Why the Obama campaign is in a panic
Jennifer Rubin reports that President Obama's reelection campaign is in a panic.The Obama team knew months ago that the economy would not sufficiently improve before Election Day to justify his reelection. Its polling showed simply blaming President George W. Bush wouldn’t be sufficient. The president and his political hacks concluded that it was too late and too risky to adopt a whole new second-term agenda. (It would risk offending either the base or centrists and reveal his first-term agenda to have been entirely inadequate.) So what to do?Read the whole thing. It's a pity that John McCain didn't know how to, or wouldn't, play this game four years ago.He could have saved the country several trillion dollars and the world several crises.
Extend the Republican primary by running ads hitting Romney and encouraging Democrats to vote against Romney in Michigan and elsewhere. Then, before Romney could fully get his bearings, unload a barrage of negative attacks, scare mongering and thinly disguised oppo attacks through the mainstream media, taking advantage of many political reporters’ relative ignorance about the private equity field and their inclination to accept whole-hog President Obama’s version of “facts.”
The extent of that effort is only now becoming clear. The Associated Press reports: “President Barack Obama’s campaign has spent nearly $100 million on television commercials in selected battleground states so far, unleashing a sustained early barrage designed to create lasting, negative impressions of Republican Mitt Romney before he and his allies ramp up for the fall.” Think of it like the Confederacy’s artillery barrage on the third day of Gettysburg before Pickett’s charge — you have to in essence disable the other side before the charge begins or its curtains.
Virtually all of the ads were viciously negative, and judging from the number of Pinocchios they’ve racked up, continually and materially false.
But it didn’t work. Romney and Obama are still deadlocked. (The AP quoted Republican operative Carl Forti: “I don’t think . . . [Obama’s] got a choice. He has to try to change the dynamic now, but the polling indicates it’s not working. He doesn’t appear to be making any headway in the polls.”)
Labels: Barack Hussein Obama, Campaign 2012, campaign finance, Mitt Romney
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 6:32 AM
2 Comments:
McCain didn't have Romney's money.
Noah David Simon,
That's very true. But that's because McCain was Mr. Public Financing and didn't understand (or want to understand) the implications of Obama eschewing the campaign financing. McCain was totally outspent because he stood on what was to him a matter of principle. Sometimes you pay a price for doing that.
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