From Politico:
The dramatic and unabashedly negative turn is the product of political reality. Obama remains personally popular, but pluralities in recent polling disapprove of his handling of his job and Americans fear the country is on the wrong track. His aides are increasingly resigned to running for re-election in a glum nation. And so the candidate who ran on “hope” in 2008 has little choice four years later but to run a slashing, personal campaign aimed at disqualifying his likeliest opponent.
Um, YEAH! Look, I know you "can't we all just get along" pragmatists hate it when anybody says anything mean about anybody, but the bottom line is that negative campaigns work. If they are going to begin to hammer down Mitt Romney, by all means don't fuck around. Swing haymakers with both fists clinched.
There is just one problem with this scenario. Who on the Obama Campaign staff is capable of such a feat? I mean, this is the "hope" "bipartisanship" "come together" crowd. Running a negative campaign isn't easy. It takes serious in your face tactics that the candidate has to be willing to stand by when called on by the media for "going too far."
The onslaught would have two aspects. The first is personal: Obama’s re-elect will portray the public Romney as inauthentic, unprincipled and, in a word used repeatedly by Obama’s advisers in about a dozen interviews, “weird.”
“First they’ve got to like you, and there’s not a lot to like about Mitt Romney,” said Chicago Democratic consultant Pete Giangreco, who worked on Obama’s 2008 campaign. “There’s no way to hide this guy and hide his innate phoniness.”
Lets face it: they're going to attack Mitt Romney personally. Now I know its out of bounds, and its just beyond the pale, and how could we possibly even think of going that far, and boo hoo I'm a weenie liberal. Well, you didn't hear any of that when the GOP very subtly went after Obama's race did you? His name? Portraying him as "other" and what not? A weakness is a weakness. Romney will have to suck it up and deal with it. "Weird." Yes. Mitt Romney is weird. I wonder why? Lets face it: Mormonism. If race is fair game, so is religion.
In a move that will make some Democrats shudder, Obama’s high command has even studied President Bush’s 2004 takedown of Sen. John F. Kerry, a senior campaign adviser told POLITICO, for clues on how a president with middling approval ratings can defeat a challenger.
“What made the Bush people successful and made theirs a very smart strategy was that they pitted something deeply ingrained about Bush against something that they were trying to convince people of regarding Kerry,” said another top Obama adviser. “Specifically, they knew Bush was seen as stubborn but very firm in his beliefs. The opposite of that, of course, is not firm in your beliefs and that’s how they portrayed Kerry from early on. It was a nice, sharp contrast.”
Obama’s team won’t portray the incumbent as stubborn, but principled. Voters can expect to see a portrait of a president making the difficult decisions in tough times set against an opponent they’ll claim has bent, like the windsurfing Kerry, with the breeze. And they may do it before Romney has even formally wrapped up the nomination in the event he ends up on a glide path to the GOP nomination.
“There’s a question of public character,” said Axelrod. “Are you principled, consistent — are you who you say you are? Can you be counted on?
It wont make this Democrat shudder. I thought Bush 2004 was a superb campaign. Much better than his 2000 campaign. Perfect pitch, aggressive on all fronts. The abysmal Kerry campaign never seemed to be able to gain traction anywhere. Still, lets not forget that Kerry came closer to defeating an incumbent president than anybody had in 12 years.
Now for the caveats:
It seems to me, if this reporting is correct, that the campaign understands that running on President Obama's record is just a loser. The country is off on the wrong track. The economy is fucked. We are still bogged down in multiple wars. Nobody has seen any significant changes in healthcare yet. The budget is a disaster. Wages are down, incomes are down, and meanwhile even the criminally rich are living it up.
Not much to run on here no matter how many times they keep saying "Lilly Ledbetter!" as if anyone cared.
The problem is that this is the thing that everyone wants to vote on. The economy. Jobs. The direction of the country. The big stuff. They may not really care that Mitt Romney is weird or different. Or that Rick Perry is from Texas. Or that Michelle Ba...., wait...okay yes they definitely will not want Michelle Bachmann under any circumstances. But with Romney and Perry, a slash and burn heavily negative personal attack is the only the way to go, but its going to take a bit more. The Carter Campaign of '80 tried "crazy" with Ronald Reagan but it it just didn't stick. When the economy sucks, people change pitchers. The Bush '92 campaign just laid into Bill Clinton calling him everything from a liar to a gangster and everything in between. The previous two times destroying your opponents character was tried, it failed. Then again, it worked for Bush in war time, but even then it was close.
We still need a serious plan for the economy. Not weak half-measures that we've already tried and already know do not work. I mean a serious plan that the president can run on.
Of course Romney is no Reagan, and certainly not a Bill Clinton(a political animal of historic proportions...who actually RELISHED political combat). He's not even John Kerry. But Perry? I don't know. Still learning. I'm a lot more concerned about Perry than I am Romney. But we are still learning.
Still, this is better news out of Obama High Command than what we've been getting. I like the fact they are releasing it now in order to shape the Republican primary.