Obama campaign manager: Here’s our blueprint for winning reelection

It’s Jim “Punch Back Twice As Hard” Messina, explaining that all The One needs to do to secure a second term is to “build the grassroots” after having disappointed them on almost every front for two-plus years. (Compare how O’ own launch video fared on YouTube to how the GOP’s parody of it fared.) How do you build a volunteer army of young voters by pushing policies that require those same young voters to keep paying into an unsustainable entitlement system? I don’t know, but hey — they’ve still got that pretty logo going for them, and I’ll bet their next mantra-like campaign slogan is awesome. “Commitment to Change,” maybe? “Operation Enduring Hope”? Messina’s working on it, no doubt.

Here’s something he had better hope will change:

Soaring gasoline prices are biting into household incomes and nibbling at Americans’ fuel consumption and support for President Obama, according to a Washington Post-ABC News poll…

Obama, like previous presidents in times of high oil prices, is taking a hit. Only 39 percent of those who call gas prices a “serious financial hardship” approve of the way he is doing his job, and 33 percent of them say he’s doing a good job on the economy…

The Post-ABC poll results show that 60 percent of independents who say they’ve been hit hard by surging gas prices also say they definitely won’t support Obama in his bid for reelection.

In a theoretical match-up with former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, the top GOP performer in the Post-ABC poll, Romney wins by a 24-point margin among the independents who have taken a severe financial hit because of gas prices, and the president is up 7 percentage point among others.

Even Boehner’s worried enough about this political oil spill to have done some harrumphing tonight about oil companies paying their “fair share” in taxes — before noting that most of the blame will fall upon the unicorn prince and that he’ll certainly lose if they don’t come down. Which is true, yet strange; gas prices hit voters in the pocketbook but they’re not something under Obama’s control the way, say, entitlement reform and debt reduction are. Yet if he fails utterly on those latter critical issues and somehow succeeds wildly on the former, he’d be very, very tough to beat. Priorities, electorate-style.

Here’s Messina urging O-bots to imagine this not as a reelection bid but as an “insurgent campaign.” Which, per the left’s new rules of rhetoric post-Tucson, presumably makes him guilty of inciting terrorism.

• Bobby Jindal: Paternalistic, big-government liberalism is the biggest loser here
• Chris Christie: “I’ll be here to welcome” Obama when he comes to tour the NJ coast again next week
• MSNBC consensus: Obama’s speech was historic, amazing, “one of the best of his presidency”

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