When you're dealing with an adversary among the key questions you have to have the answers to, "What does the opposition expect me to do?" Or, more importantly, "What does the opposition want me to do?"
Military leaders win battles with tactical surprises their foes cannot counter.
Business leaders prosper when they offer product or service innovations with pricing their competitors can't match.
Lawyers persuade juries with information the attorneys at the other table cannot overcome.
Winning coaches train their teams to execute precise plays filled with surprises the other side doesn't want to see.
In fact, the late football legend Bill "The Genius" Walsh, who died four years ago this week, developed the pernicious "West Coast Offense." It was a simple approach, a running game that began with a surgically delivered short pass which, if the opposition paid too much attention, would result in a long pass to a receiver who could outrun a cheetah. It took a decade for other coaches to figure out how to partially counter Coach Walsh's ingenious tactics.
In this column back in January of 2007 I suggested that the expected Democrat candidate for the presidency was not going to be Hillary Clinton, but rather, the junior senator from Illinois, Barack Obama. In this column in January of 2008 I predicted that Senator Obama would be the Democrat nominee the Republicans didn't want to run against because they would lose. A presidential ticket with Hillary on top could be beat if the Republicans ran the right nominees (which were not McCain/Palin, by the way -- that was a losing ticket from the get-go).
Barack Obama is president because the Democrats did the unexpected that the Republicans didn't want.
For about a century, the Democratic Party has proven that they are just plain smarter and better at election time than Republicans. The only reason for Democrats to consistently be on the losing side of an election is when they are grossly outnumbered, like here in Utah where there's a bajillion Republicans for every Utahn who will come out of the closet and actually admit to being a Democrat.
And Democrats are already starting to do it to the Republicans again, setting the stage so that the GOP will do the expected that the Democrats want.
Republicans have to remember that this isn't 1968. The outgoing president, Lyndon B. Johnson, was even more unpopular than the younger President Bush. Democratic leadership had escalated our involvement in Vietnam from a few military advisors into a full-scale war.President Johnson had persuaded Congress to add a 10 percent surcharge to income taxes to cover the deficit caused by the war in Vietnam. Just about any Republican with a pulse was going to win the 1968 election. That's how Richard Nixon became president. Although some dispute he had a pulse.
The Republican ticket in 2012 will not have it so easy.
Fortunately, the Democrats are signaling what they want the Republicans to do. Earlier this month, Bill Clinton was in Aspen, Colo., rolling out the Democrats' strategy by extolling Mitt Romney as a much stronger candidate than he was in 2008. The former president described how he actually liked Jon Huntsman as an authentic kinda guy, a real human being (perhaps in contrast to Romney being viewed by many as an "empty suit"). Then Clinton pointed to Minnesota congresswoman, Michele Bachmann, as a better than expected candidate.
Those are the Republicans the Democrats know they can beat.
Jon Huntsman is an improbable choice. But the Democrats want a Mormon on top of the Republican ticket. The upcoming election will be close and there's enough anti-Mormon knotheads out there who will swing 3 percent to 5 percent against Romney or Huntsman, which will be sufficient for a Democrat win. Not incidentally, this Democrat will vote for a Huntsman-led ticket, and even hold his nose and vote for Romney.
Congresswoman Bachmann is already being Palinized by the media, which means she is feared by the left. But the lies about her will be believed by enough voters to cost her the election.
So there you go. Will the Republicans do what is expected and wanted by the Democrats so that Obama will have his second term? Or, will they do the unexpected and unwanted and win?
The winning ticket for the Republicans in 2012 will be Gov. Rick Perry of Texas, with Congresswoman Michele Bachmann as veep.
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