The Obama Diary

Robert Shrum: With the economy finally, plainly on the mend, the Republican response — perhaps predictable from the party of death panels — is to deploy a bodyguard of lies about both the causes of the crash and the reasons for the recovery.

Up in New Hampshire last weekend, the latest reincarnation of Mitt Romney purloined the rhetoric of Ronald Reagan — is there anything authentic left about Mitt? — to denounce “the Obama Misery Index.” He blamed the president for “soaring numbers of Americans enduring unemployment, foreclosures, and bankruptcies.” Right index, wrong president. What about that guy George W. Bush, who left behind a spiraling downturn graver than anything since the Great Depression? Romney uttered nary a word about him, obviously calculating that Republican primary voters will buy Obama-bashing in any form. Romney apparently hopes to then persuade some, just enough, of the mainstream electorate of this ahistorical, economically senseless, and intellectually bankrupt anti-fairytale by repeating it over and over again.

…Republicans seem to expect or fear a continuing and convincing rebound in jobs and growth; they worry the president will get the credit. So they’re deploying their bodyguard of lies on a wider front than Romney’s incredible and inevitably time-limited attempt to blame Obama for the Bush disaster.

…That’s probably their only chance, assuming they can recruit a candidate stronger than their present field of losers. If Americans see and feel a recovery underway, they will reward the president and the party that did the heavy lifting, not those who try to lift the credit. The GOP’s bodyguard of lies will then be dismissed in defeat to the place they belong — the political and economic precincts of Bizarro World, where they famously turn up the air conditioning in order to get warm.

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