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GOP October Surprise: Obama a crazed liberal extremist!

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Was doing some oppo-reading at The Weekly Standard and came across an article that I suspect the Repub campaign will release closer to the election to show BHO as a crazy lefty liberal black terrorist, intent on raising "good folks" taxes and redistributing "your" income to these welfare moms. Article's called "Barack Obama's lost years".

It focuses on Obamas life between 1996 and 2004.

http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/015/386abhgm.asp?pg=1

On Obama's cognitive dissonance:

"What they portray is a Barack Obama sharply at variance with the image
of the post-racial, post-ideological, bipartisan, culture-war-shunning
politician familiar from current media coverage and purveyed by the
Obama campaign. As details of Obama's early political career emerge
into the light, his associations with such radical figures as Reverend
Jeremiah Wright, Father Michael Pfleger, Reverend James Meeks, Bill
Ayers, and Bernardine Dohrn look less like peculiar instances of
personal misjudgment and more like intentional political partnerships.
At his core, in other words, the politician chronicled here is
profoundly race-conscious, exceedingly liberal, free-spending even in
the face of looming state budget deficits, and partisan. Elected
president, this man would presumably shift the country sharply to the
left on all the key issues of the day-culture-war issues included. It's
no wonder Obama has passed over his Springfield years in relative
silence"

On Obama as a post racial candidate:

"Obama has recently made efforts to preemptively blunt discussion of the
race issue, warning that his critics will highlight the fact that he is
African American. Yet the question of race plays so large a role in
Obama's own thought and action that it is all but impossible to discuss
his political trajectory without acknowledging the extent to which it
engrosses him"

"On race-related issues Obama has stood shoulder to shoulder with Chicago's African-American politicians for years."

On Obama's post partsanship:

"In 2002, Obama himself could speak hopefully of plans "to move a
progressive agenda" through the state legislature, and local observers
commonly identified Obama as a "progressive." When it endorsed him for
the U.S. Senate in 2004, the Chicago Defender proclaimed Obama "represents renewal of the liberal, humanitarian cause." The Defender went on to assure readers that Obama would support "progressive action" in Washington."

On Obama crime fighting:

"Also in 1998, according to the Hill, a Washington newspaper,
Obama was one of only three Illinois state senators to vote against a
proposal making it a criminal offense for convicts on probation or on
bail to have contact with a street gang. A year later, on a vote
mandating adult prosecution for aggravated discharge of a firearm in or
near a school, Obama voted "present," and reiterated his opposition to
adult trials for even serious juvenile offenders. In short, when it
comes to the issue of crime, Obama is on the far left of the political
spectrum and very much in synch with his active political allies Ayers
and Dohrn."

On Obama and poverty:

"Obama's fondest hope is to lead America into another war on poverty.
Everything in his state-legislative career points in this direction,
and Obama calls for a renewal of expensive national anti-poverty
programs in his book The Audacity of Hope"

Their conclusion:

"he [Obama] is a big-government redistributionist who wants above all to aid the
poor, particularly the African-American poor. Obama is eager to do so
both through race-specific programs and through broad-based
social-welfare legislation. "Living wage" legislation may be
economically counterproductive, and Obama-backed housing experiments
may have ended disastrously, yet Obama is committed to large-scale
government solutions to the problem of poverty."

I have been concerned as I had not heard anything really damning that the Repubs had thrown @ Obama. Methinks this is being saved for later in October to try to paint Obama as a typical liberal.

This could sting as a meme depending on whether being considered a liberal is still a dirty word, thoughts?


Comments (5)

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Messed up the link...

href="http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/015/386abhgm.asp?pg=1"

Because of the primary season this year, and the historical nature of this campaign, I think Obama is already defined in people's minds. The McCain/Repubs problem by October (or even September) is the same problem that Obama has had with the John "maverick" McCain: they are going to have to re-define Obama.

Granted much of the attacks play into some of the people's definition of Obama, one has to believe that, for example, if Wright was going to have an impact on Obama it would have already given the saturation at the time that it broke (one of the reasons the election is as close as it is). Those who would support McCain because of this already are, and the only movement is Obama able to redefine them to bring them back into the fold.

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"Liberal" only works for the rightwing extremists. The Rush Limbaugh crowd. But he already has them.

Weak stuff, if this is all they got.

The opposite case is much stronger: McCain is an obedient GOP rightwing hack, not the "maverick" he pretended to be in 2000.

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For an October surprise to work, the campaign that would benefit from it has to have everything in place for it to succeed.

McCain's campaign seems to be in disorder right now, so I'm cautiously optomistic that an artificially induced surprise is a little less likely. No one wants to get caught and sent to prison for doing something that he is not sure is going to work.

The reason the "House Gaffe" is working so well (even Fox News is mentioning it) is because Obama's staff had, already in place and ready to go, a well thought out combination of negative AND POSITIVE actions that are dovetailing nicely with the "House Gaffe".

The branding of McCain is working, and is now an avalanche working against them not just from Obama, but also from CNN, late night TV, etc. I'm starting to think an October surprise will not rescue him from this. We shall see.

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Thanks Zentrails, had not thought about like that. Makes sense.

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