In his Friday column for The Washington Post, revered conservative commentator Charles Krauthammer argues that Republican presidential candidates like Newt Gingrich are helping President Obama’s re-election effort by adopting his class war rhetoric.
Krauthammer writes that recently departed candidate Rick Perry’s “Are you better off than you were $4 trillion ago?” is the campaign line of the year. It encapsulates the major complaint about Obama that helped the GOP make historic gains in the 2010 mid-term elections: that the president’s “reckless spending” has left the country much deeper in debt while doing nothing to alleviate unemployment or strengthen the economy.
Unable to run on his record or ideology, Obama was forced to concede that the economic situation has barely improved and fall back on a class war narrative that envisions him as the champion of the little guy against rich Republican fat cats.
“It’s all rather uncomplicated, capturing nicely the Manichaean core of the Occupy movement — blame the rich, then soak them,” Krauthammer says of the president’s re-election narrative. “But the real beauty of this strategy is its adaptability. While its first target was the do-nothing protect-the-rich Congress, it is perfectly tailored to fit the liabilities of Republican front-runner Mitt Romney — plutocrat, capitalist, 1 percenter.”
But this strategy, Krauthammer argues, also has its drawbacks. Although Obama saw a modest bump in the polls when he unveiled his new narrative at a speech in Kansas last month, it “was still lagging, suffering in part from its association with an Occupy rabble that had widely worn out its welcome.”
Then came a welcome gift for Obama straight from the Republican candidates themselves. In a last-ditch effort to stop Romney from securing the nomination, Gingrich and Perry began using rhetoric very similar to the president’s to paint the former Massachusetts Governor as a job-destroying vulture capitalist.
“Richard Trumka of the AFL-CIO nods approvingly. Michael Moore wonders aloud whether Gingrich has stolen his staff. The assault on Bain/Romney instantly turns Obama’s class-war campaign from partisan attack into universal complaint,” Krauthammer writes.
With Gingrich and Perry now attacking Romney from the populist left, Krauthammer argues, the Republican front-runner’s wealth looks as if it will become the election’s driving issue. “And why not?” Krauthammer asks. “If leading Republicans are denouncing rapacious capitalism that enriches the 1 percent while impoverishing everyone else, should this not be the paramount issue in a campaign occurring at a time of economic distress?”
Krauthammer says that “economic equality is an important issue” but to blame the economy’s ills on wealthy businessmen like Romney is “absurd.” Now, thanks to the campaign tactics of Gingrich and Perry, what was once a desperate “Democratic talking point” has become “a central focus of the nation’s political discourse.” Nobody cares that Obama is looking to raise the debt ceiling another $1.2 trillion because America’s attention is focused on “South Carolina and Romney’s taxes.”
“This is no mainstream-media conspiracy,” he says. “This is the GOP maneuvering itself right onto Obama terrain. The president is a very smart man. But if he wins in November, that won’t be the reason. It will be luck. He could not have chosen more self-destructive adversaries.”