What Losing Looks Like

Douthat sees an "aura of defeat" surrounding the Obama campaign:

Losing campaigns have a certain feel to them: They go negative hard, try out new messaging very late in the game, hype issues that only their core supporters are focused on, and try to turn non-gaffes and minor slip-ups by their opponents into massive, election-turning scandals. Think of John McCain’s desperate hope that elevating Joe the Plumber would change the shape of the 2008 race, and you have the template for how tin-eared and desperate a losing presidential campaign often sounds — and ever since the first debate cost Obama his air of inevitability, he and his surrogates have sounded more like McCain did with Joe the Plumber than like a typical incumbent president on his way to re-election.

He argues that, even if Obama wins, "it won’t look like the winning re-election campaigns we’ve seen in the recent past, and that reporters have grown accustomed to covering." I think it looks a lot like 2004 and 2000. I'd prefer the former to the latter. Given where this country now is, given how divided we are, and given the fiscal cliff ahead, a repeat of November and December 2000 would be, well, about as bad an outcome as one can imagine. Armies of lawyers are standing by for recounts, etc. Let's hope they do not need to be mobilized.