Obama attempts to “lower expectations” in the event that he wins

He’s used messianic-esque language throughout the campaign to spur his supporters on to “believe” yet here in the final hours of the campaign he and his higher-ups are breaking it to his followers gently that the “change” he wants to implement will take time:

Barack Obama’s senior advisers have drawn up plans to lower expectations for his presidency if he wins next week’s election, amid concerns that many of his euphoric supporters are harboring unrealistic hopes of what he can achieve.

The sudden financial crisis and the prospect of a deep and painful recession have increased the urgency inside the Obama team to bring people down to earth, after a campaign in which his soaring rhetoric and promises of “hope” and “change” are now confronted with the reality of a stricken economy.

One senior adviser told The Times that the first few weeks of the transition, immediately after the election, were critical, “so there’s not a vast mood swing from exhilaration and euphoria to despair.”

The aide said that Obama himself was the first to realize that expectations risked being inflated.

In an interview with a Colorado radio station, Obama appeared to be engaged already in expectation lowering. Asked about his goals for the first hundred days, he said he would need more time to tackle such big and costly issues as health care reform, global warming and Iraq.

“The first hundred days is going to be important, but it’s probably going to be the first thousand days that makes the difference,” he said. He has also been reminding crowds in recent days how “hard” it will be to achieve his goals, and that it will take time.

“I won’t stand here and pretend that any of this will be easy — especially now,” Obama told a rally in Sarasota, Florida, yesterday, citing “the cost of this economic crisis, and the cost of the war in Iraq.” Obama’s transition team is headed by John Podesta, a Washington veteran and a former chief-of-staff to Bill Clinton. He has spent months overseeing a virtual Democratic government-in-exile to plan a smooth transition should Obama emerge victorious next week.

The real goal here of the Obama campaign is to do exactly as they did everytime he had a debate, and that was to play the “low expectations” game by praising his opponents and their reputations for being able to debate well. That way when he came out the “winner” of the debate, it would be by “sheer luck.” Both Obama and his campaign know damn well that if he wins he will have a strong Democrat majority, if not a supermajority , in both the House and Senate, and as a result it’s not going to be difficult to implement his agenda. Both Obama and his campaign want people to think that “change” won’t be easy, so that when it turns out that it is, Americans will attribute this to Obama’s “ability to get things done.”

Bleh.

Cross-posted to Right Wing News, where I am helping guestblog for John Hawkins on Sundays.

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