Obama Chooses Republican VP Nominee

“Can you believe this is just what Obama wants?”
credit: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images

In ancient Greece a strategos was a general—the person elected to have a broad, comprehensive view of the challenge facing the army and the state, and then to implement it successfully.  It’s from strategos that we get the English words strategy, strategic, strategically.

Young community organizers working in the Gamaliel network in the 1980s and 90s know this because their mentors and supervisors taught it to them…and then taught them to think strategically about political power, and about how to design and use a campaign to build their organization’s power.

Barack Obama was one of those young community organizers.  And as Ryan Lizza recounts, in early 2010 Pres. Obama made a strategic decision to elevate Paul Ryan and his Roadmap for America’s Future as the face, and the agenda, of the Republican Party.  (Previously, congressional Republicans had adopted a “just say no” strategy of opposing Obama’s policy ideas without putting forward their own alternative.  Obama wanted to place before the citizenry a choice between competing proposals.)

Mitt Romney’s campaign strategy for the past 3 years had been to avoid making specific proposals, so as to make the 2012 election a referendum on Pres. Obama’s four years in office.  Apparently it wasn’t working.

By picking Paul Ryan as his running mate, Romney has, in effect, conceded to Obama’s preferred type of campaign: a choice between two different visions for America and its government.  Now we’ll see if the Democrats can overcome the greatest obstacle to campaigning against the Republican agenda:  the fact that it’s so extreme most voters refuse to believe Republicans actually plan to do it:

“(Democratic SuperPAC Priorities USA) spent the early months of 2012 trying out the pitch that Romney was the most far-right presidential candidate since Barry Goldwater. It fell flat. The public did not view Romney as an extremist. For example, when Priorities informed a focus group that Romney supported the Ryan budget plan — and thus championed “ending Medicare as we know it” — while also advocating tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, the respondents simply refused to believe any politician would do such a thing.”