Because it’s not precisely accidental that Axelrod got rhetorically ambushed today at his take-em-by-surprise press conference, while Mitt Romney did not.
Yup, that’s Solyndra.
And that’s all I’m going to say about that. Except… welcome to the majors, Davey. John McCain was an aberration; we generally like to play to win.
Jim Treacher, on the… strain… that David Axelrod has been showing lately.
I think maybe Axelrod needs a vacation. Just five more months of this, Dave. Five more months.
Stay on target…
The thirty-second clip (via Erick* over at RedState) is funny:
Continue reading And here I thought David Axelrod was supposed to be *good*.
More accurately, as I noted privately the other day, Rush Limbaugh served up a combined “Sorry if you were offended” and “It was a joke.” David Axelrod should be familiar with these species of non-apology apologies, seeing as the Democrats are quite fond of both. Not that any of this is particularly my problem, since the last time I checked Limbaugh wasn’t running the Republican party, Axelr0d et al‘s tired rhetoric to the contrary.
That includes, pretty specifically, me not caring if anybody else has a problem with this not being particularly my problem. Take it up with Rush Limbaugh, assuming that you can even get his attention…
Moe Lane Continue reading #rsrh Of COURSE it was a quasi-apology, David Axelrod.
Hard to say which is the better line in this Mona Charen article about an increasingly-nervous Obama re-election team, and their planned one-note symphony:
For the record, there has never been a time in the past 50 years that the Democrats have not claimed to detect a frightening rightward tilt in the GOP — even as the party has nominated such wild-eyed radicals as George H.W. Bush, John McCain and George W. (“compassionate conservative”) Bush.
or
The economy today is in some respects worse than it was in 1980. Barring a catastrophe, little else will matter in 2012. Any credible Republican can defeat Obama — which is why Axelrod is already smearing as “extremist” a person whose name he does not know.
This should be fun.
The Platonic Ideal of Burying the Lede.
(Fair warning: while the original H/T is via RCP, there are a lot of links to Left-publications and sites in this post. This was essentially unavoidable)
It was the funniest thing: I was flipping through this Michael Scherer article on the resumption of the Obama 2012 campaign (short version: “Getting re-elected is hard!” Particularly when the Democrats have to run on an actual record, instead of the record that they breezily assured people was waiting just over the electoral horizon*), when I came across this passage:
Some on the left have argued that the President dropped the ball by failing to keep his network of supporters engaged and by following his transformational campaign with a transactional governing style. “Fighting to make something happen is different than sitting back and trying to mediate something,” says Marshall Ganz, a supporter turned critic of Obama, who teaches at Harvard. “People can’t organize around that.”
I don’t know why that triggered something in my head; it just seemed a bit… off, somehow. Maybe it was because whoever this Ganz guy was, it was enough to make David Axelrod bristle in the next paragraph. Which means that Scherer must have gotten that Ganz quote first. Which meant that Marshall Ganz may have been important.
So I decided to look Marshall Ganz up. Continue reading TIME, Marshall Ganz, Barack Obama, and 2012.
Oh, Davey. I know that it’s all mean and stuff that his man-god is going to have to run as a mere mortal in ’12, but that doesn’t excuse amateur tactics on David Axelrod’s part, right? If he wants the line-item veto so badly in order to combat all that nasty pork that the President supposedly doesn’t want to approve, then Obama should dust off H.R.4890, have it resubmitted to the House, and tell the Senate to pass it this time. The Democrats have huge majorities in Congress –
– at least, for the next two months –
…so they’d have plenty of time to get the bill passed. They could do it in a week. If they really wanted to; which they don’t, which is why they’re trying to foist this off on Republicans. Of course, as Ed Morrissey notes, this is all really about how President Obama is panicking over the thought of us getting our hands on the budget that the Democrats were too gutless to pass in an election year. Much better to get one last session at the trough before the grownups take charge in January.
Moe Lane (crosspost)
(Via Hot Air Headlines) I’m putting both of those terms in quotes for different reasons. To begin with (and in reverse order), they’re not ‘tax cuts.’ The tax cuts were done years ago. What the administration is flirting with doing is raising tax rates to pre-Bush levels, in the middle of a sour economy and looming inflation. I know that the Democrats would like to pretend otherwise, but I’m not obliged to help them. And ‘temporary’ is one of those fascinating political terms of art that mean their opposite: there is nothing so permanent as an officially ‘temporary’ policy, as we’re starting to see now.
Moving along, David Axelrod today confirmed to the National Journal that the administration was caving on raising taxes. Admittedly, he was trying to make it sound like the administration was not caving, but that strategy only works when your target audience lacks the mother-wit to click through on links*. Here’s what HuffPo reported: Continue reading #rsrh Axelrod confirms ‘temporary’ ‘tax cuts.’
Because you ain’t so tough.
Confident Axelrod challenges GOP: ‘Make my day’
One of the president’s top advisers confidently predicted Sunday that Congress will pass healthcare reform and dared Republicans to advocate repealing it during the 2010 elections.
We ran a Republican in Massachusetts on the explicit promise that he’d do everything in his power to spoke the wheels of your party’s disaster of a health care bill – and he won in a walk. We’ve got states like New Jersey calling for junking the current mess and starting over. And the ‘debate’ so far consists of a lot of people trumpeting their ‘no’ votes, almost nobody bragging about their ‘yes’ votes – and nobody brave enough to admit yet that they plan to go from ‘no’ to ‘yes.’ And you still want to dance? OK, then: let’s dance.
Davey.
Moe Lane
Crossposted to RedState.
Probably not. Although it’s as good an answer as any, I guess*.
…Mr. Axelrod was as bothered by the words and her discussion of “the Obama brand” and her role in promoting it, according to people informed about the conversation.
“The president is a person, not a product,” he was said to tell her. “We shouldn’t be referring to him as a brand.”
Via Ann Althouse, via Glenn Reynolds. You can understand why Axelrod was so ticked, though: his entire career and reputation from now on rises and falls on his ability to promote the “Obama brand” – a key feature of which is, of course, the flat denial that there could ever be any sort of thing as an “Obama brand.” Having people actually talk about the “Obama brand” in public was just one more thing that Axelrod didn’t need happening. Particularly when it’s the White House social secretary; normally, they’re about the only people who can get away with calling an “Obama brand” an “Obama brand.” Of course, normally the sentiments that lurk behind the concept of an “Obama brand” aren’t the building blocks of the primary governing strategy of a Presidential administration.
Moe Lane
*Read the whole thing only if you haven’t hit your ‘whining stories about people getting shafted by Washington’ quota for the day. I’m really glad that we have modern medicine, but by God having it has completely redefined our definition of “tragedy.”
