When a candidate can’t run on his past and has no ideas for the future, he must destroy his opponent in the present — which can be done by distorting his adversary’s history and lying about his plans for the future.
There is a problem with this approach, however. It works only if people trust the candidate doing the distorting. Should people actually take a look for themselves and not come up with the same conclusion, the disseminator with the poor past and no plans begins to lose credibility.
No one likes a liar — unless, of course, he is a good liar. And Barack Obama is not a good liar. He is a victim of media complicity in the fallacies and half-truths that constitute the myth of Barack Obama. But fiction works only if you can get your audience to suspend disbelief, and every day fewer people are buying into the meme.
During the first two debates, America looked at Mitt Romney and realized that Barack Obama has been lying to them. Mitt is not an evil oligarch raping the nation so he can put another elevator in his beach house and buy his wife another Cadillac.
Once people realize that a candidate is a liar, many are loath to ever believe anything he says again — or at the very least, they approach all he says with studied suspicion.