Charles Krauthammer, "The case against reelection": Powerful, but Will November Be Decided by the Larger Advertising Budget?

As well known to Axelrod and friends, Obama cannot run on his record, and therefore the November 2012 campaign is being waged by the Democrats by seeking to sully Romney's name. Ergo, Gail Collins's incessant, albeit tame, dog-on-the-roof columns, which more recently have morphed into an advertisement linking Romney to the death of a steelworker’s wife from cancer some seven years after Romney ceased to effectively manage Bain in 1999 (see: http://jgcaesarea.blogspot.co.il/2012/08/romney-responsible-for-death-of.html).

In a Washington Post opinion piece entitled "The case against reelection" (http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-case-against-reelection/2012/08/09/c64ce76c-e250-11e1-98e7-89d659f9c106_story.html?hpid=z2), Charles Krauthammer observes that Romney can't win if he pits his personality and mien against Obama, who is "more likable and immeasurably cooler." Instead, Romney should refuse to play Axelrod's game and instead run against Obama's record:

"First, the $831 billion stimulus that was going to 'reinvest' in America and bring unemployment below 6 percent. We know about the unemployment. And the investment? Obama loves to cite great federal projects such as the Hoover Dam and the interstate highway system. Fine. Name one thing of any note created by Obama’s Niagara of borrowed money. A modernized electric grid? Ports dredged to receive the larger ships soon to traverse a widened Panama Canal? Nothing of the sort. Solyndra, anyone?

Second, radical reform of health care that would reduce its ruinously accelerating cost: 'Put simply,' he said, 'our health-care problem is our deficit problem' — a financial hemorrhage drowning us in debt.

Except that Obamacare adds to spending. The Congressional Budget Office reports that Obamacare will incur $1.68 trillion of new expenditures in its first decade. To say nothing of the price of the uncertainty introduced by an impossibly complex remaking of one-sixth of the economy — discouraging hiring and expansion as trillions of investable private-sector dollars remain sidelined.

The third part of Obama’s promised transformation was energy. His cap-and-trade federal takeover was rejected by his own Democratic Senate. So the war on fossil fuels has been conducted unilaterally by bureaucratic fiat. Regulations that will kill coal. A no-brainer pipeline (Keystone) rejected lest Canadian oil sands be burned. (China will burn them instead.) A drilling moratorium in the Gulf of Mexico that a federal judge severely criticized as illegal."

The case against Obama cannot be spelled out any clearer, and Krauthammer doesn't even reference Obama's disastrous foreign policy.

So why do the polls have Obama leading Romney with so many Americans on the unemployment lines? Probably because Romney is so uncomfortable under his own skin. Then, too, if hundreds of millions of dollars are raised by George Clooney, Sarah Jessica Parker and friends for character assassination advertisements, ultimately this propaganda will have its effect.

November 2012 will be determined by the size of the candidates' advertising budgets. Sad but true, which is why the Democrats are also seeking to trash the names of Romney's donors, e.g., Sheldon Adelson (see: http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2012/08/08/jewish-dems-had-no-religious-duty-to-smear-adelson-njdc-prostitution/).