It’s refreshing to see a guy willing to bet his career on what looks from this end of the time tunnel to be a gross example of wishful thinking – except that in this case, pundit Dick Morris has been through a few careers already, first as a Republican, then as advisor and campaign manager for Bill Clinton, then as a Republican again, with enough strange and off-color anecdotes to keep an entire lineup of political comics in business.
I believe the above introduction is necessary so that you would go get whatever grains of salt you’ve got left in your political cupboards and rely on them heavily when reading the following predictions. Because, let’s face it, they’re incredibly seductive.
“That’s right,” says Dick Morris, it’s going to be “a landslide for Romney approaching the magnitude of Obama’s against McCain. That’s my prediction.”
Morris contends that Romney will win the McCain states from 2008, as well as Florida, Indiana, Virginia, North Carolina, Colorado, Iowa, Ohio, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Minnesota.
In other words, all the baby-blue states Democrats have grown to love and think of as their own (with the exception of Indiana, Virginia and North Carolina) are really pink states. Romney is going to sweep them, and end up with 55% to Obama’s 45% of the national vote, if not an even wider margin.
Morris says that even though the Romney campaign was “brilliant,” as he puts it, the Obama side will lose because of their own mistakes.
The Obama negative ads in swing states were refuted by Romney’s congenial appearances during all three debates. He turned out not to be the monstrous robot they said he was.
Obama never made a convincing defense of his record, other than to say that it was GW Bush’s fault, and he had no vision to sell for the next four years. He didn’t ignite anyone’s imagination. So once people stopped fearing Romney, there was no other reason left to vote Obama.
Obama took too many states for granted, like Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan and Minnesota. He was misled by his own echo chamber. He should have treated them as swing states and invested heavily there. That’s what Romney did in North Carolina.
Obama looks tired. It’s not only his actual lack of sleep, there’s a sense that the man is used up, that, deep inside, he wouldn’t mind losing this one and go get a much deserved rest. McCain looked that way, four years ago. Bob Dole did in 1996. It’s hard to shake that feeling, no matter how many times he and his circle insist you’re “energized.”
And he looked mean and angry. He started talking about revenge in the last week of the campaign – voting for me is the best revenge, he said (I’m paraphrasing).
(To be perfectly frank, Obama is showing signs of being normal with his subtexted reluctance to do another four years of this hellish chore. I’m not sure that when we say someone is a “political animal” it’s such a big compliment. And yet, we don’t call our leaders “political humans.”)
Benghazi was a terrible mess, a collapse of the Intelligence network in Libya – and Obama should have said so on day 1. And Hurricane Sandy, with all the accolades from Gov. Christie and Mayor Bloomberg, was a very traumatic moment for many millions of Americans who might not be so wild about their incumbent president just now. Both events exposed an incompetence on the part of the Administration. Maybe the Benghazi failure didn’t touch so many voters, but, trust me, Sandy did.
Granted, Obama didn’t come across as callused and aloof as did GW Bush with Katrina, he jumped on his plane and went places right away – but a week later, people are still hungry and without power. You think they have a soft spot for the man at the top?
So, there it is, Dick Morris’s extremely convincing arguments why Team Romney is going to run away with the ball today. Like I said, very seductive…