by Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n
NRO’s\u00a0The Corner<\/em><\/p>\n Campaign Rhetoric<\/strong><\/p>\n The campaign contour is pretty clear: The Obama reelection team will not make the case for the advantages and popularity of Obamacare, for the Chuian advantages of $4-a-gallon gas, for the dynamism of a 1.7 percent GDP growth rate, for the stimulatory effects of adding $5 trillion in new debt, or for why 8 percent unemployment does not qualify under the old rubric of a \u201cjobless recovery.\u201d Instead we are going to see a) mostly the spike-the-football sloganeering about Osama bin Laden and adherence to the Bush-Petraeus timetable in leaving Iraq, b) the supposed racism (Trayvon Martin-style), sexism (\u201cwar on women\u201d) and homophobia of the Right, and c) personal attacks on Romney\u2019s past.<\/p>\n But given that of almost all politicians, left and right, on the national scene, Romney is about the most squeaky clean (indeed, perhaps the squeakiest in a generation of candidates), the fare is going to be pretty paltry \u2014 mostly Mormon boilerplate and silly stuff like the\u00a0Washington Post<\/em>\u00a0high-school bullying story that already is starting to unwind or fade.<\/p>\n The notable thing about these surrogate attacks is not just that they are trivial, beneath us, and distractions from a real debate over what to do about debt, joblessness, and the economy, but how quickly they are matched and trumped in equally trivial style. In the women wars, Sandra Fluke was rebutted by the unapologetic misogynist Bill Maher\u2019s $1-million-dollar-gift to the Obama campaign; in the doggy wars, poor Seamus in his windy car-top cage was trumped by Obama\u2019s cynophagia, and now Romney the prep-school purported hair-cutter is seen and raised in Na-na na-na na-na style with Obama the Hawaii preppie stoner, who likewise had been insensitive early in his school days, in his case by pushing a middle-school girl. In other words, the Romney support group is not, in high-minded McCain fashion, going to avoid the silly, trivial, and irrelevant, as was true in 2008. And given that Obama\u2019s past has never really been vetted, at some point I think these\u00a0Washington Post<\/em>-like stories will cease, given the inevitable trump to follow. In other words, I don\u2019t think we are going to be reading stories about anything like Romney getting a B- in math in college, or not telling us that on his released medical report that he might have had asthma, or that as a Bain CEO he didn\u2019t publish an annual report, and for obvious reasons . . .<\/p>\n Will 2012 Be Nasty? Of Course!<\/strong><\/p>\n The central issue of the campaign \u2014 granted, Obama inherited a weak economy, but then made it far worse \u2014 is at an impasse: Obama keeps pleading that \u201cBush did it\u201d and a Romney would have made it even worse than he did. So we are left with a surreal debate in which 1.7 percent GDP growth, 8.1 percent unemployment, a $1 trillion deficit, and $5 trillion in new debt \u2014 all the indicators of abject failure that Democrats used to call all sorts of things like \u201ca jobless recovery\u201d and \u201cit\u2019s the economy stupid\u201d \u2014 are now offered up as an encouraging improvement from where we were in September 2008.<\/p>\n The result is that all sorts of trivia will come up, as much as handlers insist they are irrelevant, and I don\u2019t think anything is going to be off the table for a variety of reasons. The Obama campaign, as it demagogues the Bain Capital connection, can always (and correctly) note that they are doing nothing different from what conservatives like\u00a0Newt Gingrich<\/a>\u00a0and Rick Perry did during the primary, often to some effect. And if we are going to go back 50 years to Romney\u2019s school days and Ann Romney\u2019s horse-riding, then surely strange artifacts like Obama\u2019s college transcripts,\u00a0inter alia<\/em>, are fair game \u2014 especially because all during the 2008 campaign and the first years of his presidency, Obama played on the image of a \u201csky-high IQ,\u201d and in the words of one\u00a0presidential<\/a>\u00a0historian was the smartest person ever to assume the presidency. To serially cite innate talent and erudition only invites proof of the same. Had the public known that Obama was, perhaps, a C+\/B- student, then all the talk of his dazzling brilliance would have long ago been suspect. And the issue is relevant when\u00a0Obama claims<\/a>\u00a0he did not have Romney\u2019s silver spoon \u2014 if he did have some sort of precious metal utensil to parlay a dismal prep school and undergraduate college record into admission to Harvard Law.<\/p>\n But in a larger sense, 2012 is going to be nasty largely because the all too human Obama of today is not the mystical Obama of yesterday: 1) He will not have a sizable financial edge this time around to flood the media; 2) he has four years of a record that the public is not impressed with; 3) he has lost the glitz that resulted in enormous turnout among young people; 4) there will not be high-profile independents and conservatives who loudly announce that they are going to jump over to Obama; 5) he has decided to govern and run from the left, not the 2008 center; 6) and at times, he may well run behind in the polls. The result is that Obama himself will often go negative and will not be able to plead that Romney should emulate the restraint of\u00a0John McCain<\/a>\u00a0\u2014 as if George H. W. Bush in 1992 could have urged Bill Clinton to follow the more noble high-minded Dukakis campaign of 1988.<\/p>\n What Will We Call 2011 or 2012?<\/strong><\/p>\n Summing up a yearly economy depends a lot on the media. The three most recent setbacks for the Republicans were perhaps the years 1992, 2006, and 2008. In 1992 \u2014 the dismal year of \u201cIt\u2019s the Economy, Stupid,\u201d the \u201cworst recession since the Great Depression,\u201d and the Bush I defeat, to take a few examples \u2014 the unemployment rate ended at 7.5 percent, the\u00a0GDP growth<\/a>\u00a0rate was 3.4 percent, the budget deficit was $290 billion (unadjusted dollars), and gas averaged $1.13 a gallon (unadjusted dollars). In 2006, the year of the Republican \u201cshellacking,\u201d and general unhappiness over Iraq and the economy, the unemployment rate was 4.5 percent, the\u00a0GDP growth rate<\/a>\u00a0was 3.5 percent, the federal budget deficit was $248 billion (unadjusted), and gas was $2.59 a gallon (unadjusted). In 2008, the last full year of the Bush presidency, marked by the Wall Street meltdown of mid-September, the unemployment rate for the year ended at 5.8 percent, the 2008\u00a0GDP<\/a>\u00a0growth rate, including the post-September months, was 1.1 percent, the budget deficit ended at $438 billion (unadjusted), and gas averaged for the year was $3.31 a gallon (unadjusted).<\/p>\n