Mitt is running a perfect campaign

[lunatica]

What's wrong is that we're the ones who are not getting it so we laugh at him thinking him a fool.

1. Mitt has billionaire Superpacs who are willing to spend whatever it takes to win. So that means he fundamentally knows the game is thrown in his favor, especially after Scott Walker landed so beautifully on his feet in Wisconsin. Money definitely talks the loudest of all. It does so legally I might add.

2. He has to stump on the campaign trail so he's perceived by the ordinary Joe and Jane as really campaigning for their votes. He must go through the motions for a couple of reasons. It keeps the corporately owned propaganda media talking about him in glowing terms which mollifies the citizens and keeps them from revolting. This is important because, well, it makes it all easier for the 1% not to have to deal with the possible revolting throngs of the 99%. Keep them ignorant and mollified and they won't rise up against you.

3. If you pay attention to what he says and understand that he isn't talking to the people at all it becomes obvious who he's talking to. He's sending loud and clear messages to the 1% who are backing him. What sounds stupid and idiotic to us is pure music to their ears.

4. When he says something we think is really stupid like how he'll open up all the National Parks to Big Oil development we think he crazy and has yet again said something that will cost him the vote. But the 1% get all hot and write him another check.

5. When he says he'll do away with Obamacare the health insurance industry hugs themselves in anticipation while we just shake our heads in disbelief of how stupid he is.

6. When he makes declarative statements of how Corporations Are People Too the 1% smile and nod while the rest of us are left chewing on our own bile believing that he'll never get the vote.

7. When he implies he'll go to war with Iran and China the Military Industrial Complex goes into Paroxysms of hand rubbing glee.

Meantime that same 1% is making sure that Obama is criticized constantly for everything he does and says by the pundits while Romney is constantly given a pass and even aided by the media in their pretense that he's saying things of weighty substance and importance. Obama, who whether you like him or not is probably one of the most charismatic politicians and speakers of our lifetimes is portrayed as weak, indecisive and waffling and is constantly given 'advice' by the pundits about how he can run his campaign better. Even here on DU the trolls talk about their concern of how weak Obama's campaign is even as he basically trumps everything Romney says. The gnashing of concerned teeth sometimes shows what I think is a concerted effort to diminish and weaken Obama's image so that psychologically others will come away with disappointment in him and the Democratic Party which will translate into despondency and will keep people from voting.

In the end Romney and his campaign managers are relying on the money they're getting and the money the Superpacs will spend to assure his win and that's who Romney is really talking to on his campaign. His statements may sound insane to us, but they are loud and clear message to the 1%. The 1% who are allowed to lie with impunity in their ads and they do so at every opportunity, knowing that they're setting their carefully considered and manufactured 'facts' in stone as 'facts' in the majority of the American minds.

We may not be able to do anything about what's happening. Wisconsin is the perfect example of how a million signatures were gathered to impeach Walker, yet a million really enthusiastic people didn't appear to come out to vote for it. Note that I said didn't appear to come out. There are a thousand ways to manipulate the votes and make it look the way they want it to look. Just one of those ways is to rig the privately owned voting machines. I think the entire vote was rigged and it took a lot of 1% money but it worked. As a result the 1% are empowered like they used to be before Teddy Roosevelt and his nephew Franklyn came along. Their pockets will really open now because of the simple fact that it worked in Wisconsin. It was their first test State after the Supreme Court granted their corporations Personhood.

Money talk louder than you and I do.

[WI_DEM]

1. President Obama says...

[lunatica]

3. Did you read the Post?

[WI_DEM]

4. yep, you made some good points

except about regular joes and janes I still dont think they can connect with him even as he campaigns by bus and then flies to his next location.

p.s.
Also I know straight up from the WI campaign that money does talk. But, unlike Barrett, Obama will not be outspent 10-1. He'll be outspent, but he'll also have a lot of money to compete even with the pacs. Even with Walkers big money advantage he won by about 170,000 out of 2.5 million votes, actually a fairly close election.

[flamingdem]

31. I think he's only "Got This" if we go all out

and he's always said "We're the ones we've been waiting for" and we ignore this at our peril.

People are not analytical enough in this country. They can be fooled. The average IQ is 100
on the Bell Curve. It's not a matter of what we believe is logical, DU is a bubble.

[Puzzledtraveller]

27. No, he doesn't have it, ignoring the writing on the wall

is going to cost us this election and then you can forget about having a POTUS or Dem congress for a long time.

[FarLeftFist]

2. He'll get vaporized during the debates when his lies get called out to his face in front of America.

He can no longer hide in his tour bus or the backyards of billionaires.

[lunatica]

6. My point is it doesn't matter that he gets vaporized on a daily basis

It's blatantly obvious even to those who are disappointed in Obama that Mitt is an idiot compared to him. The media will, at best call it a draw, but I think they'll go way overboard in claiming that Mitt won the debates because they really are tools for the 1%.

[leftynyc]

33. You seem to want to wallow

in negativism. Knock yourself out but don't think the rest of us are going to join you in misery.

[lunatica]

43. OK

Whatever.

[bigtree]

5. not really, and he's a flawed candidate

Romney is merely lining up all of the republican ducks in a row and presuming to stand in front of all of them. He's good for that, but it's a far cry from gaining support beyond the republican base or energizing enough actual voters to register and vote for him. These big money donors only have a vote apiece among them.

[randome]

7. Talk about pessimism.

I try not to be pessimistic OR optimistic. I'm more likely to see the truth that way.

The truth, IMO, is that the GOP is in disarray and could well be seeing their last days as a force in politics. It will take a while before that comes to pass, if it does, but Romney is nothing but the lamest, most stupid of their wannabes that we have seen in a very long time.

Obama will destroy him during the debates. Without even trying.

[lunatica]

8. And the media will claim Mitt held his own easily

So those uninterested Americans will come away thinking Mitt is strong.

[randome]

10. The media is a factor but not the only one.

You can only spin shit so many ways before you have an unmitigated mess on your hands.

[lunatica]

14. I hope you're right

Believe me, I do. Shit spinning doesn't work on everyone, and here in DU we try to see through it, but I'm surrounded by people in my regular life who aren't stupid but they're also not paying much attention, so when they hear the media claiming something they tend to believe it at face value.

[randome]

21. Each of us sees the world from one specific pocket.

So it's always hard to say what 'mood' the country is in. Some will be taken in by the media nonsense. The GOP will continue to demagogue Obama. And the GOP will outspend him.

Even with all that, I think the odds are in Obama's favor this time.

[AndyTiedye]

35. Can I Have Some of Whatever You are Smoking?

The truth, IMO, is that the GOP is in disarray and could well be seeing their last days as a force in politics.

They WERE, then the Supreme Court threw them a lifeline with Citizens United and that changed EVERYTHING.

[Inkfreak]

48. Absofukinloutly spot on

[NNN0LHI]

9. Who is this "we're" you are referring to in your first sentence?

Shoot man, I watched Reagan get elected twice by a landslide. Seen it with my own two eyes.

And as if that wasn't enough for the useful idiots who voted for him they then went ahead and elected his vice president for another 4-year term. Think about that for a minute.

And the scariest part is that most of those imbeciles are still with us. We are surrounded by them. And a lot of them are now blaming Obama and Democrats for their own past mistakes.

Don

[lunatica]

12. I watched all that too

Which is why I'm not laughing now.

I used the word 'we' because it would sound like I believed myself to be superior by pointing a critical finger at 'you', as if somehow I was smarter than everyone else. And because I believe myself to be a part of 'we' in DU.

[Bluenorthwest]

11. I think he's a sucky plastic candidate that most people dislike on sight. He's fodder.

And while I oppose Citizens United and all, the fucking facts just do not support this meme that spending equals winning. I personally think that people need to stop repeating that lie, for it is false and it serves the GOP. Spending does not equate to victory. Ask Meg Whitman. Ask many others. Buying lots of ads does not mean that which you advertize succeeds. It simply does not. If it did, no product would fail, no film would flop, they'd just buy success. It just does not work that way. Too many ads is a huge pitfall, worse than none at all in fact. It is particularly damaging to candidates who are known to roll in money.
It is time to put aside the magical and false notion that one can purchase enough ads to sell anything, or that the most ads wins. Frankly it is so daft a notion it makes me ill seeing people buy into it. It people would just sit and think about products outside of politics, and advertizing campaigns and note that many products and services come out each month with huge ad campaigns and then fail to deliver business. That is just a fact. Advertizing is not magic, money is not a potion.
For crying out loud....Mitt is lousy candidate.

[lunatica]

13. The ads may not work on you

But they work. How else do you explain so many Americans voting against their own interest.

I wish you were 100% right though. I really do.

[Bluenorthwest]

16. Did you read what I wrote? I'm not talking about me, I'm talking about facts. You do not care for

facts. Ads are not magic. Money does not 'assure victory'. To keep pushing that helps those who wish to hell ads were magic and money did assure victory.
If ads always worked and money assured victory, why is Meg Whitman not Gov of CA, and instead Jerry Brown is? Jerry spent less on his entire campaign than Meg spent on TV time alone, not ads, just TV time alone. And she lost. What happened to the magic of money? Same thing went down with Fiorino last election. Here in Oregon's 4th DeFazio defeated a seriously crazy republican who had tons of out of state cash given him just to attack DeFazio. Crazy Money Bags lost.
The list goes on and on in politics. And of course, other products and services and persons are promoted with high dollar campaigns each week only to fail. How do you explain that, if 'ads work' like talismans? Why would a hundred million dollar film be allowed to perish if just buying more ads would magically make profit and put butts in seats? Do you have any answers to those questions?
Because all I'm suggesting is to think it through a bit. If money equaled success, why would major corporations fail in promoting new products even once, much less regularly, more products fail than succeed. No matter how hard you market them.

[lunatica]

17. Tell me how major corporations have failed in their ads

I think most of their ads succeed beyond their wildest dreams.

And no one is talking about 'magic' except you. What I'm referring to is propaganda and it's worked quite well historically. How else did Hitler get away with persecuting and murdering Jews? Propaganda.

[Wednesdays]

47. What if I gave you three dollars?

How much?
Th...four dollars!

[solara]

45. Hear! Hear!

You, dear person, are a voice of reason

I salute you

[Ghost of Huey Long]

15. perfect to wake Americans to the superficial arrogant entitled greed of the super rich

Now, my friends, if you were off on an island where there were 100 lunches, you could not let one man eat up the hundred lunches, or take the hundred lunches and not let anybody else eat any of them. If you did, there would not be anything else for the balance of the people to consume.

So, we have in America today, my friends, a condition by which about 10 men dominate the means of activity in at least 85 percent of the activities that you own. They either own directly everything or they have got some kind of mortgage on it, with a very small percentage to be excepted. They own the banks, they own the steel mills, they own the railroads, they own the bonds, they own the mortgages, they own the stores, and they have chained the country from one end to the other until there is not any kind of business that a small, independent man could go into today and make a living.

[agent46]

18. This is an accurate run down imo

Combine all this with the ongoing failure to challenge unverified electronic voting and you have a set up for a stolen election. I'm not optimistic.

[wandy]

19. One dollar = one vote. Nothing left to say

[lunatica]

22. You can buy that one vote many times over

And you can rig the elections in thousands of ways. From 'losing' ballots to rigging voting machines to buying the Supreme Court selections.

[maxrandb]

20. Correction: "The Corporate Media is Running the Perfect Mitt Romey Campaign" n/t

[lunatica]

23. Good point

and true.

[librechik]

24. NYT editorial this morning: Mitt Campaign nothing but Lies

"...And it is there that Mr. Obama still has not made his case. Mr. Romney’s entire campaign rests on a foundation of short, utterly false sound bites. The stimulus failed. (Three million employed people beg to differ.) The auto bailout was a mistake. (Another million jobs.) Spending is out of control. (Spending growth is actually lower than under all modern Republican presidents.) He says these kinds of things so often that millions of Americans believe them to be the truth.

It is hard to challenge these lies with a well-reasoned-but-overlong speech — just as, in an odd juxtaposition, Mr. Obama failed to make his case for his Afghanistan policy in a speech in May that was both too short and too shallow. The president has less than five months to find a way to make a vital message sink in. "

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/15/opinion/the-political-contrast.html?hp

[lunatica]

26. And at the same time they claim Obama is weak and should do what they say

he should do. Just what I was saying in the OP.

[librechik]

32. yup--there is a hidden logic outside reason which is running the campaign

How can you fight madness? When the facts don't change someone's mind who is hypnotized by the bright lights and repetition of public relations psyops, we really have lost.

[Puzzledtraveller]

25. Why would the health insurance industry want a Romney win?

No, they will be pissed as heck if their mandate is thrown out, it's "their" mandate, they bought and paid for the ACA and suckered us into going along with it.

[lunatica]

28. Millions of children, young adults and elderly are now insured

and they can't do a damn thing about it. They can't take your insurance premiums and turn around and tell you that they won't allow you to get medical care for 'pre-existing' conditions thereby enriching themselves on your payments while not treating you. They can't tell your 25 year old son or daughter that they aren't covered so fuck them.

In the long run it's about the bottom dollar. They want to rake the money in while paying out the minimum. They can't do that now.

[Puzzledtraveller]

30. I do agree with the benefits we have today, its an obvious trade off

But the mandate portion has not kicked in yet, when it does it will be like a wolves guarding the hen house, that is when their pay day kicks in.

I supported either single payor or bold reforms, including opening the market across state lines.

[Life Long Dem]

29. Will the 1% be enough votes for him to win the election?

Is he depending on some of the dumb ones in the 99% to help him out? Of course he is, and that's where we stop him.

[lunatica]

34. Their money will buy the ads that convince the politically under-educated

to vote for the propaganda lies. Yes. It works that way.

[jmondine]

36. So, what do you hope to accomplish from this thread?

If it was to wake us up and get us to start taking the election seriously, you stopped short. You need to give examples of what can be done about this, of how to fight back.

You say that constant criticism of Obama will lead to despondency and keep people from voting, and yet describing our situation as helpless by saying that "we may not be able to do anything about what's happening" accomplishes this even better. The rich don't need to be all-powerful, they just need to seem to be all-powerful.

We do not need to be woken up to how bad things are. We need to be woken up to how powerful we are.

[lunatica]

38. I'm awake

And I think that if one knows the facts without continuously sliding back into the falsehood entrapments around us then we can devise a method of fighting back.

This is the first time that unlimited money can flow into campaigns legally and that corporations are people. We best pay attention. Don't you agree? If you can come up with solutions when we don't quite yet know how it's working then I, for one would be grateful.

The old fashioned way may not work this time. And yes, it's important to be well versed and convinced of what we face. And that's an accomplishment in anyone's book. Except maybe for those who demand a solution every time a problem is pointed out. It pays to understand the problem first.

[bpj62]

37. Yes a Perfectly Stupid Campaign

I understand your arguments and some of your points are valid but what the press says and what educated voters see are two different things. Mitt will be exposed at the debates simply because he is an arrogant man who has no idea whatsoever how the majority of us live. The debates are about the only time that the candidates are really forced to explain their positions and and their past statements. Obama is a excellent debater and he will have all the facts and counter points in his head.

I know the common belief is that the media wants a close race because it ups their ratings but in 2008 the race was supposedly close and we know what happened then. The media can only do so much and the fact of the matter is this, the uneducated political voter is already going to vote for Romney because the don't know any better. They didn't vote for him in 2008 and they won't vote for him now. I bet that 99% percent of the people who call themselves Tea Party members did not vote for Obama in 2008. Although I am worried about November I am confident that despite the money Obama will be reelected.

[lunatica]

40. My OP was not just about the media

It's much more about the Superpacs and the billions being poured into the campaign ads for Romney and the propaganda. Or do you think that's not happening?

Do you think the million signatures that were gathered to impeach Scott Walker were false, or do you think that those million voters didn't vote, or if they did vote is was because they changed their minds and voted not to impeach? You can't have it both ways. Either one or the other is false.

And do you know what percentage of Americans watch the debates? Most Americans will find out who 'won' the debates through the media, so the media is a lot more powerful than either you or I would like to give them credit for.

[jpljr77]

39. He also has a massive advantage for campaign purposes: no job.

Mitt Romney is the first major party nominee in A VERY LONG time to not hold a job during the campaign (and I can't honestly remember the last one. Perot, maybe? He wasn't a major party candidate, obviously, but that was a weird year.).

Sure, most politicians that are holding jobs always seem to find the time to campaign. But Romney literally has nothing else to do. Only his physical endurance limits how much time he can spent on the road in front of people...because money is certainly not an issue.

This is going to be tough.

[Freddie Stubbs]

41. Bob Dole had resigned from the Senate by this point in the campaign in 1996

[arely staircase]

42. yeah, he'll buy the election

just like president perot did.

[lunatica]

44. Perot didn't have Citizens United

Those were the good old days in comparison. Perot paid with his own money. Romney has billionaires throwing money into Superpacs because they can. That's something Perot didn't have and he also didn't own the media or electronic voting machines.

Times have changed. We best change our way of thinking with them.

[arely staircase]

53. well of course i was being flippant and agree with your

General assessment. But my problem with CU and campaign finance.generally is not the fooling of people with advertisement but rather the even larger amount of influence the doners are buying with the winners of those elections.

[rocktivity]

46. To paraphrase Jim Morrison, Mitt's got the bucks, but we've got the the numbers.

Last edited Tue Aug 5, 2014, 11:36 PM - Edit history (2)

There aren't enough white voters who:

a) are willing to vote for Mitt simply because he's white and Obama isn't.

b) are going to overlook his not producing his tax returns -- a tradition begun by Mitt's own father.

c) have forgotten what life under Obama's predecessor was -- and Mitt is making no bones about the fact that he'll be George Bush II on steroids.


rocktivity

[lunatica]

49. So you think voting isn't rigged?

[Ship of Fools]

51. I agree! But I think the lyrics were:

"They've got the GUNS but we've got the numbers..."

No biggie, but it has other significance when you consider that
the country has grown by millions of new gun owners since
Jimbo kacked.

[magical thyme]

50. Mitt's millions buys him media exposure, nothing more

and the biggest problem Mitt has is that the more people see and hear him, the less they like him.

Wisconsin is no barometer of this campaign, and is in no way analogous. Recalls are rarely successful, Barrett had already lost against Walker, Walker probably isn't as creepy.out of touch as Mittens is (simply because few people are).

For example, my local radio was just blanketed with vapid, rMoney ads inviting us to come see him at Scamman Farms in NH. I swear in between every song and ad, there was Mittens with canned cheers talking about how "We Love America! We believe in Freedom and Opportunity and Free Enterprise! And I am an Example of Free Enterprise and Opportunity!" and similar blather.

Did you see the pix in the other threads? Very low turnout. And there was Mittens, with a large sign that said SCAMMAN at the base of his stage. The subliminal message comes through loud and clear.

Tomorrow will be his first interview not at Faux News. He inadvertently insults people -- including his 'little people' hosts -- wherever he goes.

He's got a ton of money to buy exposure, but then, so did Meg Whitman in California. That situation -- an out of touch, obscenely wealthy, psychopath failing to buy an election -- more closely replicates Mittens' situation.

[lunatica]

52. You know all this because you keep yourself updated

Most Americans know nothing of what you wrote. They only know what the media says which is what the billionaires pay for them to say, either directly as their bosses or indirectly through advertising.

If everyone were as savvy as you say Mitt would have been dumped many months ago. The only reason he will be the nominee is money.