Hope And Change Was Always Bullshit

According to David Axelrod.

In May, ABC News portrayed President Obama as a uniter at heart with a natural aversion to “politics as usual,” forced to embrace super PACs and negative advertising by those icky Republicans. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to run the most positive campaign ever; he was just being pragmatic and resigning himself to the political climate.

He called it a “bullshit notion” that Obama ran a positive campaign in 2008, according to “Obama’s Last Stand”, a new e-book by Politico reporter Glenn Thrush.

Yeah, no kidding. Despite all the fawning lapdog media reports about Obama’s “above the fray” campaign style, we kinda noticed that. Here’s what Axelrod told Thrush:

The campaign is doing what it did in 2008, drawing a contrast between Obama and the opposition, he insisted. The difference now is that the pundit class is holding the president to a phony, Catch-22 standard.

Phony standard? Even as Obama embraced negative campaigning in 2008, he repeatedly talked about dispensing with politics as usual. You know, because hope and change. So the pundit class didn’t build that standard alone — Obama made that happen. Intentionally.