More on Mr. Plouffe and His Plouffe-ters

Can Obama Fool the People the Second Time Around?

As I mentioned in my previous post, I am beginning to wonder if the "Ellie Light" propaganda phenomenon signals the almost under-the-radar return of Obama's 2008 campaign chief, David Plouffe, to the center of this already highly politicized White House. Plouffe, David Axelrod, and numerous other despicable left-wingers--aided and abetted by media types in the tank for Obama from the get-go--were responsible for running the virtually information-free campaign that got their man into the White House. They waged imaginary battles with imaginary villains to distract the electorate from the real villains--themselves. And they succeeded brilliantly.

Their tactics were pure Saul Alinsky: having spent plenty of pre-campaign time working with the willing media to vilify and undercut President Bush throughout his second term, the Obama campaign carefully froze the phony Bush image in place and ran against it, smearing and slandering all the way. As to their opponents, they were secondary issues. They avoided attacking John McCain, a genuine war hero, directly for the most part and focused on the hapless Sarah Palin, re-inventing her as the kind of clueless idiot that would follow in Bush's footsteps if she were elected. The fact that she wasn't running for president wasn't important to them. The vilification was.

All Republicans running for office in 2008 were recast as clones of Bush. A transparently idiotic bit of chicanery on the surface, but it worked, proving that you can indeed fool all of the people at least some of the time.

The result: between George Bush and Sarah Palin, these Alinskyites created a collective comic book villain that inspired tens of thousands of young voters to pull the Democrat lever for probably the first and last time they will ever vote. The result: an astoundingly unsophisticated president with no executive experience who's now demagoguing furiously about fiscal matters best treated with extreme delicacy. Are you ready for more of this? Are you ready for another stock market crash tomorrow?

Obama may very well endanger our entire socioeconomic system. But why should he care? It'll just hasten the revolution that should have happened a long time ago. And to make sure it happens this time, the Chicago Messiah has brought back his old campaign team to start doing advance work for this fall.

Belmont Club's perspicacious Richard Fernandez unintentionally sets the table for an answer by citing an unusually credible piece in the NY Times:

Perhaps stemming from his earlier belief that he had “lost touch” with a fearful electorate, one of President Obama’s first moves in the wake of the Massachusetts debacle was to reshuffle his political operatives and put them on a permanent campaign footing.

In addition to Mr. Plouffe, who will primarily work from the Democratic National Committee in consultation with the White House, several top operatives from the Obama campaign will be dispatched across the country to advise major races as part of the president’s attempt to take greater control over the midterm elections, aides said.

“We are turning the corner to a much more political season,” said David Axelrod, a senior adviser to the president, who confirmed Mr. Plouffe’s role. “We are going to evaluate what we need to do to get timely intelligence and early warnings so we don’t face situations like we did in Massachusetts.”

Additionally, Fernandez cites the remarks of longtime liberal businessman Morty Zuckerman in this context. Zuckerman, along with the bulk of the East Coast's Wall Street fat cats, joyously pulled the lever for Obama in November, 2008. All of them, like the kiddie corps just cited, acted as if the election were just a big party where they could celebrate just how progressive they were by "making history." Now they're having a serious case of buyers' remorse. (The kids have gone back to their video games and saving the world through rock concerts.)

Zuckerman laments the sheer mendacity of Obama's and the Democrats' ultimate excuse for a national healthcare plan:

Five states got deals on health care—one of them was Harry Reid’s. It is disgusting, just disgusting. I’ve never seen anything like it. The unions just got them to drop the tax on Cadillac plans in the health-care bill. It was pure union politics. They just went along with it. It’s a bizarre form of political corruption. It’s bribery. I suppose they could say, that’s the system. He was supposed to change it or try to change it. …Focus on cost-containment first. But he’s trying to boil the ocean, trying to do too much. This is not leadership.

Fernandez takes the ball here and runs with it, offering one of the more cogent observations I've read recently about what's currently going on:

Zuckerman’s words — a man who voted for him — and the rejection by Massachusetts — the most liberal state in the country — echo through the debate. Sharpening the message and leadership style are not basic enough. Here’s a President who may have made the mistake of putting politics, not policy at the center of things. And repeating the mistake with greater emphasis isn’t necessarily a solution. He can send for his conjurers again and create the mightiest permanent campaigning machine history has ever seen. But they won’t bring back the magic. That requires performance in the areas of policy and governance.

The really worrisome thing is if the President can’t change as opposed to won’t change. If politics is all he knows and all he is good at then 2010 will be a rough year indeed, not just for Obama, but for everybody.

Amen to that. Even on the road in Elyria, Ohio, the President pretty much indicated that he won't change. God help us all.

The hits will keep on coming. Even more about Plouffe and other underground types in a future post. And they thought Karl Rove was a bad guy.