"Release the hounds!" - Montegomery Burns

So since the near-coronation of Saint Mitt as the GOP candidate this week, we've heard that Darth Rove is about to unleash the torrent we all knew was coming, the ad onslaught by American Crossroads.

My feeling is that these ads will not have the Obama stopping power they wish they will have. Two reasons: First - TV. Not everyone watches it any more. In fact, I feel that the impact of superpac tv advertising has been greatly lessened since 2008. In 2010, although the teabaggers had some success in filling the house, the "big ticket" names that they promoted like O'Donnel, Angle and other "stars" of the new GOP all failed despite the insane amount of money spent by Rove in those states. Spending millions upon millions did not win them those elections. To me, that is very telling. So with TV being a less-than medium for getting these commercials to impact voters, they will of course post them online - where people would have to choose to view them.

The second reason is - I believe that at least half the country is not ignorant or stupid. These dirty ads may have had some impact in 2008 and even 2010, but I'm not convinced that the american viewing public are going to be suckers for these overblown, overproduced ads again, to any great degree.

So what do you all think? Do you think Rove could completely and utterly demolish where Obama is in the polls and turn the whole election around for Romney with his sleazy-slick ads?

I just don't see it. I don't care how much money AC has. Thoughts?

I hope these ads both fail and that they also inspire a rebellion against the pro-corruption Citizens United decision that makes them possible.

I would like to see the Obama campaign adopt a consistent, overwhelming emphasis on simple, defensible, truthful statements. For example, the job creation statistics clearly show that the downward trend of the previous administration has been reversed, and while it is not moving as quickly as we would all hope, the record is a positive one for Obama. So is the fact that taxes have been lowered. There has not been sufficient effort to get those facts out. And his opponents have been lying to obscure them.

It seems to me that in a relatively objective, facts-based campaign, Obama would be easily reelected. But the contrast has to be made abundantly clear -- these are the facts, and these are the lies. Keep it simple.

That's why I was so disappointed the other day when the President misspoke on SCOTUS with regard to health care. He's on the right side, but for the moment he let himself get bogged down by misstatements.

As has been said many times, we are all entitled to our opinions, but we are not all entitled to our own facts. If the emphasis can be sharply focused on what is objectively true, I think we will have made enormous progress. Of course, people will still differ on how they want to prioritize our resources given the facts, but let's try to establish clearly what the facts are.

O'Donnel was not supported to any degree by the RCC or the RSC. I don't recall what, if any, support she got from any Rove front organization, but I don't think it was much. I think she was seen as a losing venture (from an ROI point of view) pretty much from the get-go.

IMO SuperPAC money and the negative ads it can buy, along with the "plausible deniability" those PACs afford the candidate himself, definitely has the potential to make a big difference this year. See Newt Gingrich after Iowa - See Rick Santorum after Colorado. As soon as they looked like they might be getting somewhere, Romney's superPac just annihilated them. Maybe they never had a chance anyway, but those ads were at least the final nails in their coffins.

Like Skeppy, I'd like to see Obama's campaign, along with the whole West Wing, do a better job of getting the message out on their accomplishments. At this point, I'm not sure if Obama and his team are just not getting it done or if the well was so poisoned in some people's minds back during the very corrosive health care debate that he will simply never recover. That doesn't mean he can't be re-elected, but I think it's going to be a hard slog. And I think the Citizens' United decision has made it exponentially harder.

YMMV.

I actually think that, perversely, the horrible Citizens United decision helps Obama. He is enormously bankrolled, while the Republicans have been spending their corruption-inducing CU money on attacking each other, with billionaires bankrolling fake GOP candidates who were never going to get the nomination, while attacking their actual real candidate, whose campaign is, IMO, holed below the water line.

Romney has been forced to burn enormous amounts of money to attack a parade of clowns while Obama has been sitting on a big cash reserve.

I do not believe this race will be an easy victory, but I also do think it is Obama's race to lose. Unless he screws up horribly, he will win.

Will all the money injected into this race make any difference in the job market? Surely the millions spent on the campaign is stimulating the economy creating millions of jobs....Yes???

Could the solution for the Bush Recession be election cycle spending?

The article below is sort of what I was getting at:



http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/04/12/1082918/-How-much-will-negative-advertising-affect-Obama-