Pivot Time

by JASmius

You know what Wolverine said in X-Men III The Last Stand: Best defense is a good offense:

I don't know that I'd characterize Governor Romney's strategy here as throwing the flip-flopper charge back in Red Barry's face, and not because he finally refrained from stepping all over another big primary victory by belching out another trademark gaffe, such as, say, calling The One the REAL "etch-a-sketch" candidate. Seizing on B.O.'s sotto voce assurance to Dmitri Medvedev about all the additional concessions he'll make to Vlad Putin next year once he gets past the election (nudge-nudge-wink-wink) sagely illustrates that Barack Obama is congenitally mendacious, not vaccilatingly irresolute. That you can, indeed, count on him - to be the hard-left radical extremist that he's always been and time-and-again proven himself to be over the past three years, and to lie about it until his nose is longer than the Sears Tower is tall.

Given the record that His Infernal Majesty has already implicitly conceded he can't run on, why wouldn't Mitt hang it around his neck like the dwarf-planet-sized millstone it is? Seems like an obvious gambit to me. Or are "experts" underestimating Romney's intelligence as much as his politicking skills?

Not that there isn't grist for the flip-flopper charge. But I don't think it really fits the definition of the term. The true flip-flopper doesn't have any core beliefs to throw overboard; he just panders any way he can to mine votes. Is there anybody who still believes Barack Obama is anything but a raging ideological zealot? And that that will be more politically saleable than center-right technocracy with a Thurston Howell III twist? Better the guy who'll probably be with you on most things than the guy whose failed views you hate almost as much as the arrogance with which he persists in angrily pushing them.

And redundantly as well:

Eeyore nails what I've been saying for the past three years:

Maybe he's been giving the same three speeches since 2009 and nobody's noticed because we've all tuned him out.

Precisely. When you take the country by storm promising heaven on Earth and then all your big ideas go the way of the Edsel, and then you keep issuing the same promises based on the same failed ideas, people are going to stop paying attention. Or, as another old saying goes, the opposite of love isn't hate, it's apathy.

The Chicago Cherubim wants us all to believe that if we don't re-elect him, or hold him accountable to his own governing record, or bow down to his golden self-image, it's proof that we're all slavering night-riders. The truth is much more prosaic than that: he's a failure. Also an insufferable, pompous, strutting, megalomaniacal narcissistic asshole; but what matters is that he's a failure. And a miserable one at that. The only difference between the "pragmatists" and us "ideologues" is that we saw it coming. But we don't need to say, "We told you so," because everybody can see the dismal results. That is what Barack Obama can't talk his way out of, and what Mitt Romney would be well-advised to staple to the Li'l President like Jacob Marley's chains.

Particularly since the Obamedia will have other priorities.

[cross-posted @ Hard Starboard]