Ali's "Rope-a-Dope" tactic gets a lot of play here, especially after last night's debate performance by the President. The problem with using this analogy is that it doesn't fit, unless Obama does one important thing, which I will get to later.
"Rope-a-Dope" only works when your opponent has finite resources and energy. We all know that Romney is a liar, and that he is wealthy beyond our imagining, and he has the backing of many of the richest people in the world. None of those things is going to change, and apparently, none of them--even the lying--affect his ability to keep running this race. In fact, his lying enables him to win debates and the votes of those who don't have the time, energy, knowledge, or inclination to disprove his lies.
In other words, Romney will not "punch himself out", which is what happens in the ring during a "Rope-a-Dope" fight. A boxer has only so much physical stamina, and each punch thrown reduces some of this pool of energy. Ali knew this, of course, and let his opponents throw as many punches as they could as fast as they could, blocking as many of them as he could. Ali didn't really fight back in those early rounds, because that would have allowed his opponent to "rest" while Ali was working.
Boxing matches themselves (since the early 20th century), though, do not last forever; they end after some number of 3-minute rounds, and may not result in one opponent knocking the other out. "Official scorers" treat each round as a separate entity, usually by granting one or the other fighter a win by some small margin of points, and it is due to these three points, while in and of themselves they are analogous to a political campaign, that we can show the inaptness of the "Rope-a-Dope" analogy.
The important thing to remember about Ali's tactic was that during the fights, Ali knew he was going to lose every single round while he was letting his opponent throw himself out. This gave rise to 2 possible problems. 1) There was a very real danger that the first few times he tried this (and it is vital to know that he didn't use "Rope-a-Dope" more than a handful of times), the referee could have stopped the fight at any time he felt Ali wasn't defending himself or actually, you know, fighting. So in each round there would be a moment or two when the ref would step in to verify that Ali was still coherent and able to fight--if Ali couldn't convince the ref that he was ok, the ref would have stopped it and declared his opponent the victor. 2) Ali (and/or his ringside team) had to be able to judge the precise time to start fighting back. If he waited too long and couldn't knock his opponent out, he might lose the fight "on points" due to all those rounds he lost at the beginning--in other words, he would have dug himself too deep a hole to climb out of. If he didn't wait long enough, he would have given his opponent a bunch of rounds without really affecting his ability to fight back effectively when Ali did "wake up."
We do know when this fight ends; November 6, 2012. But that's all we really know for sure. We don't know how the judges are scoring, and in fact, there aren't any "rounds" at all. (Yes, there are the polls, but they are not set in stone, and have no effect on the final outcome.) So we don't know when Obama has to start fighting back and landing his own punches--there is no calculus or estimate we can use that will give us that knowledge--to even give him a chance at a win. And while there is no referee who could possibly step in and end it early, that simply reinforces the inaptness of the analogy.
I would bet that if you asked Ali himself, he would tell you he would have never used "Rope-a-Dope" if he didn't think he needed to. He would have loved to have been as well ahead of his opponent as Obama was before last night, and would have relished getting a KO as soon as possible in that scenario. Because you never know when that fighter might land that one lucky blow that knocks you out of the fight instead. Boxing enthusiasts know--think Mike Tyson v. Buster Douglas. Obama will still probably win this election, but there is no reason he can't be fighting aggressively all the while. And if he is indeed thinking he's using "Rope-a-Dope", now's the time to start throwing hard punches and landing them without letup.