So it comes down to this: a choice between the feckless — our president — and the clueless — his challenger.
No wonder the two daily tracking polls, Gallup and Rasmussen, say respectively that one or the other is leading by a single point.
The feckless president and his feckless team have been doing a remarkable and deeply worrying two-step around the disgusting anti-American violence in the Middle East. They have claimed that the uprisings on Sept. 11 were spontaneous and entirely driven by public response to the YouTube trailer for “Innocence of Muslims.”
Not only didn’t this pass even the faintest smell test, it was quickly disproved. On Monday, CNN and NBC both flatly asserted that their reporting proved Libyan government had specifically warned of an attack three days before.
But why make the foolish assertion in the first place? Because if it’s about a movie, it’s not about America, or a test of America, or a test of President Obama. The refusal to engage a regional crisis when it’s staring you in the face, or to pretend it’s something other than what it is (hello, Iran) is the height of fecklessness.
It’s a mark of how deeply invested the rest of the mainstream media are in re-electing Obama that the CNN and NBC reporting hasn’t caused major ripples through newspapers and magazines and TV since.
Instead, for the past seven days, the mainstream media have been concentrating on Mitt Romney’s way of talking about things.
The universal assertion that Romney’s quick condemnation of the Obama administration’s reaction to the riots in Cairo was a) monstrous and b) damaging has been pretty conclusively disproved by those two tracking polls. Both showed Romney gaining 6 points over the course of the week. If the Libya response had hurt him, that wouldn’t have happened.
Indeed, in the first major national poll taken after the Libya horror, President Obama’s foreign-policy approval rating is down 5 points since August — with a 12-point drop among all-important independents.
The new scandal revolves around words Romney spoke in May that he wrongly believed would only be heard by a friendly audience eager to get some inside dope from the man at whom they were expected to throw campaign dollars.
Inside dope they got — with an emphasis on the dope.
Romney decided to engage his audiences by explaining what political professionals have now taken to calling his “theory of the race.”
In explaining this — how he was going to combine issues and technical campaign know-how to win — Romney did something he’d never have permitted from an analyst at Bain Capital. He falsely conflated two very different data points because they shared two things: the words “47 percent.”
Romney knew that the president was almost certain to have a solid, unbreachable base of 47 pernt of the electorate.
And he knew an entirely true and undeniably terrifying statistic: Nearly 47 percent of Americans pay no income taxes, even as many collect government benefits.
Romney presumed in his now-notorious quote that the 47 percent of the electorate who would never vote for him constituted the same 47 percent that pays nothing in federal taxes.
When he said it wasn’t his job to talk to them, he clearly meant it would be foolish for him to try and win the votes of Obama’s base. But then he chose to wax philosophical about the reason, and waxing philosophical is not one of Romney’s strengths.
He suggested that Obama’s base and the federally untaxed were one and the same, and that those people would never vote for him because they were effectively now on the federal dole.
This was wrong, and Romney deserves to be criticized for it. The grafting of a momentary electoral factoid with a much more complex issue involving tax policy and the relation between the individual and the state is another mark of the cluelessness that too often has come to characterize Romney’s candidacy.
But it presents his profoundly over-cautious campaign an opportunity to place his quotidian approach to the election — I’ll get you a job — in a larger and more urgent context. He can explain how the joblessness of the Obama era is not just a practical crisis, but threatens to become a moral crisis as well.
If he does that, he’ll no longer be clueless. If he gets a clue and Obama stays feckless, he’ll win.