Rick Wilson: It's The Facts, Not The Daily News Cycles, That Determine Elections

 Stories about surreptitious videos and of Romney’s campaign being on the precipice of destruction from internal tension and fights over strategic messaging are missing the most important point: there’s only one campaign at real risk of destruction right now, and it belongs to Barack Obama.

Process stories are easy. They're fun. They play who's up-who's down game using simple signifiers and narrative shortcuts.... But process stories – on either side, as “bitter clingers” proved – don't win elections.
Of the dozen or so Romney gaffes in the primary and beyond, each has been greeted by a media more intent on declaring it to be the fatal moment....
Now, everything about Barack Obama's brand – which is what has replaced the Democratic Party, to its future peril – relies on what John Hayward called “...a manufactured political narrative that bears little resemblance to reality.”
The delta between the world as Obama and his legion of fanboys describe it and the world as it is grows more spectacular and more impossible to sustain by the day.
...
Which is why process stories and Obama's considerable self-regard can't paper over an economy teetering on the precipice. Process stories can't make the fiscal crash that's coming any less catastrophic or record unemployment less systemic.
Process stories can't stop the video of burning U.S. Embassies and of the beaten, violated corpses of American diplomats being dragged through the streets. Process stories can't stop the grim sight of Al Qaida flags proudly flying over what were once U.S. diplomatic compounds...

You know how I knew John McCain would lose in 2008?
It wasn't Sarah Palin. It was that he was running (in the public mind) as the third term of Bush and the facts in 2008 were not so good.
We had a financial crisis, and the world seemed to be going to hell.
That's a tough environment to win an election in.
Now, Obama has something McCain didn't -- a media desperately in love with him and willing to embargo important news in order to push minor stories to distract away from the big ones.
In the Obama/McCain contest, the media was, get this, quite willing, even eager to note the bad facts in 2008.
Now they are determined to discuss everything except that.
That's something. That's a big chit for Obama.
And yet, the news got around even in the Soviet Union, didn't it?