Barack Obama, although having the iciest and coldest of personalities, is noted for his likeability. He is a man of the far far left but is praised as a centralist. He is a divider but has risen to the presidency as someone who can bring the country together. He has had a succession of failed policies with not a success to be found yet people believe he has the answers to the country’s problems and this is so even though he did not propose a single initiative during the whole campaign. He defeated Mitt Romney by blaming George Bush for overseeing the briefest of recessions which ended in 2009. He has received astonishingly little blame for overseeing by far the worst recovery in post-War history which is not in spite of but because of the policies he pursued. He talks about the need to balance the budget while adding five trillion dollars of debt in four years with more to come.

So how did he do it? How did he win re-election. It is a conundrum being widely discussed because Mitt Romney did fairly represent the great traditions of the Republican Party. So far as policy is concerned, in most of the ways that count, there would not be a dime’s worth of difference between Romney and Ronald Reagan. And yet he lost and in the end it wasn’t close.

I have an article at Quadrant Online that tries to deal with this conundrum. This is how the article begins which summarises what comes after:

The confluence of the mendicants, the envious, the abortion lobby, what I will call the cohort of damaged women, and the social sciences know-nothings has proven a formidable combination. They are a new constituency amalgamation that will affect the politics of the United States for the foreseeable future.

And I will again mention the ability that the Obama team had in constructing tailor made policies just for you based on your demographic details. This is Peggy Noonan writing in 2011 in a passage I have quoted time and again because to my mind it explains better than anything else I have come across what happened:

The other day a Republican political veteran forwarded me a hiring notice from the Obama 2012 campaign. It read like politics as done by Martians. The ‘Analytics Department’ is looking for ‘predictive Modeling/Data Mining’ specialists to join the campaign’s ‘multi-disciplinary team of statisticians,’ which will use ‘predictive modeling’ to anticipate the behavior of the electorate. ‘We will analyze millions of interactions a day, learning from terabytes of historical data, running thousands of experiments, to inform campaign strategy and critical decisions.’

In my view, Gillard will try the same as Obama and quite possibly with the same success. We have already seen how potent labelling opponents as misogynists has been. More of the same to come from the Obama playbook which I discuss in this article at Quadrant Online.