Invisible Obama

If you care about facts and are foolish enough to follow politics, you may be flabbergasted at the slew of lies about President Obama coming from the right over the last few weeks.  From false accusations that Obama has removed the work-requirements from welfare to talk about Obama letting a GM plant close before he was even President, to turning an out-of-context quote into an entire convention theme – lies and misinformation about President Obama have abound.  Yet it only took 90 seconds of an octogenarian’s primetime speech before all the disparate pieces fell into place – Mitt Romney isn’t running against President Obama.  He is running against the President that only Republicans can see, “Invisible Obama.”

As Obama revealed in an interview with Vanity Fair, “there is a character people see you there called Barack Obama.”  It is the Obama Administration’s goal to shape who Barack Obama is, whether it is true or not, and it is the opposition party’s goal to distort it to their advantage.  These GOP distortions are well known, persuasive, and likely to continue – Mitt Romney’s pollster Neil Newhouse said, after all, that fact-checkers wouldn’t “dictate” the Romney campaign. Touché.

So who is Invisible Obama?  In 2008 he was a radical Marxist-Kenyan with a deep hatred of white people and secret ties to terrorist Islamic groups.  Invisible Obama is now a job killing, entitlement flaunting, big government liberal intent on punishing job creators, intentionally destroying the economy, and ruining Medicare.  

Where is the evidence for most of these claims?  The proof that Republicans provide is often misleading, taken out of context, or outright lies.  But it doesn’t matter.  National elections are not decided by competing detailed policy proposals (as they are in the Netherlands), but on a complex combination of personality, morals, basic policy differences, economic performance, looks, oratory, and competing narratives and characterizations that emerge during the campaign.

Lies aren’t effective for vast majority of the voting population.  Most voters, including a significant portion of independent, are decided partisans.  The true swing voters that can actually impact the election, those in battleground states, compose only about between 3-5% of the registered voter population.

How do these swing voters ultimately make up their minds?  Swing voters often form their opinions about candidates based on “emotional intangibles,” many are low-information voters who may not watch the Republican National Convention but you will hear through sound bites that Romney and Ryan blasted Obama for shutting down a GM plant (he has no soul!), and removing work requirements from welfare (how dare he!).  Is it true?  No.  But these voters aren’t going to run to their computers to fact check the claim. That is exactly what the Romney campaign is banking on. 

As an aspiring political scientist, I would like to think that a greater emphasis on policy could elevate the debate above the misleading and false characters that both campaigns develop of their opponent.  But the narratives developed are powerful and facts are stubborn things.  As long as 17% of voters think Obama is Muslim and 25% of adult Americans think he was born outside of the United States, focusing on policy proposals will be difficult.  Former President Clinton did so beautifully last night.  But did swing voters listen?  Tough to say.  Instead, I’m afraid, many voters will vote against Obama because he is the President of entitlements and dependency, despite the incontrovertible fact that he is not.