Media Actually Bothered By Obama's Malignant Ad

Drudge's wordplay, of course. Good word choice.

Michelle Malkin wants an investigation into illegal coordination between Obama and PrioritiesUSA.

So why this vicious ad, coordinated at the highest levels by Obama? Well, remember that Larry Sabato analysis I'm so fond of.

Larry Sabato looked at previous polls and had several conclusions: 1, there are not very many swing voters at all. 2, they're unenthusiastic about voting (which either causes, or is caused by, the fact that they're uncommitted and don't love either candidate).

And 3, they don't much like this Barack Obama character:

Swing voters had much more negative opinions of President Obama’s job performance than other voters. In fact, their opinions were almost as negative as those of Romney supporters. Only 11% of swing voters approved of Obama’s job performance compared with 6% of Romney voters. In contrast, 92% of Obama voters approved of the president’s job performance.

[Quoting Sabato, if that's not clear.]

Sabato's conclusion was that a higher-turnout election actually favored Romney, because if these unenthusiastic Obama critics actually make it to the polls, they'll vote against Obama (or against him about 70% to 30%).

Interestingly, Obama's down-and-dirty negative campaign dovetails nicely with his best strategy, which is to depress the vote among all but his most reliable partisans. Making the election about nothing except negative attacks should do that for him.

Even though Romney has an edge with these True Undecideds, they're small in number. Sabato, IIRC, pegged them at no more than 10%, and yesterday's CBS/NYT poll had it that only four percent were undecided. (Four percent?!)

Still, a 70/30 split with 5% of the population means a net gain of 2% in the overall vote (3.5% for Romney, 1.5% for Obama)-- assuming we can get these people to the polls, which, at the current moment, is in doubt.

Sabato noted of the True Undecideds...

...compared with voters supporting a candidate, swing voters were disproportionately white and female.

I don't know how "disproportionately" white and female they were, though.

So Obama's gambit here may wind up helping him. Soptic's wife was white and female (presumably as to the former, required by the then-existing laws for the latter). The sob story is deliberately chosen to turn white female undecided voters away from the election -- they may despise Obama, especially after this ad, but they'll still remember the lie, won't they?

Obama's strategy is to simply disgust all voters except for his hardest-core partisans and depress the vote of all groups except those reliable Obamabots.

Everything he does must be seen in this light -- yes, he's turning people off, but he's turning people off from politics as a general matter, turning them off of voting, period.

Which is his only hope.

posted by Ace at 01:05 PM

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