Obama decided early in his re-election campaign to destroy his opponent, Mitt Romney.  The Democratic Party's mud-slinging ads, and the mainstream media newscasts, relentlessly painted Romney as an evil conservative who looks down on the 47% of Americans who receive government benefits.  Romney was a wealthy industrialist who outsourced American jobs, a greedy capitalist who murdered a steelworker's wife by taking away her health insurance, a tax-evader, a bad Mormon, and a racist.  Furthermore, he was waging war on women, on the middle class, on Social Security and Medicare, and on the planet.

Obama pumped in huge sums of money, carpet-bombing swing states with negative advertising.  The combined Obama campaign/mainstream media onslaught gave Americans a generally negative opinion of Mitt Romney.

But then something very strange happened.  The polling started to detect a slight trend towards Romney.  Nobody in the Obama camp could understand it.  They couldn't believe it.

Last month, Barack Obama was leading in virtually all of the national polls and was confident of a win on November 6.  This month, the American people are telling the pollsters that they like the Romney/Ryan ticket better.  Romney now has a slight lead.  The Obama camp and news media suddenly find themselves in frenzied, panic-stricken, damage control mode.

Peering through the Muck

What happened to the mainstream media's drumbeat that Obama's re-election was in the bag?  Had the multi-media left-wing disinformation campaign lost its punch?  After enduring weeks of blitzkrieg negative advertising, the American people finally got a peek at the Republicans.  And they liked what they saw.

Kevin "Coach" Collins had this to say:

Have you seen some of those anti-Romney mud-slinging TV spots? If so, you'll be glad to know that Barack Obama's attack ads are not only falling short of their goal of tearing down Romney's character, but according to one survey are actually energizing Republican enthusiasm to vote against Obama.

Despite the torrent of negative attack ads, the American people wanted to see for themselves who Mitt Romney was and what he was all about.  The more people saw, the more they liked the man and his vision for America.  Romney has a five-point plan that is coherent and makes sense.  He comes across as a very decent fellow.

After a stellar first debate in which Romney roundly trounced Obama, making Obama look like a little child wearing Daddy's shoes, followed up by two more debates in which he looked presidential and held his own against the surly, dissembling Obama, many Americans decided that Romney is the man for the job.

Josh Jordan (National Review) wrote a piece titled "Romney's Not-So-Secret weapon: America Actually Likes Him," in which he said:

You might not know it from the day-to-day coverage, but America is warming up to Mitt Romney. A difficult primary left Romney bloodied by his primary opponents, and before he could establish his general-election footing Obama's campaign began a relentless assault on Romney's character with tens of millions of dollars of ads.

Americans might have warmed up sooner if they hadn't had to endure the punishing "day-to-day coverage" by the mainstream media and the Obama attack ads.  Stuart Rothenberg (Roll Call) said it this way:

After spending the summer defining and discrediting Romney in key states and nationally, the Obama campaign now finds itself facing an opponent who, in just 90 minutes, erased much of the image that David Axelrod and David Plouffe created in a series of negative ads over the summer.

Romney's new image and positioning in the race - moderate, reasonable and focused on problem-solving - make him a far more acceptable alternative than he once was, and that has made it easier for voters to focus their attention during the final month of the campaign on the president and his record, which remains mixed.

Barack Hussein Obama has always run his political campaigns to exploit racial, economic, religious, and political divisions.  The main thrust of his current political campaign is to demonize his opponent, not run on his track record.  Obama is playing his Chicago game.  The GPO has just released a graphic showing that Obama's October campaign ads were 73.3% purely negative, compared to 36% for Romney.  But Mitt Romney endured the mud-slinging, the lying, the misrepresentations, the race-baiting, the attacks on his faith and his personal and professional life.  He took it all and endured, smiling the whole time as he waited patiently for his turn.

Dawn's Early Light

Romney is American to the core, and people sense that.  In contrast, Obama is the first anti-American president, a globalist whose goals are to bring the USA into the fold of international socialism and to right the imagined wrongs of an oppressive state.  Romney wants to improve the lives of all people, or at least as many as he can.

Obama callously divided this nation after promising to bring it together and heal its divisions.  Romney actually has a record of uniting disparate groups and working positively with a Massachusetts legislature that was 84% Democrat.  He was a very successful governor in a state that is notoriously hard to govern.  He has a proven, fantastically successful track record in business.  Obama has never held a real job, run a business, made payroll, or ever held an executive position.  Not one.  He scooped ice cream at Baskin-Robbins and worked on a newsletter.  The rest of his life has been as a community organizer or in politics.  Obama's origins and family history have largely been kept secret from us.  Mitt, Ann, and their five boys look like a living Norman Rockwell painting -- quintessentially American.  You know they believe in America and all it stands for.  Not so with Obama.

Even the New York Times ran a generally favorable piece on Romney entitled "Romney as a Manager: Unhurried and Socratic."

Americans like Mitt Romney.  They trust him.  But most of all, Americans are coming to see --despite the inescapable disinformation to the contrary -- that Romney genuinely loves America and believes in her founding ideals: personal responsibility, limited constitutional government, religious freedom, and the free-enterprise system.  He has demonstrated exceptional understanding and capability in all four areas.  What a refreshing change.

The Ryan Bump

When Romney announced Paul Ryan as his running mate on August 11, that sealed the deal for many.  But the media and the Democrats vehemently denounced the selection.

Obama has a great deal of personal animosity toward Ryan, who worked diligently to defeat ObamaCare.  The media have echoed these ill feelings.  Michael Tomasky (Daily Beast) wrote that Romney's VP pick of Paul Ryan was a "terrible, stunning choice."  Andrea Mitchell (NBC), a leading Obama spokesman, wasted no time in her attack: "This is a base election. This is not a pick for suburban moms; this is not a pick for women."  Candy Crowley (CNN) claimed that unnamed Republicans felt "trepidation" that the pick "looks a little bit like some sort of ticket death wish."  The media recognized the threat to their ideological standard-bearer and went on the attack -- and, in doing so, even further alienated themselves from the American public.

Paul Ryan was an astonishingly good choice and one that greatly impressed the citizenry.  Most voters considered the choice much better than the one the president had made.  Ladies wholeheartedly approve of Ryan and have been rallying to his side.  Ryan singlehandedly eliminated the so-called gender gap, taking millions of votes away from the Obama camp.

The liberal media largely denied that Ryan shifted the poll numbers at all, but many pollsters recorded a decisive bump soon after the August 11 announcement, especially among independent/undecided voters and in swing states -- where they hurt Obama the most.  Obama enjoyed a 5- to 7-point national lead, but Ryan's pick quickly closed the gap, bringing a surge of much-needed momentum to the conservative camp.  Romney smacked one out of the ball bark with Ryan.  And patriotic conservative Americans cheered.  Romney's picking Ryan -- and Romney's increasing likeability -- changed the political fundamentals, and we now have a tight race.

Decision Time

Americans have had the full measure of Barack Hussein Obama.  He may have 35% or 47% of the vote sewn up.  He will retain his hardcore yellow-dog Democrats and many of those who are dependent on government welfare programs.  But there are those of us who are convinced that the USA cannot survive another four years like the last.  We number at least half of the electorate -- hopefully more.

When decent, honest working people look at Obama, and then look at Romney, there is no hesitation to point to Romney as their choice to lead them into the future.  America's future does not belong to international socialism or to the collectivists who want so desperately to "fundamentally transform" our nation.  This nation's future depends on rediscovering our founding principles and values, fighting to preserve them, and teaching them to our children.  This hard work is necessary in this election and all future elections -- otherwise, we are lost.

Ronald Reagan once said:

Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.

Despite the massive, mud-slinging, negative campaigning by the Obama administration, and the pervasive mainstream media anti-Romney propaganda, the American people have discovered Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan.  And they like them.  The majority of American voters believe that Mitt Romney is the last best hope to save the USA.

J.T. Hatter is the author of Lost in Zombieland: The Rise of President Zero, a political satire on the Obama administration.  J.T. can be reached at jt@jthatter.com.