dissociative press 

Chase Woodruff  |  dissociativepress.com 

In little more than a week, Americans will vote in what is being called — yet again and (probably) accurately — the most important presidential election in our lifetimes. The choice is stark. The basic argument for President Obama’s reelection holds that a four-year term has not been enough to undo the unprecedented fiscal and economic damage done by or during the previous administration, that the country is on a path to recovery, and that a reversion to the same policies that caused or enabled the Great Recession in the first place would be a mistake. The argument for Mitt Romney is, chiefly, that the president is a failure, that he has aggravated the unemployment crisis, besieged businesses with higher taxes, and spent the country further into debt, and that things would only get worse in his second term.

I’m writing this to offer both an endorsement of the former argument and an aggressive, unqualified rejection of the latter. The image of the Obama presidency as some sort of historic calamity is, if not pure fiction — Romney and his campaign have, for reasons noble or otherwise, broken from those on the lunatic fringe of their party who talk of death panels and U.N. conspiracies — then a gross distortion of reality authored by partisan doctrinaires and propagated by an insular but powerful faction of ideological media typified by Fox News and the Drudge Report. It relies almost without exception on cherry-picked data, omissions of fact, biases, innuendos, and, perhaps above all, simple mendacity.

It would of course be impossible to litigate each and every charge leveled against President Obama over the course of the campaign. But on the core issues that should define and decide this election — jobs, the debt, spending, and taxes — the conservative rhetoric upon which Romney has based his campaign is so astoundingly incoherent that it’s actually rather easily refuted. The four charts I’ve included below reflect both the president’s success in addressing the complex set of challenges we’ve faced as a nation over the last four years and the abject inadequacy of the solutions put forth by Romney and the Republicans going forward.

Chase Woodruff  |  dissociativepress.com 

1. In the past several months, more than a few observers have noted that Mitt Romney, and by extension the conservative political and media apparatus backing him, seems to have adopted an “I know you are, but what am I?” strategy, which basically involves Romney or one of his surrogates taking one of his (or his party’s) cardinal weaknesses and projecting it onto President Obama and the Democrats. In April, when Republicans were bogged down in a fight over contraception and being accused of waging a “war on women,” Romney trotted out a juked employment statistic and started talking about “the real war on women.” Charged by liberals with wanting to end Medicare as we know it and replace it with a voucher system, he attacks the president’s health care reform plan for its (imagined) $500 billion Medicare cut. Faced with a widespread perception that he can’t relate to the struggles of the working class, he regularly calls Obama “out of touch.” 

Romney deploys this tactic reflexively and without any apparent thought as to how transparently ridiculous it might sound: earlier this month, with polls showing that solid majorities of Americans believe Republicans in Congress have intentionally sabotaged sensible recovery efforts in order to hurt Obama politically, he accused the White House of… yes, intentionally prolonging the recession by passing Obamacare — presumably part of the president’s super-secret plan to win reelection by fucking up the economy.

By now this is such a predictable pattern that it’s barely worth pointing out, but this week brought a particularly egregious example in the form of a column by the Washington Examiner’s Timothy P. Carney, a dutiful attempt to lasso the charge that the contemporary right suffers from “epistemic closure” and hurl it back at the left:

Chase Woodruff |  dissociativepress.com 

1. Ten years ago today, semi-lapsed ur-textual hype-swaddled NYC hipster-icon five-piece garage-rock anachronists the Strokes released Is This It; though not all consider it the best rock album of the decade, the idea that it’s the most important is not really disputed. We’re led to believe that without the “saviors of rock n roll” Jack White would be back upholstering furniture in the East Necklace, Dan Auerbach and Patrick Carney would be pulling double shifts at the Goodyear factory, and the Followill clan would be singing Pentecostal hymns in Ridge-and-Valley churches.