Rick Santorum went from being an annoyance to an afterthought in a matter of hours yesterday, but Mitt Romney, the GOP's newly anointed standard bearer, had no time at all to savor the culmination of his four-year campaign for the Republican nomination. Because down in Florida, President Obama launched a general-election broadside against the GOP that revealed in stark outlines what his emerging strategy will be. And Romney had better start rebutting it fast.
Based on his three speeches yesterday as well as others he has recently made--particularly the one last week before the American Society of News Editors--Obama's strategy seems to be this: I'm going to persuade the American people to think that you, Gov. Romney, are the reincarnation of Barry Goldwater, an extremist extraordinaire both on the economy and foreign policy. One who lost in the biggest landslide in American history in 1964.
The president, campaigning in the critical swing state, delivered three speeches that sounded some common themes. The main one was that Romney and today's Republican Party have reverted back to the unreconstructed movement conservatism of Goldwater, one in which nothing much else matters but protecting the rich and shrinking government to a size not seen since the Eisenhower era.
Obama tossed back in Romney's face the line that the former Massachusetts governor has been taking during the primary campaign in order to fight the charge--made most effectively by Santorum--that he and the president are too similar: that this is a historic election between candidates with two fundamentally different concepts of government. "There are contrasting visions here," Obama said at one fundraiser event. "And this election will probably have the biggest contrast that we've seen maybe since the Johnson-Goldwater election -- maybe before that."
Will Obama's tack work? Not necessarily. As my colleague Josh Kraushaar points out today, the country is much more center-right today than it was in the Goldwater era.
Yet the president wants to paint Romney not as the center-right governor he once was but rather as an ideological captive of the tea party. To drive home the point, Obama again resorted to a meme that has already become familiar: he invoked other GOP presidents going all the way back to Lincoln in arguing that today's Republicans are ideological extremists caught up in failed ideas. Pushing for social equity and investing in the nation's future "is not historically a Democratic or Republican idea," Obama said at another event in Hollywood. "It was Republican Teddy Roosevelt who called for a progressive income tax. Dwight Eisenhower, Republican, built the Interstate Highway System. It was, with the help of Republicans in Congress, FDR who gave millions of returning heroes, including my grandfather, a chance to get ahead through the GI Bill. Abraham Lincoln, first Republican President, helped to bind this country together through the Transcontinental Railroad, started the land-grant colleges, National Academy of Sciences. This is not just a Democratic idea."
The president sounded this same theme, one we hear from him often, in a rousing speech at Florida Atlantic University. "We can't build a highway for ourselves," he said. "We got to get our neighbors and our friends to say let's go build a road. That's why we supported the research and the technology that saved lives and created entire industries. The Internet, GPS -- all those things were created by us together, not by ourselves."
Obama, in pushing for the populist Buffett rule requiring fair tax payments by millionaires, also sought to exploit perhaps the biggest sleeping-serpent issue of the election: the vast and growing income disparity in the country, which is at historic proportions.
According to a recent report by the Congressional Budget Office, from 1979 to 2007, the nation's top 1 percent of earners saw their income quadruple 275 percent to $347,000. By contrast, the 60 percent of Americans considered middle-income earners experienced an increase of less than 40 percent. Indeed, the greatest beneficiaries of globalization and the Information Age, including an amply bailed-out Wall Street, are the richest "1 percent" of the nation, to adopt the language of the growing Occupy Wall Street movement. This fortunate elite increasingly prospers in a place apart, both physically and spiritually.
Obama wants to cede the "1 percent" to Romney in this election, while he, the president, will be happy to take most of the rest. "There's a debate going on in this country right now: Could we succeed as a nation where a shrinking number of people are doing really, really well, but a growing number are struggling to get by?" Obama told the crowd at FAU. "No!" they roared back.
Remember that "etch-a-sketch" pivot to the middle we heard Romney was going to make? He'd better make it. Soon.
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