Campaign & Speech Advice

Lawrence O’Donnell is becoming more and more a cartoon show. He now features Howard Fineman, head blogger at Huffington Post, as a guest expert every night. This is a creep who prefaces every statement with, “Well I talked to folks at (insert source here) today and they tell me that (insert propaganda here)." He is, apparently, incapable of original thought and merely passes on to us what other people tell him.

Fineman advised us that “the folks” in the White House believe there is some good news in the latest poll numbers, and that is that Congressional approval is at only 13%. This means that they can run the reelection by having, “not the president himself,” Fineman tells us, “but his people going intensely negative on Congress.” Apparently they will just ignore the Republican presidential candidate, and we will have a campaign where Obama is just some sort of cheerleader and his staff is running a negative campaign against Congress. It’s certainly a novel approach; remains to be seen how successful it will be.

He went on to give the “people” who will be running in Obama’s behalf an actual line to use, which goes, “Do you want the economic plan which you blame for the problem or do you want… something else?” The ending was really weak as he realized, as he reached that point, that the Democrats aren’t actually offering any plan, other than blaming the Republicans. He could with equal validity offer, “Do you want the economic plan which you blame for the problem or do you want the one that isn’t working now?”

I think that also lacks a certain punch, and that we might want to be glad that O’Donnell's crowd is not managing Obama’s reelection campaign.

The Hardball crowd is not any better though, as that gang was offering advice for Obama’s speech that varied between incoherent and insane yesterday. Mark Halperin, co-author of a book which awes Chris Matthews
with its collection of trivial gossip and not one single named source, says Obama should consult with John Boehner today and present not his own jobs plan but one upon which he and John Boehner have agreed in advance. Jonathan Alter says he should go for a big “New Deal” type of thing on infrastructure and construction spending, which he admitted could never pass and as far as I could tell he thought would serve no useful purpose other than pissing off Republicans.

I’m sort of with Jonathan Alter, actually. Obama might as well take advantage of the opportunity to piss off the Republicans, because he’s certainly not going to accomplish anything else tomorrow night unless his speech runs long and he pisses off NFL fans as well.