Why Team Obama is losing

No Quarter links a New York Post column in which Mark Cunningham observes:

If it suddenly seems like the Obama campaign doesn't have any idea what it's doing, maybe that's because it doesn't.
Barack Obama has never run a campaign against a real Republican. And his main strategist, David Axelrod, is way out of his areas of expertise.
Axelrod specializes in urban politics. . . .
[Axelrod's] left-populism did work for Deval Patrick in the People's Republic of Massachusetts. . . .
The approach appeals to Democrats. . . . But it just doesn't sell with the great American middle.

Obama's recent "pledge" to raise taxes only on households earning over $250,000 a year is the classic error produced by this sort of echo-chamber liberalism. What Obama doesn't seem to understand is this: Middle-class voters don't trust Democrats on taxes, period. Obama would do best to avoid the subject of taxes entirely, but instead repeats Clinton's lying 1992 promise of "middle-class tax cuts," while claiming he'll only raise taxes on "the rich."

Obama's never faced a serious GOP opponent, and his chief strategists (Axelrod and David Plouffe) have practically zero experience in general-election campaigns in "red" states. By comparison, Steve Schmidt ran Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's successful re-election campaign in deeply "blue" California.