Pat Buchanan: Look for a Desperate, Failed President Obama to Run the Dirtiest Re-Election Campaign Since Jimmy Carter Slandered Ronald Reagan in 1980

 
Carter and Reagan at one of their 1980 debates. A desperate Carter went into the gutter, but still took a thrashing.
 
The John Doe calling himself "Barack Obama." How low will he go? There's no bottom to this guy.
 

Will Obama Choose The Last Recourse of Failed Presidents—The Low Road?
By Patrick J. Buchanan on September 3, 2012 at 6:20pm
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What makes that 1980 election relevant is that it was the last national election and the only postwar election where a Democratic president widely perceived to have failed chose to run for re-election.

And what strategy did the Carter campaign adopt?

They sought to demonize Reagan as a tool of the rich, a cold-hearted wretch who would savage the safety net, a crazed anti-communist Cold Warrior whom it would be dangerous to entrust with nuclear weapons. Ronald Reagan was Barry Goldwater redux.

Yet, looking back, what else could Carter do? Looking forward, what else can Barack Obama do?...

With the nation believing Carter had failed by the fall of 1980, and prepared to remove and replace him, Carter had one lane left to victory. He and the liberal media had to define Reagan for the electorate as an uncaring extremist and dangerous man.

Lest we forget, this Carter strategy was working….

One difference between 2012 and 1980? President Obama retains a reservoir of goodwill President Carter never acquired.

[N.S. Because everyone is afraid of taking off the gloves with a racist, “blakc” president.”]

If this analysis is correct, the Democratic convention and the next nine weeks will witness one sustained slander of Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan as Ayn Randian agents of a plutocracy hell-bent on seeing its taxes reduced and the tax cuts paid for by eviscerating programs on which America's poor and the working and middle class depend for survival.

The one sure way Obama can win is to convince a nation ready for change to fear, loathe and recoil from the proposed agents of change.

Obama’s aides and media auxiliary have already painted the Republican convention in Tampa, Fla., as permeated with lies and dog whistles to racists.

Yet, one wonders: After such a campaign, how does Obama unite and lead the country, should he win?

[Read the whole thing.]