President Obama's campaign whisperer: Bill Clinton
Barack Obama’s top advisers are making a mid-“core” correction in their attacks on Mitt Romney — with a little nudge from Bill Clinton, who is finding a niche as an Obama campaign whisperer and fundraiser.
Late last year, as Romney galloped to the right, Obama’s messaging team hit on what it assumed would be a durable bumper-sticker attack: Romney, senior advisers David Plouffe and David Axelrod intoned time and again, was a political shape-shifter who lacked any real moral or political “core.”
The slogan was the Obama talking point for months. But Clinton, echoing survey data presented by Obama’s own pollster Joel Benenson, quietly argued that the empty-core approach failed to capitalize on what they see as Romney’s greatest vulnerability: An embrace of a brand of tea party conservatism that turns off Hispanics, women and moderate independents.
A more effective strategy, Clinton has told anyone who would listen, would be to focus almost exclusively on Romney’s description of himself as a “severe conservative,” to deny him any chance to tack back to the center, according to three Democrats close to the situation.
Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0412/75452.html#ixzz1sslHPpA8
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It might be fair to point out that for obvious reasons, The Honorable Mr. Clinton's view of the election is primarily Presidential in scope and interest.
Whereas I think President Obama's approach to the election is far broader. His problem is not reelection--Romney simply can't win now that 67% of all female voters hate him, and everyone on the inside of both campaigns knows it to some degree or another.
What President Obama needs is for at least 30-50 Republicans in the House to pack their bags and go home, and for Democrats to hold onto the Senate in spite of the enormous problem of defending 23 Senate seats against 10 mostly solid Republican ones.
Untangling that knot is going to require coattails that do not just include social out-groups (that's a sociological term that for our purposes translates to "anyone shat upon by the Republican Party"
. The President must also garner the support of white males, preferably most of them.
So I suspect that the President's overall approach will indeed be friendly to women, Hispanics, and moderates, but it will also find a way to resonate with an even broader demographic--everyone who is getting slapped in the wallet by Republican obstruction (about 95% of all voters, minus the goose-steppers who do what they're told).
This is because the President doesn't just have to reelect himself, he has to reelect all Congressional Democrats and kick the snot out of at least three dozen Republicans on top of that. That is going to require a populist approach across a broad array of issues and demographics, with taxes and economic recovery as the central issue.
