In a recent piece, I suggested that Romney would likely win the Republican nomination, and since he has no history of scandals and is obviously intelligent, the Obama campaign (which cannot run on Obama’s record in office, which is risible) would attack him in the only way it can. It will try to attack him for being rich, white, and Mormon. That is, it will try to arouse envy of the rich among the poor, hatred of whites among blacks and Latinos, and anti-Mormon prejudice among the populace at large (and especially among evangelicals).
So I am not surprised that Obama is now running this sort of campaign. I am, however, surprised — and pleasantly so — at how quickly the Romney campaign and the countermedia are hitting back.
I have already described in some detail the mainstream media’s concerted attack on Romney’s faith. Two recent illustrations have just occurred. MSNBC host Martin Bashir read on air from the Book of Mormon, somehow linking it to his condemnation of Romney to hell for allegedly lying about Obama’s stellar record of job creation (a record that, by the way, should condemn Obama to hell). And Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer couldn’t resist reminding us all that Romney descends from a polygamist great-grandfather.
The countermedia hit back, pointing out that Obama’s grandfather and even his father were polygamists. So the Schweitzer attack quickly fizzled.
Then there were the attacks on Romney’s wealth. Obama felt obliged to remind us that he was “not born with a silver spoon in his mouth,” and his campaign advisor and pet harpy Hilary Rosen opined that Ann Romney had never worked a day in her life.
The pushback was rapid. If not a silver spoon, Obama clearly had some feet in his mouth. The blogs had a field day pointing out that his white grandmother was wealthy; she paid for him to go to the toniest prep school in Hawaii, then sent him to Occidental, a high-priced private college. The sharp-tongued Ann Coulter caused a stir when she observed that Obama was a clear beneficiary of affirmative action, which is certainly a case of being privileged.
As to Rosen’s slur, the backlash was quick and strong enough to make Obama disavow Rosen’s views and make her apologize rather quickly. Ann Romney had, as the countermedia reminded us, raised five boys, which every parent will attest must have involved endless work. The countermedia also showed that Mitt and Ann Romney started out with essentially nothing, and built their fortune together.
Of course, Rosen was just pushing a line, one found in a strain of feminism that goes back to Simone de Beauvoir. It’s the idea that women who choose to be stay-at-home mothers are being turncoats to The Cause. This may play well with Women’s Studies profs, but it clearly doesn’t resonate with most women.
Finally, it became all too clear how Obama aims to fire up his base among minority voters: look for any racial incident to exploit. One appeared, providentially, in the killing of Trayvon Martin. Knowing the game plan, the mainstream media quickly hyped the story: big, armed white man shoots innocent black child, and gets away with it in the Deep South. Obama quickly pushed racial grievance exploiters like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson aside (not an easy thing to do!) to get in front of the issue. “If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon,” the prez solemnly intoned.
Obama’s plan was as obnoxious as it was obvious: find and dramatize a racial incident, get minority supporters to rally behind him, then turn to the rest of the country and say, “See? You need me to keep racial tensions under control! My opponent can’t do that, because he’s white!”
However, the countermedia rapidly discovered facts that shook the Narrative. Trayvon’s shooter, George Zimmerman, was half-Hispanic; he was smaller than Martin; Martin had had trouble with the authorities; Zimmerman had wounds on the back of his head, consistent with his story of self-defense; and so on.
The president and his henchmen in the MSM will continue to assail Romney along these obvious tracks. But the countermedia seem to be pushing back, and Romney seems to be catching on to the vicious assault headed his way. He has had only a tiny appetizer — the main course awaits him.
In the meantime: entitlement programs keep heading towards collapse, war clouds appear once again in the Middle East; we remain totally dependent on volatile oil supplies (Obama having canceled the Keystone pipeline and prevented oil and gas exploitation on public lands), and the pathetically tepid “recovery” seems headed for a stall.
A country gets the government it deserves. And it gets the economy it deserves as well.
