Election Week One

If this election were a heavyweight fight, the referees would have to stop it by a TKO in the first. President Obama controlled the pace, the roll-out and the whole rhythm of the debate. Like clockwork, the Obama campaign sent one internet ad after the other punching Romney with being too extreme on women's issues,economic issues and showcasing the President's  decision to kill Osama bin Laden and contrasting it to Romney's statements that it wasn't worth the money.
President Obama's appearance on the Jimmy Fallon show to slow talk the Student loan issue generated the right type of reaction from the Republicans and Romney, who tut-tutted that this was beneath the office of the President.


Karl Rove seems to be going Rogue by-passing the Romney campaign as he senses they are floundering. Rove cut an ad about President Obama's cool and trying to insert the old Reagan line whether you are better off today than you were four years ago. But the ad only visually reinforced how Cool Obama is and not the political message Karl wanted to convey.


I don't know whether Joe Biden is Obama's Drew Bundini or his Fight Doctor. Mitt Romney assembled his group of national security advisers to pre-but the Vice President's speech on foreign policy. This team ,with script in hand, lamented the President's policy on Czechoslovakia (which hasn't existed for two decades), the Soviet Union (ditto), China and Iran. Biden gave a slam dunk speech calling Romney out on his out of date thinking and ran down the list of President Obama's foreign policy accomplishments. It was one of the few times in recent memory that Democrats actually took the offensive on this issue. 


The ad about Bin Laden deeply wounded the Republicans from their outrage. The ad had Bill Clinton go on at length about the nature of the decision to take out bin Laden in Pakistan and what would happen if the President failed. The sub text was Karl Rove's misquoting Bill Clinton in the past as saying that Obama did what any President would have done. Clinton made it clear that wasn't the case and then we get Mitt Romney's statements from the last campaign how it wasn't worth the money to go after one man. The ad was wounding. Mitt Romney personally was outraged that he had been called out and John McCain whined that President Obama had desecrated the memory of all those who died in 9-11 by politicizing the killing of bin Laden. 


Of course, we won't mention that John McCain glorified 9/11 at his convention and one Republican president was in a flight suit and posed underneath a banner saying "Mission Accomplished". The Republicans were so wounded by this that their criticism actually was given some weight by the news media but the blood was already in the water. The Obama campaign laid down the marker and challenged the Republicans on national security and they didn't know how to react.


President Obama hit three campuses this week in lobbying for the reduction in interest on student loans and was enthusiastically greeted by students in Swing States and the local print coverage was just as good. Unfortunately, Mitt Romney's strategy of bird-dogging the President at every step back fired. At a university in Ohio, he put the audience to sleep by criticizing the stimulus package and saying that the students shouldn't take out student loans by borrow $20,000 from their parents. This was said at a university with lower to middle-class students. 


It was as if the Romney campaign felt that McCain had a winning formula in 2008. Romney went on the attack against President Obama in terms of the unemployment of veterans. The President flew down to a base in the South outlined his plan to stop for-profit colleges from ripping off soldiers and summarized what his administration has done for veterans. His own initiative for hiring of veterans has significantly reduced veterans' unemployment. It reminds me of McCain who had an awful record on veterans' affairs trying to criticize Obama for his, even though President Obama had backed the new G.I.Plan and McCain had not. This time Romney walked into the trap.


The RNC ran internet ads replaying the 2008 campaign about Obama's "inexperience" and suggesting somehow that he was still inexperienced to be President. Naturally, this ran into fact checkers pointing out that Romney had far less experience in the public sector than Obama at the same time. The ad looked forced and all that was achieved was the Obama campaign forced the Republicans to waste money.


Today, the spokesperson for the Romney campaign said that President Obama's only economic success was following Mitt Romney's idea for bailing out the auto industry. A stunning lie. Of course, the most rudimentary fact-check reproduced Romney's insistence not to bail out the auto industry and let the car industry go bankrupt.


Yesterday, President Obama had an event for women at the White House and gave a full-throated endorsement of issues from equal pay for equal work,reproductive rights and the act against violence against women. This was followed by a strong ad on Romney as "too extreme" on women's issues. 


As if playing the willing pawns, the House Republicans passed the student loan bill but with provisions to pay for it out of funds for women's preventive medicine. At last count, the Republicans around the county have over 900 bills that restrict reproductive rights, equal pay and preventative medicine for women. This week John McCain as Romney surrogate sputtered that the war on women was a Democratic fiction.


Sometimes gaffes are unintentional and aren't generated by a campaign. For some reason, Haley Barbour went out of his way to criticize  Nobel Prize winner Elie Wiesel for his criticism of Mormon's proxy baptizing Holocaust victims. Not only is the issue sensitive but Wiesel has the credibility of having survived the Holocaust. Instead Haley Barbour claimed that Elie Wiesel's request was just a plot by the Democratic Party to criticize Mitt Romney's faith. So without being asked, you criticize a victim of the Holocaust and raise the religion of your candidate as an issue, which the Obama campaign has been avoiding like the plague.


The goal of Republicans is to have this election a referendum on the President and not a choice. The Obama campaign has already made the election a choice and been raid fire in responding to the Romney's campaign's criticism. 


For a week the Romney campaign has basically been playing a me-too strategy of backing the President's proposals on non controversial things. But this has become complicated because the SuperPacs and astroturf groups like the Club for Growth have been running ads undercutting that position. I think you will see more of that as this campaign develops. 


One of the Big Duds from the Romney campaign  has been their attempt to redefine "fairness" as their campaign's centerpiece. Romney's explanation came off false and phony and he used his statement to try and gin up criticism about President Obama. The problem is that the minute he raises this the whole issue of his taxes and the fact he hasn't released his tax returns comes up. It's like he loves to shoot himself in the foot.


The President has announced May 5th as the start of his campaign with appearances in Virginia and Ohio. The Romney campaign has to spend the next three weeks raising money and putting in place organizations for the fall campaign. Haley Barbour was shrewd in warning the Romney campaign that they would get far behind before they started and the Obama campaign would be damaging the GOP candidate before he was ready for the general election.


Romney is snarled in the Republican Party and enmeshed in the Paul Ryan budget. I don't see how he gets out of it. As Karl Rove noted, Obama has significant leads against the GOP on their two stock issues--taxes and foreign policy. Stripped of these two, the GOP is stuck in culture wars and the ideological destruction of the social welfare state. It is tough how to see how this is a winning hand in a general election where more people turn out. 


Lastly, this week the Republicans have tried to deal with the fact that the American people like President Obama and frankly, don't like Mitt Romney. They have replaced their "Celebrity" meme, the "Cool" meme, and the "Nice guy but over his head " meme to no avail. Romney has also pulled out the new fear card that under President Obama the United States faces a situation like Greece. But voters have to registered the national debt as one of the major issues they are concerned about. 


As I said at the beginning, if this week were the election, you would have to stop the fight. It was no contest. President Obama knocked Romney down and dance circles around him.