The last time a Democrat running for President earned as much as 51% of the popular vote was LBJ in 1964. So here we are 44 long years later and the Democrat candidates are peddling the same old leftist swill. Nothing much different than the disgraced, miserable Lyndon... or McGovern or Carter or Mondale or Dukakis or Gore or Kerry. Bubba won in '92 with just 43% of the vote promising a tax cut. He lied about that, raised taxes, pushed Hillary-care and ushered in the biggest Republican takeover of Congress in history. Now, one of the two still running pumps the lefty junk with a shriek and a drone-- the other in lighter-than-air vapidity that makes the little girls swoon. That's about all it comes down to. Who ya got?
It is so dismal, and the two remaining candidate's positions are so similar, that the race has turned on things having nothing to do with 2009-era governance: race, one candidate's loose cannon spouse (a former POTUS), the other candidate's loose cannon spouse (who says that nothing much good has happened in America during her adult life), superdelegate bribing, inability to count primary votes, depriving FL and MI of their delegates, kindergarten reports, and on and on.
Meanwhile, the ever-diligent US media yawns and reports on today's polls and speculates about when someone will drop out. They don't bother on issues because, well, the candidates are two sides of the same coin. One will back the biggest tax increase in history, the other will do that plus a dollar more. Neither seems terribly interested in defending America against her enemies. Both would greatly enlarge the role of the federal government in the life of the ordinary American. So, what's to report on? Better to just do the horserace junk.
Into this comes the latest flap over nothing: Obama had a riff in a speech that sounded like a 2006 campaign speech by MA Gov. Deval Patrick. By now you've probably seen the videos. The Clinton campaign overreaches by telling us it's, gasp, PLAGIARISM! The BHO campaign sez, "No big thing. Deval's my friend and we trade lines with each other." Or words to that effect. But so far I haven't seen any media outlet report on the most interesting thing revealed by this little blip: both Patrick and Obama have their message tooled by the same consultants-- "AKP&D Message and Media" out of Chicago. The "A" in this firm is David Axelrod and he is never far from BHO's side. He also "did message" for Deval Patrick's 1996 campaign.
That soaring rhetoric that has lifted the Obama hot-air balloon over everyone this year? Most of it comes from the agile mind of Axelrod. If you don't believe it just compare how BHO sounds when he's using a teleprompter with how he sounds in an interview or debate. Let's just say there wouldn't be young girls fainting at a BHO rally if the prompters weren't working.
So, if some cable news channel wants to have some fun, instead of comparing Patrick's language to Obama's, compare "prompter Obama's" rhetoric to "off-the-cuff Obama's" hemming and hawing. More importantly you would find that when BHO isn't reading AKP&D's stuff and has to talk off the top of his head he goes very hard left. Axelrod knows that to get to that 51% and an electoral college win his client needs to soar higher than the treetops. Without A-Rod crafting the message young Barack sounds farther left than anyone that's gotten the nomination since McGovern. That won't work in 2008 even though the Republicans have given the Democrats the gift of a McCain candidacy.
Republican strategists right now are thinking of ways they'll be able to get Obama away from Axelrod's lofty rhetoric and into his default language-- which is a warmed-over Marxism just this side of Hugo Chavez.
