Senior Obama adviser David Axelrod was on ABC’s “This Week” yesterday with Jake Tapper filling in George Stephanopoulos. If this appearance was any indication, the President’s campaign team is having more than a little difficulty coming up with a way to distinguish their pitch in 2012 from the last two elections. The typically dour Axelrod was also tasked with spinning the poor turnout at Obama’s official campaign kick-off in Ohio on Saturday. From ABC News via Breitbart TV:

The campaign is still about Hope, and still about Change because…clearly that’s all they have. More than 3 years later and they are still talking about how bad the situation was in January 2009 when Obama entered office? Just look how well this strategy worked for them in 2010. I could be wrong but I have a sneaking suspicion that most of the American people are a little tired of hearing about “headwinds”. After the continued failure of the President’s policies to make any significant impact on economic growth, perhaps the White House might want to stop and consider whether these headwinds are actually the winds of change this Administration blew in on in 2008. Because who else if not them has set the direction we are currently on?

Also, at the risk of helping the Obama campaign, I’m beginning to wonder whether we are seeing the early signs of the Taranto principle at work here. Does the Obama campaign really think they can run on the same message as 2008 (and 2010) and come out victorious? With virtually every liberal media outlet echoing the idea that Mitt Romney is some sort of right-wing extremist, not to mention most polling experts already giving the President a significant edge in the 2012 electoral map (Intrade currently has it 263-133 in favor of Obama, with 142 votes a toss-up), maybe they believe this is all it will take. Or perhaps they are trying to buy time while hoping for just a little improvement on the economic front. In any case, it seems to me that the Romney camp has a real opportunity to brand their candidate right out of the gate as the alternative representing real change.