They are not putting a man forward to take over the office of the presidency. They are throwing a human stink-bomb at it – the biggest best most unbelievable beautiful stink bomb ever at whatever might plausibly qualify a president for support in the eyes of Jonathan Chait.
On the part of the one who overdoes it, such negative affirmation is a self-pleasuring form of not really listening that is hardly heard, but more often resented, or, sometimes even worse, re-echoed.
The two main alternatives that are put forward and passionately defended by partisans are utopian, not because they are particularly imaginative, but merely because they cannot be implemented. They cannot be implemented, or no one can quite be bothered to implement them, in part because we seem to be heading to where they lead, or to where they fail to lead, to nowhere, anyway.
Jonathan Chait, assessing the President’s challenge in the light of weak economic numbers, in “Springtime for Romney “:
Obama’s fallback is to go back to emphasizing the fact that he has a plan that Republicans refuse to enact. In his speech today, Obama is reemphasizing the proposals that he introduced last fall.
This opens Obama up to the charge by Mitt Romney that he simply hasn’t gotten his plan passed, so it’s time to vote in somebody else. This counterattack will probably work well: Voters, and especially swing voters, have very little understanding of how divided power works, and they tend to simply attribute all results to the president.
Leo Strauss explaining the classical political-philosophical problem with “democracy”:
…[D]emocracy, or rule of the majority, is government by the uneducated. And no one in his right senses would wish to live under such a government.
