Deeply unsettled political landscape, with voters in a fiercely anti-incumbent mood, is framing the 2012 presidential race 15 months before Americans decide whether to give Obama a second term or hand power to the Republicans. Trying to ride out what seems to be an unrelenting storm of economic anxiety, people in the United States increasingly are voicing disgust with most all of the men and women, Obama included, they sent to Washington to govern them.
With his approval numbers sliding, the Democratic president will try to ease their worries and sustain his resurrected fighting spirit when he sets off Monday on a bus tour of Minnesota, Iowa and Illinois. The trip is timed to dilute the GOP buzz emanating from the Midwest after Republicans gathered in Iowa over the weekend for a first test of the party's White House candidates. The state holds the nation's first nominating test in the long road toward choosing Obama's opponent.
"You have just sent a message that Barack Obama will be a one-term president," Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann told elated supporters minutes after winning Saturday's Iowa straw poll, essentially a fundraising event that also tests a candidate's organizational and financial strength. She spent heavily and traveled throughout the state where she was born, casting herself as the evangelical Christian voice of the deeply conservative small government, low tax tea party wing of the party.
So Bachmann won the test vote and Democrats probably rejoiced that her ultraconservative voice gained strength among Republican contenders. But at the same time, the contest to challenge Obama in November 2012 grew even more jumbled. While the voting was under way in Ames, Iowa, Republicans had to shift their gaze halfway across the country to South Carolina, where Texas Gov. Rick Perry made a cleverly timed entrance into the race.
Like Bachmann and all the other candidates, he ravaged Obama. Perry said the president was presiding over an "economic disaster," in a declaration that stole some of Bachmann's political thunder and undercut the front-runner status of former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, who didn't compete in the Iowa test vote. Perry clearly cast a broad shadow across the Republican contest.
Obama, expecting the political shelling he would take, fired pre-emptively in his weekly radio and Internet address to the nation on Saturday. He told listeners that it was the Republicans running for president and serving in Congress who were at work crushing voters' hopes and dreams.
Earlier this week, Politico.com published a story quoting anonymous sources said to be close to the Obama re-election team. In it, the sources said the president's focus in the 2012 campaign will not be on his record but rather on attacking the presumed GOP candidate, Mitt Romney.
"Unless things change and Obama can run on accomplishments, he will have to kill Romney," said a prominent Democratic strategist aligned with the White House, Politico reported.
Not to dismiss the reporting done by Politico, but because the sources are unidentified, it's hard to know how involved the individuals quoted are with the Obama campaign and how much of what they said is actually true. Obama adviser David Axelrod has since called the story "garbage" and said he would fire anyone trying to paint Romney as "weird" as part of the strategy.
Still, the Romney campaign wasted little time using an unattributed quote from the piece in a campaign ad, so true or not, the "kill Romney" strategy is out there.
After all, Barack Obama beat Hillary Clinton and John McCain in part by appearing to be the least negative and the one most focused on issues.
To do an about-face in hopes of re-election would reek of the foul politics-as-usual stench he promised to clear out if elected. We can certainly debate whether he actually tried to do that before the reality of partisanship hit him in the face. However, if he allows personal attacks to shape his re-election bid, that debate is moot and his journey to the dark side complete.
Now granted, employing such a strategy will not automatically cost President Obama my vote or even the election. But it will certainly cost him a certain measure of respect.
He proved himself to be a decent man during a 2008 campaign that was at times ridiculous (Is he black enough?) and other times, nasty (Falsely saying he's a Muslim!). I would like to see him be confident in his record and hard on his opponent. But to resort to off-topic, personal attacks would simply be hypocritical and desperate.
Coming into Obama's presidency, most supporters knew some core Democrat principles would have to give way to Republican ones, which to me is fine because no one party has all the answers anyway. And even though many of the people who voted for him didn't always agree with his decisions as president, Obama the man has always been liked by most Americans.
That all changes if he starts slinging mud.
But more importantly, what does it say about how Obama views his first term if he chooses to run a campaign that seems to run away and not run on his record? How could anyone not see that as a self-issued indictment of his own performance or a validation of the GOP's assessment that his presidency has been a failure? Any attempt to frame Romney as "weird" may be good for chuckles, but it doesn't erase Obama's record in the White House.
Just as Romney touting his business background doesn't erase his lackluster record in creating jobs while governor of Massachusetts or Texas' Rick Perry blasting big government doesn't erase the fact he accepted more than $6 billion in stimulus money to help balance his state's budget.
Sometimes you are who you are, so Obama, as well as the eventual GOP candidate, might as well own what they've done because it's going to be brought up anyway.
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