Rick Wilson writes today at ricochet.com about the presidential campaign that is really on the edge — and it’s not the one you think it is:
- … Barack Obama is running against Mitt Romney, and against a domestic economy in almost existential peril and from an Arab world sinking into chaos and darkness from Algiers to Aleppo, and from two of the world’s economic superpowers about to start a hot war in the Pacific and from his “good war” in Afghanistan warming up to become a genocide at the hands of the Taliban [as it prepares for a return to power] as American troops inevitably withdraw, their decade of sacrifice and heroism squandered.
Obama is running against all those glittering, gorgeous promises of economic miracles and civic harmony from 2008, and of powerful stimulus programs that were guaranteed to generate millions of green jobs.
He’s running against the grim reality of the real world, foreign and domestic.
Barack Obama is a man, once that beautifully constructed political narrative collides with reality, who is demonstrably out of his depth, and who relies on having every externality dutifully ignored.
Any one of those examples can break, suddenly and terribly, and end Obama’s campaign tomorrow. …
Which is why process stories [from the Obamedia "ink lackies"] and Obama’s considerable self-regard can’t paper over an economy teetering on the precipice. Process stories can’t make the fiscal crash that’s coming any less catastrophic or record unemployment less systemic.
Process stories can’t stop the video of burning U.S. Embassies and of the beaten, violated corpses of American diplomats being dragged through the streets. Process stories can’t stop the grim sight of Al Qaida flags proudly flying over what were once U.S. diplomatic compounds.
And that’s just for a start.