The No Agenda Myth
By BILL KELLER
Published: October 28, 2012
I feel a rising tide of ennui. America is in the last, numbing days of an excruciating slog to Election Day and some of my tribe — the jaded scribes, the blogging sages and caffeinated cable chatterers — have run out of patience, poor babies. Searching for the source of their malaise, beyond the dubious science of the polls and the mean spirits of the campaigns and the emptiness of the slogans and our own limited attention spans, those of my ilk have come up with this high-minded diagnosis: the candidates have No Agenda.
They say: “It’s a good time to follow the candidates if you like elections about nothing.” And: “Obama’s greatest weakness is that his proposals for the future are nonexistent.” And: “The president did not lay out a second-term agenda ... And that is where he is the weakest.” And: “People say, I want to vote for him, but he hasn’t told me what he’s going to do.” And, by the way: “You don’t get that from Mitt Romney, either.” I’ve heard it countless times and, truth be told, probably said it myself once or twice. No Agenda!
When President Obama’s campaign last week issued a 20-page booklet of its intentions, it was dismissed in my own newspaper for containing “no new proposals,” and in The Wall Street Journal as a “glossy” pitch to critics who say “Mr. Obama hasn’t fully explained what he hopes to accomplish if re-elected.” Romney has made the ostensible lack of an Obama agenda the heart of his closing argument. That’s shrewd politics. The No Agenda meme works nicely for Romney. If Obama has no agenda then he is, by default, the candidate of the status quo, and the status quo is a painfully slow recovery, a hovering debt crisis and a worrisome world. Obama’s retort is that Romney is trying to hide his agenda — dressing a pack of wolves in sheep’s clothing.
But Romney, with or without an agenda, is the candidate who has not presided over a time of national anxiety, and therefore he is the de facto candidate of change. Or as the new slogan has it, “Big Change.”
more:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/29/opinion/keller-the-no-agenda-myth.html?_r=1&
= new reply since forum marked as read
and the moment somebody starts giving facts, figures, numbers, etc. the pundits start complaining that they are too "wonkish" and fall asleep. They get all hot and bothered, however, when one candidate shows up at a debate, lies about all of their past policy positions, and steamrolls the opponent and the moderator.
It's now 4 years later and some stuff has been done and some stuff hasn't. Shouldn't be too much of a stretch for us to deduce that he will continue working on the things he didn't get done during his first four (VERY) heady years in office. Did voters demand a whole raft of new promises and agenda when Bush ran for re-election in 2004? I pretty much assumed that, if re-elected, Bush's second term would be pretty much as miserable as the first one and that he'd continue on with and/or expand most of his policies at the time. Of course, we had no clue that he had designs on Social Security until he was safely re-(s)elected as he never actually campaigned on it but IMHO the burden should be on somebody challenging an incumbent to produce an acceptable alternative agenda. We already know where President Obama stands on the issues and what his agenda is likely to be during a second term. We know very little about what Romney's actual agenda is or even whether his agenda would be his own or if the Republicans in the House would essentially be making it for him. 
repeat this narrative to me, while we were watching football yesterday; "
President) Obama has no plan for the future!"
I said, "What are you talking about ... The President has been very clear as to what he plans to do when he is re-elected." Then I ticked off several policy points that President Obama has advanced.
My friend, then, said, "Yeah ... But he hasn't said anything new!"
So I said, "Look at this as a football game. If you are winning at half-time, you don't have to CHANGE your game plan ... you don't have to come up with something new ... what you are doing is working; so, you just go into the locker room and lie out plans to tighten up those areas where you can improve."
Mind you ... This friend is a fox (non)watching (but quotes hannity and cavato, word for word), small business owning (a business that survived on stimulus spending, after nearly having to shutter his business in 2008), (President) Obama-hater.