Maybe it’s just me (and maybe it doesn’t help that I thought the criticisms were ten different kinds of stupid in the first place), but I’m getting mighty tired of Team Obama basing their entire campaign around populist, small-potatoes criticisms of Mitt Romney. His tax returns, his “secrecy,” his time as a “corporate buyout specialist” and “outsourcer,” his Cayman Island bank account, his wealth, blah blah blah — none of those provide a lot of information about Obama’s successful policies and why we should reelect him in the fall. (Ohh yeah, that’s cause there aren’t any and we shouldn’t. Silly me.)
But I think (I hope?) that even the average American voter will have had their fill of Obama’s campaign as-is long before we hit November, and as the attacks in this vein haven’t seemed to do much to tip the polls into Obama’s favor, it looks like Team Obama is looking to reassess their strategy to a more Obama-centric bigger picture. It’ll have to be done carefully, very carefully, and Obama will have to lay on the rhetorical charm to keep the focus looking “forward” and to provide us with reasons why his ostensibly wonderful policies have had such a remarkably delayed reaction. At a fundraiser in New York last night, the President said:
Obama has faced criticism from some members of his party and key constituencies for not laying out clearly enough what his priorities will be if he’s re-elected. He has also taken heat for running a predominantly negative, anti-Romney TV ad campaign in battleground states. …
“This phase of the campaign I think you’re seeing a lot of negative ads and a lot of contrast ads, although when people start saying how terrible it is I just have to remind them to take a look at what Jefferson and Adams had to say about each other, and democracy has always been pretty rough and pretty messy,” Obama said.
“There is going to be, though, as the summer winds down and we get into the fall, the need for voters in these swing states to know not just what they’re voting against but also what they’re voting for,” he said. “And so we’ll be spending a lot of time talking about the specific agenda that I intend to pursue in the second term, which I think will make sure that this economy is going full guns.
Ahh, but of course — when taking heat for breaking campaign promises (i.e., “we’re going to run a positive campaign!”), just laugh it off by invoking the Founding Fathers — isn’t that what all of those crazy right-wingers are always on about, anyway?
In the meantime, however, it looks like we’ve more class-warmongering attacks to endure yet. Just this morning, the Obama campaign released this new-yet-aggravatingly-old Romney sideswipe:
(Did anybody else catch the “Felons” subliminally splashed across the screen there? Real subtle, guys.)
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