This'n'That; August Twenty-Second #1; The Amateur-Finale

obama Campaign Reaches 'Way Back!'
    "The Amateur's" 258 pages went by really quick!  Maybe it is the topic at hand; maybe it's my complete and utter dislike and distrust of America's current exalted ruler, "Clown Prince" obama.  The final chapter (#22) of the book is titled "The Low Road" starting with a quote from Florida's U.S. Senator Marco Rubio:
"I'm troubled by rhetoric that pits people against each other....  We have never been a nation of haves and have-nots.  We are a nation of haves and soon-to-haves, of people who have made it and people who will make it.  And that's who we need to remain."   --United States Senator Marco Rubio
    In Chapter #22, David Axelrod lays out the only course of action available to "Clown Prince" obama's re-immaculation efforts, given his complete lack of positive accomplishments.  With neither Governor Romney nor Representative Ryan having ever been divorced, Axelrod is forced to formulate new tactics to discredit the opposition to another four-years spent in an economic downward spiral.  To that end, Axelrod apparently researched President Harry S Truman's come-from WAY-behind victory over Thomas E. Dewey and came away with Clark Clifford's "The Politics of 1948," memo to President Truman.  I quote from "The Amateur:"
Faced with these poll numbers [Feb 24, 2012; Gallup; 51% say obama too liberal, up from 37% during 2008 campaign], David Axelrod, obama's political Merlin, has waved his magic wand again and conjured up a new persona for his candidate in 2012.  Gone--poof!--is the American Messiah of 2008, who promised "hope and change."  Gone--poof!--is the self-righteous figure who once proclaimed,
"If you don't have any fresh ideas, then you use stale tactics to scare voters.  If you don't have a record to run on, then you paint your opponent as someone people should run from."
Gone--poof!--is Mr. Nice Guy.

    Axelrod ripped a page out of Harry Truman's 1948 playbook and fashioned a campaign for obama in which he demonizes his opponents and runs against a "Do-Nothing" Republican Congress and its wealthy supporters.  You can hear an echo of "Give 'em Hell Harry" when obama declares:
"This Congress--they are accustomed to doing nothing, and they're comfortable with doing nothing, and they keep on doing nothing."  Or when he says,
"My attitude is, get it done....[but] if they don't get it done, then we'll be running against a Congress that's not doing anything for the American people, and the choice will be very stark and will be very clear."
    Axelrod's strategy is virtually a copy of a sixty-five-year-old memorandum written by Harry Truman's political guru, Clark Clifford, and titled "The Politics of 1948."  The gist of Clifford's memo was the need to divert attention from Truman's domestic and foreign problems and make the contest a conflict between Congress and the president.  In such a battle, Clifford argued,
"[t]he presidency is vastly more flexible than Congress.... There is little possibility that [the president] will get much cooperation from the Congress, but we want the president to be in a position to receive the credit for whatever they do accomplish while also being in a position to criticize the Congress for being obstructionists."
   "It is obvious that Team obama is deliberately following the Clark Clifford strategy," E. Michael Young wrote in American Thinker.  "Like Truman, obama called a special session of Congress to propose his American Jobs Act, knowing in advance that the Republican-controlled House would reject.  Like Truman, obama used an executive order to effect social change in the military (by allowing gays to openly serve) to prop up his liberal base.  And like Truman, obama is giving speeches all around the country, saying the obstructionist 'do-nothing' Republicans in Congress are blocking his jobs bill, hurting the economy, and currying favor with the wealthy elites."
    Mr Klein goes on to enumerate some of the problems the re-immaculation campaign faces with the 'Clifford' approach.  All-in-all, this book was a great read although it 'went by' way-too-fast!  You'd do yourself a favor--no matter your place in the political spectrum--to read "The Amateur," to find what I see as the actual facts in a failed presidency.
Til Nex'Time....

[Blogger Note: 
I added the link to Mr Clifford's original memo.
I added the link to Axelrod's 'divorced' shenanigans. 
I added the photo of President Truman with the 'Dewey Defeats Truman' newspaper. 
I added the 'racist-idiot' billboard photo.]