While aides to past reelection campaigns have typically waited until it became clear who they'd face in the general election before taking direct aim in the media, Robert Gibbs, a former White House press secretary who is now advising Obama's reelection effort, explained to The Huffington Post that "no one thought it made sense to let the Republicans attack the President for months and months without some fact checking and pushback."
For the past several days, Gibbs and chief strategist David Axelrod have tried to define former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, long considered by Team Obama as the most likely nominee, and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who is now leading in most primary polls. On CBS's "Face the Nation" Sunday, Gibbs described Romney as "a political gymnast of the highest order," who will "say virtually anything to get elected to any office." Across the dial, Axelrod told NBC's David Gregory that "when it comes to his public character, [Romney] doesn't have a core," echoing past criticism from White House senior adviser David Plouffe.
The campaign turned its attention to Gingrich Monday, with Axelrod calling him the "Godfather of Gridlock" in the morning on MSNBC and again at night on CNN. Gibbs brought up Romney's "trust issue" on Tuesday's "Morning Joe" and told "Today" co-host Ann Curry on Wednesday that he doesn't "think voters are going to like, quite frankly, either one of them." That afternoon, Axelrod told reporters at a forum hosted by Bloomberg View that Romney belongs in the "martini party set" and made a crack about Gingrich's credit line at Tiffany's.
On Thursday, Obama campaign press secretary Ben LaBolt, who regularly fires off tweets digging into Romney's rhetoric and record, responded to a new ad targeting President Obama's job creation record by saying that Romney would "put Wall Street profit ahead of middle class security."
Team Obama shouldn't be expected to sleep through the Republican primary, and past reelection campaigns have surely used the period leading up to the Iowa caucuses to stock up on opposition research, raise money, talk to reporters, and plot a general election strategy. But some veteran political reporters and operatives told The Huffington Post that the Obama campaign's decision to engage so publicly with specific candidates -- along with its aggressive pushback through the news media and social media -- is a risky move for an incumbent president's campaign which could otherwise try staying above the primary fray, and let the candidates tear each other apart, well into spring 2012.
Washington Post reporter Dan Balz said the Obama campaign's "focus on Romney is earlier than we've seen in the past."
Take the economy: Unemployment numbers are still bad, but they are improving, reaching levels not seen since the very start of the crisis. GDP growth has been anemic but it long ago stopped contracting, as it was when Obama first took office, thanks to effects of the global financial crisis and US credit crunch. Asset management firm BlackRock, meanwhile, predicts that GDP growth will increase in the last quarter, hitting the 3% mark that puts the economy beyond “treading water” territory into real growth that companies large and small will invest in, both in terms of equipment and real estate upgrades, and new hiring. Macroeconomic Advisors puts the figure at 3.7%.
The GOP would love to challenge Obama on foreign policy, but here he is nearly unimpeachable. He’s steadfastly refused to commit U.S. resources to overseas adventures, resisting the “nation-building” that candidate George W. Bush had promised to not engage in. He corrected the Bush-era excesses by pulling out of Iraq and announcing a timetable to withdraw from Afghanistan. If a president John McCain had used drone strikes as much as Obama did, Republicans everywhere would be crowing about the president’s use of “smart power” in the War on Terror.
As Todd Purdum recently explained in Vanity Fair, in an article about George Kennan and his disillusionment with our country’s military-driven growth and global-policeman interventionist foreign policy stance, there should never have been anything inevitable about the U.S. jumping into global hot spots just because it could. Obama is perhaps the only president in the last fifty years to successfully resist committing huge numbers of American lives and treasure to an overseas engagement. With that accomplishment, he joins only Dwight Eisenhower, who ended the Korean War, if we go back a little further. And yet, when asked Thursday at a press conference if he was engaging in a policy of appeasement with Iran, he smartly suggested that the reporter “ask Osama bin Laden and the 22 out of 30 top al-Qaida leaders who have been taken off the field whether I engage in appeasement. Or whoever is left out there, ask them about that.” The GOP may try to pin Obama on foreign policy, but when he starts defending his record in such stark terms, it’s pretty easy to see how this is a losing fight.
If the economy rebounds even partly, and his foreign policy continues to be effective, what can the Republicans pin on Obama? The birth certificate is public and the country has grown comfortable, or at least used to, seeing him on the world stage. The “otherness” that plagued him during the early days of his presidency has been all but eradicated. The incumbent advantage will begin to manifest itself as the GOP nominee struggles to present a vision for America that differs significantly from where we already are. With social issues always being marginalized in general elections (and with Rick Perry proving even the GOP primary season is barely hospitable to his anti-gay TV spots), it’s becoming clear that no credible alternative narrative to the Obama era is going to emerge from this Republican party or its Tea Party wing.
Finally, Obama seems to have learned perhaps his most difficult lesson: how to be the master of Congress. He’s taking credit for good ideas and pointing fingers at the failures, while appearing to the public as engaged but above the fray. He learned all the lessons of the debt ceiling debacle in time to benefit rather than suffer from the super committee’s failure. He’s dared congressional Republicans to attack his middle-class populism by wearing the cloak of a Republican, Teddy Roosevelt, when talking about it. And if Congress fails to pass the payroll tax extension before its December recess, the administration will surely paint its Republican leaders as not just do-nothings, but hypocrites to boot.
Come general-election season, Obama should be able to describe his first term as one in which: he took the right steps on the economy which, due to simple outside lag time, are just now paying off; he avoided military entanglements while keeping the country safe and hunting down terrorists; and he stared down the extreme wings of both parties in order to maintain a centrist course, while also increasing health care coverage for millions of Americans. In short, whereas it was once hard to see how the president could possibly win a second term, it’s now difficult to understand how he could lose.
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