful understanding of the economy can never boil down to one of these or the other, it could be said that they're both right (i.e., some people are doing well, others aren't; things are not as bad as they could be, but they could always be better; etc.).
The 2010 mid-term election was based entirely on fiction; there's no reason to believe the 2012 election will be any different.