The Fix: President Obama
What’s the matter with Iowa?
President Obama is in the midst of a three-day campaign swing through the state of Iowa, his longest visit to one state so far in the 2012 race and a sign of the concern and consequence with which his side holds the Hawkeye State.
President Barack Obama stops for a snow cone at Tropical Sno, Monday, Aug. 13, 2012, in Denison, Iowa, during a three day campaign bus tour through Iowa. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)
“I have nightmares about the electoral college coming down to 266-266, with Iowa to decide it,” said longtime Iowa Democratic operative Jerry Crawford. “It’s not as far-fetched as it might sound.”
Added Dave Roederer, who ran the George W. Bush operation in Iowa: “This is an unprecedented five-city tour. I doubt he’s here for the mountains.”
How Paul Ryan impacts the electoral map. Or doesn’t.
The word “game-changer” is being thrown around quite a bit in regards Mitt Romney’s selection as Paul Ryan as his vice presidential running mate over the weekend.
And there is a case to be made — and Republicans will make it — that Ryan re-focuses the election on the need for big ideas and hard truths.
But, does Ryan really change the game as it relates to the race for 270 electoral votes? Not really, according to our latest look at the Fix’s electoral map.
The lamest week of the 2012 campaign
It’s official: The 2012 presidential campaign has hit rock bottom.
President Obama delivers remarks during a campaign event at Colorado College in Colorado Springs, Colorado, on Thursday. (AFP PHOTO/Jim Watson)In the course of the last week, the following things have occurred:
* Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said Mitt Romney hadn’t paid taxes in a decade, but refused to name his source.
* President Obama referred to the Republican presidential nominee as “Romney Hood” because he allegedly robs from the poor to give to the rich.
* Romney dubbed Obama’s alleged exaggerations about his record as “Obama-loney.”
* A Democratic super PAC ran an ad that not-so-subtly suggested that Romney’s actions led to the death of a woman.
* The Romney campaign released an ad accusing Obama of working to “gut” welfare reform, a claim that independent fact-checkers found highly questionable.
Partisans love to hate President Obama and Mitt Romney
More than eight in 10 Republicans view President Obama unfavorably, while a similar number of Democrats see former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney in an negative light, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.
The numbers are just the latest sign of the deep partisan divide gripping the 2012 presidential race.
Eighty-four percent of Republicans view Obama unfavorably, while 80 percent of Democrats feel the same about Romney. Those are among the highest numbers ever measured for the opposing candidates in Post-ABC polling, far outdistancing all but how Republicans viewed Bill Clinton in 1996 (78 percent unfavorable) and how Democrats saw George W. Bush in 2004 (76 percent unfavorable).
Here’s a full chart detailing how the opposite party has felt about the presidential nominees dating back to 1988:
Mitt Romney’s money edge — and whether it matters
In the past two months, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney and the Republican National Committee have outraised President Obama and the Democratic National Committee by $61 million.
And, while Obama’s campaign has yet to release its cash-on-hand total at the end of July, it’s a near-certainty that Romney’s $26 million edge at the end of June widened in July.
Republican presidential candidate and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney (C) greets supporters as he arrives at a campaign event with U.S. Senate Candidate Richard Mourdock (L) at Stepto's Bar B Q Shack on August 4, 2012 in Evansville, Indiana. (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images)
Add to those numbers the fact that, as of mid-July, Republican super PACs and other conservative aligned outside groups were outspending their Democratic counterparts by a seven-to-one margin on the TV airwaves in swing states, and you are left with a simple, inescapable conclusion: The President of the United States is likely to be heavily outspent in the final three months of this campaign.
Why President Obama needs to make history in 2012. Again.
Amid the back and forth about Friday’s jobs report, one thing is abundantly clear: To win a second term on November 6, President Obama is going to have to defy history.
US President Barack Obama pauses while speaking during an event in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building on the White House campus August 3, 2012 in Washington, DC. Obama spoke to urge Congress to pass tax cuts for the American middle class. AFP PHOTO/Brendan SMIALOWSKIWhy? Because the July jobs report affirmed the now-certain reality that the unemployment rate won’t drop below eight percent between today and November. And no sitting president since World War II has been re-elected with the unemployment rate above 7.2 percent.
Mitt Romney’s foreign trip didn’t go well. Does it matter?
Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney later today wraps up his foreign tour, a trip that drew a series of negative headlines and has left many Republicans wondering what exactly the GOP presidential nominee was hoping to accomplish.
The assessments of the trip, which saw Romney visit London, Israel and Poland over the past week, ranged from scathing to resigned among the Republican professional political class.
“I find this entire trip borderline lunacy,” said one senior Republican strategist granted anonymity to speak candidly. “Why on earth is he seeking to improve his foreign policy cred when there will not be a single vote cast on that subject?”
Mitt Romney and the ‘wimp’ factor
Is Mitt Romney too wimpy to be president?
U.S. Republican Presidential candidate Mitt Romney delivers foreign policy remarks at Mishkenot Sha'ananim in Jerusalem, July 29, 2012. REUTERS/Jason Reed That’s the (purposely) provocative question Newsweek asks on its cover this week. It’s a question sure to stir controversy — and one without an easy answer.
How Mitt Romney’s tax returns stack up — in 1 chart
Unless you haven’t been paying attention to politics for the past few months, you know by now that former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney is very wealthy.
But, how does Romney’s wealth — as translated in the political conversation through his tax returns — compare to that of the last few presidents? Thanks to the Sunlight Foundation, the Fix’s new favorite site, we know.
The chart below shows both the year-by-year incomes of and the effective tax rate paid by Romney as well as the last five presidents (including Obama).
Who wins a “devil you know vs devil you don’t” election?
One thing is starkly clear from the last month of the 2012 presidential campaign: We are headed toward a lowest common denominator, devil-you-know-versus-devil-you-don’t election in which the winner will not so much triumph as survive.
A devil you know. (Photo by Rick Scavetta/U.S. Army Garrison Kaiserslautern)The latest NBC-Wall Street Journal poll makes that point in stark terms. Forty three percent of respondents viewed President Obama negatively while 40 percent saw Romney in that light; the percentage of people who regarded Obama and Romney “very negatively” was at an all-time high (or low, depending on your perspective) in the NBC-WSJ data.
“This is not characteristic … for July,” GOP pollster Bill McInturff, who conducted the survey with Democratic pollster Peter D. Hart, told NBC. “These are numbers you usually see in October.”
2012: It’s the values, stupid?
President Obama’s best chance at winning a second term this fall revolves around turning the race from a straight referendum on his economic policies and toward a debate about which candidate better shares voters’ values, according to two new national polls.
In a new NBC-Wall Street Journal poll, President Obama held a 49 percent to 33 percent edge on the question of which candidate is “looking out for the middle class” while new Gallup data showed Obama with a 50 percent to 39 percent edge on who “understands the problems Americans face in their everyday lives”.
How super PACs are saving Mitt Romney
Republican-aligned super PACs and other outside conservative groups have spent more than $144 million on general election ads in swing presidential states, a huge outlay of cash that has allowed former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney to not only combat but exceed heavy early ad spending by President Obama.
In this May 8, 2012 file photo, Republican presidential candidate, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney speaks in Lansing, Mich. (AP Photo/Carlos Osorio, File)Roughly 80 percent of all ad spending by Republicans on the general election has come from these super PACs, as Romney has expended a relatively meager $35 million to date on ads in swing states, according to ad buy figures provided to the Fix by a GOP media buyer.
By contrast, the $20 million that Democratic super PACs have spent on ads so far in the general election accounts for just 19 percent of total ad spending on the Democratic side.
Obama campaign pushes back on ‘burn rate’ criticism
In the wake of a report that the Obama campaign’s burn rate — the amount of money they are spending per month on the race — has raised concerns among some within the party, the president’s campaign manager insisted that every penny is being well spent.
“We made a big bet in this campaign,” Obama campaign manager Jim Messina told the Fix in an interview this afternoon. “Ground organization matters and building one takes a lot of money. It’s an expensive proposition.”
Mitt Romney’s ‘exotic’ tax problem
For years, President’s Obama’s political opponents have used his background — Kenyan father, Kansan mother, raised in Indonesia and Hawaii — to cast him as somehow exotic, someone whose life makes it hard for him to understand the average American.
And yet, it’s Mitt Romney, Obama’s general election opponent, who is now dealing with an “exotic” issue that is centered on his considerable wealth and being played out in the ongoing fight over whether he will release more than two years worth of tax returns.
When politics stops — and how it never really does
In a speech today addressing the tragic shootings in Aurora, Colorado, President Obama said that “there are going to be other days for politics...This, I think, is a day for prayer and reflection.”
US President returns early to the White House in Washington,DC on July 20, 2012 after cancelling a campaign stop in Florida. Obama and his rival Mitt Romney suspended their campaigning out of respect for the victims of a shocking shooting at a Colorado movie theater that left 12 people dead and over 50 injured. AFP PHOTO/Nicholas KAMMHe’s right. Both Obama and former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney canceled planned campaign rallies, pulled negative ads and generally refrained from doing anything that appeared even remotely political.
But, to assume that politics ever truly stops in this country — even in moments of national tragedy and mourning like this one — is a mistake. Politics and political campaigns don’t happen in a vacuum. Every external event — from the joyous to the tragic — is a piece of the broader political puzzle.
Is the 2012 election the 2004 election all over again?
A few months back, we wrote that the election most analogous to the 2012 contest was the 2004 race between President George W. Bush and Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry .
And, as the race has played itself out since then, we feel more and more confident in that comparison.
In this Jan. 16, 2010 file photo, former President George W. Bush listens as President Barack Obama speaks in the Rose Garden at the White House in Washington. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais, File)
A tale of two campaigns
There are two campaigns for president happening simultaneously right now.
One is being staged inside Washington — and President Obama is winning that one resoundingly. The other is set in the rest of the country — and that one is a dead heat between Obama and former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney.
Why President Obama’s reelection is no sure thing — in 2 charts
Judging from the coverage of the presidential race over the past few weeks — questions about Mitt Romney’s staff, his exact departure date from Bain Capital and whether or not he should release his tax returns — you could be forgiven for thinking that it’s time for President Obama to break out the champagne and start celebrating his likely re-election in November.
But to draw that conclusion ignores the broader currents at work in the political waters, currents that will make it very tough for President Obama to win a second term almost no matter what Romney does between now and this fall.
Once you step back from the day to day knife fight of the campaign — and make no mistake that Obama is getting in more and better swipes than Romney at this point — you’re reminded that the overarching dynamic of this race is the sputtering economy and a continued lack of confidence within the electorate that things are or will get better.
Why Mitt Romney should just release his tax returns
Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney continues to be steadfast in his refusal to release any more than his last two years of tax returns, a position that has already become a distraction to his presidential campaign and could cause considerably more trouble if he doesn’t figure out a better answer — and soon.
Demonstrators stand outside a fundraiser for Republican presidential candidate, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney on Monday, July 16, 2012 in Baton Rouge, La. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
“Perception is becoming Romney’s reality and these issues have now risen above mere distractions,” said John Weaver, a Republican consultant and former senior adviser to Sen. John McCain’s (R) 2000 and 2008 presidential campaigns. “The President has had the worst three months of any incumbent, due to the economy, since George H.W. Bush in 1992, and yet Romney has lost traction among key demographic groups in the vital swing states. He has got to get this behind him or he’s going to face summer definition ala [Bob] Dole and [John] Kerry. ”
Why Democrats are willing to walk off the fiscal cliff
Less than 24 hours after Democrats publicly pronounced their willingness to jump off the so-called fiscal cliff later this year if Republicans refuse to drop their opposition to ending tax cuts for certain income levels, they got a bit of good news: the public is on their side.
A cliff. Not a fiscal one. BEHROUZ MEHRI/AFP/GettyImagesForty-four percent of people in a new Pew Research Center poll said that a tax increase on incomes over $250,000, which is what President Obama and congressional Democrats are pushing, would help the economy, while 22 percent said it would hurt the economy.
Similarly, 41 percent of Pew respondents said that raising taxes on income over $250,000 would make the tax system “more fair,” while 21 percent said it would make it “less fair”.
Mitt Romney’s unsolvable Bain problem
Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney continues to struggle to get out from under questions regarding just when he departed from his job at Bain Capital. And there’s reason to believe that he won’t be able to solve his Bain problem anytime soon.
HOUSTON, TX - JULY 11: Republican presidential candidate and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney addresses the NAACP National Convention at the George R. Brown Convention Center July 11, 2012 in Houston, Texas. (Photo by Eric Kayne/Getty Images)Politics 101 says that when your campaign is bleeding — and Romney’s camp is bleeding right now — the best way to stop it is to get as many facts out as quickly as possible and then insist that it’s a dead issue and refuse to answer questions on it moving forward.
That won’t likely work for Romney because of the seeming contradictions about when he left the company — and the exotic nature of his financial life.
What President Obama has learned from Republicans
The last week of the presidential campaign has been the nastiest to date, with outrage stoked, allegations leveled and apologies demanded.
Nothing new there. Campaigns are — in the modern era — races to the bottom, a lowest common denominator battle to slime the other guy before he slimes you. (USA! USA!)
What has changed is that it’s Democrats pushing the political envelope and Republicans insisting that a line has been crossed.
The tax return fight and the cult of transparency
President Obama is amping up the pressure on Mitt Romney to release more of his past tax returns, an attempt to change the subject from the still-struggling economy and bring the issue of transparency to the fore in the 2012 campaign.
“What’s important if you are running for president is that the American people know who you are and what you’ve done and that you’re an open book,” Obama told a New Hampshire reporter on Tuesday. “And that’s been true of every presidential candidate dating all the way back to Mitt Romney’s father.”
Vice President Joe Biden, as he is wont to do, took the critique of Romney’s reluctance to release his tax returns a step further. “Mitt Romney wants you to show your papers, but he won’t show us his,” Biden told a Hispanic audience Tuesday in Las Vegas.
And then there was this web video released by the Obama campaign that asked “why is Mitt Romney hiding the rest of his tax returns?”
The remarkably unchanging 2012 race
The past 14 months have had their fair share of historic moments — the killing of Osama bin Laden, the ongoing debt crisis in Europe, the debt ceiling fight, the Republican presidential primary fight and the Supreme Court’s ruling on President Obama’s health care law to name just a handful.
And yet, in spite of the massive news coverage that each of those stories has drawn, none of them seem to have impacted the race between President Obama and former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney in any meaningful way.
No immigration bounce for President Obama
President Obama’s announcement of his support for relaxed enforcement of immigration laws on young illegal immigrants has not provided any lift for him on the issue according to the new Washington Post-ABC News poll.
His approval rating on dealing with immigration issues is no better (nor worse) than it was two years ago, and he runs evenly with former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney on who people trust to handle the issue. Fewer than one in five voters — 18 percent — say immigration is an extremely important issue in their vote.
For Romney backers, the election is all about President Obama
Nearly six in 10 of those siding with Mitt Romney in a new Washington Post-ABC News poll say their vote is primarily “against” President Obama not in favor of the former Massachusetts governor, a testament to how much of Romney’s support is built on opposition to the current occupant of the White House.
By contrast, about three-quarters of Obama’s supporters are voting affirmatively “for” the president.
One man’s tax cut is another man’s tax increase
One man’s tax cut is another man’s tax increase.
That political reality will be proven — yet again — in the aftermath of President Obama’s decision to call on Congress to extend the Bush era tax cuts for those making under $250,000 — and, therefore, for those not making more than $250,000.
Make no mistake: This proposal isn’t going anywhere legislatively before the election. (Republicans were quick to remind voters that Obama already pushed virtually this same proposal earlier this year.) It is a purely political gambit by the President designed to force Republicans to defend what the White House believes is an untenable position: preserving tax cuts for the wealthiest among us.
Ohio at the epicenter of 2012 ad battle
More than $39 million has been spent on television ads in Ohio by the two presidential candidates and their affiliated outside groups as of early July, according to data provided to the Fix by a Republican media buying firm, a massive outlay of campaign cash that re-affirms the centrality of the Buckeye State in the electoral calculus of both parties.
U.S. President Barack Obama greets residents of Beaver, Ohio July 6, 2012. Obama is on a two-day campaign bus tour of Ohio and Pennsylvania. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque President Obama’s campaign has spent an eye-popping $22 million on ads in Ohio already in the race while former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney has dropped $6.4 million. Ohio is the state where both Obama and Romney have spent the most money on TV ads so far in the campaign.
The most important chart of the 2012 election
The June jobs report — 80,000 jobs added in the month and an unemployment rate of 8.2 percent — is full of bad news for President Obama as he seeks to make the case to the American electorate that the economy is slowly but surely improving.
The politics of the economy are heavily dependent on perception and that perception is heavily driven by the unemployment rate. (Economists roll their eyes at using such a simplistic measure to gauge the relative health of the economy but — and we can’t believe we are writing this — it is what it is.)
Mitt Romney’s tax gamble on health care
On July 4, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney tried to explain the (close to) unexplainable: How a penalty in Massachusetts is a tax nationally.
At issue is the Supreme Court’s decision to uphold President Obama’s health care law by stating that those who don’t opt in to the insurance system can be taxed for not doing so.
The amazing number of people who know nothing about the health-care ruling
One of the most common mistakes made in political reporting is to assume that average voter is following the daily news cycle as closely as we are. He or she isn’t.
This Oct. 8, 2010, photo shows the justices of the U.S. Supreme Court at the Supreme Court. Seated from left are Associate Justices Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., Associate Justices Anthony M. Kennedy and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Standing from left are Associate Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Stephen Breyer, Samuel Alito Jr. and Elena Kagan. (Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP)The latest poll numbers from the Pew Research Center on the Supreme Court’s decision on President Obama’s health-care law are (yet another) affirmation of that fact.
Forty-five percent — yes 45 percent! — of respondents in the Pew poll either didn’t know what the court had done in regards the health care law (30 percent) or thought that the court had rejected most of the provisions of the law (15 percent).
Let’s just make sure we are all clear: Forty-five percent of people didn’t know about or were misinformed about the most highly publicized Supreme Court case since — at least — Bush v. Gore in 2000 that dealt with the landmark legislative accomplishment of Obama’s first term in office. That is staggering stuff.
The political fallout from health care reform — in three charts
The Supreme Court’s ruling in support of President Obama’s health care law isn’t even a week old yet but we are already seeing some fascinating numbers about how the ruling changed — or didn’t change — how people feel about the Affordable Care Act.
The Kaiser Family Foundation, which has been polling on attitudes regarding health care since time immemoriam, released new data today that tells a fascinating story about the political future of the law.
What is that future? It depends on which numbers from the poll you look at it. Below are three charts that provide three varying narratives on what the law meant, means and will mean in our political landscape.
Gaming out the politics of the Supreme Court’s health care ruling
In less than 24 hours, the Supreme Court will hand down its ruling on the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act, the defining achievement of President Obama’s first term in office.
A view of the Supreme Court in Washington, Wednesday, June 27, 2012. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)The stakes — from a political and a policy perspective — are absolutely massive although, as we have noted, public opinion on the law itself seems to be relatively cemented.
While the ruling isn’t likely to drastically change how people perceive the law, it could well have a major impact on how voters perceive the two parties — and their respective candidates for president — with 131 days left before the November election.
Below we examine the three most likely decisions from the Court — affirmation of the law, rejection of the law and some middle ground — and how the two parties would seek to shape them politically.
We’ll know what the Court decides by (around) 10 am tomorrow. Until then, the political world waits with bated breath. (Looking for something to do between now and then? Use this interactive to find out what the different rulings from the Court could mean to your health care.)
What a Scott Walker win would tell us about Wisconsin
The expectation — among Republicans and Democrats — heading into today’s Wisconsin recall election is that Gov. Scott Walker (R) is likely to narrowly hold on to his office, a victory that will immediately set off furious speculation about what the result means for the presidential election in the state this November.
What Obama meant by ‘social Darwinism’
In his speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors Tuesday, President Obama called the budget proposed by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) “thinly veiled social Darwinism.”
What does that mean?
Poll: President Obama leads in swing states
President Obama is pulling away from his Republican rivals in key swing states, a new Quinnipiac poll finds.
* In Florida, Obama leads former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney 49 percent to 42 percent and former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum 50 to 37 percent.
* In Ohio, Obama leads Romney 47 percent to 41 percent and Santorum 47 to 40 percent.
Republicans’ war on the TelePrompter — and its limits
From the start of the 2012 presidential race, the most consistent — and popular — criticism of President Obama by the GOP candidates has not been on the economy, health care or foreign policy. It’s been on the incumbent’s use of a TelePrompter.
Former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum took the TelePrompter criticism to a whole new level over the weekend by declaring that “when you run for president of the United States, it should be illegal to read off a TelePrompter,” adding: “Because all you’re doing is reading someone else’s words to people.”
President Obama hits campaign speed in UAW speech
In the swirl of news coverage focused on the Republican presidential primaries in Michigan and Arizona today, it’s easy to miss the speech that President Obama delivered to a group of United Auto Workers in D.C. today.
But, it was a speech not to be missed — the closest thing we have seen to Obama running at full campaign speed we have seen yet in the 2012 race.
January jobs report is good news for Obama
January’s jobs report is welcome news for the president.
The unemployment rate dropped 0.2 percentage points to 8.3 percent; 243,000 new nonfarm jobs were created in the past month.
More important than the numbers is the trend: It’s the seventh-straight month of job growth over 100,000, as well as a marked increase from December when the economy added 200,000 jobs. It’s also the fifth straight month in which the unemployment rate dropped, and the lowest rate in nearly three years.
Below the top-line numbers were other encouraging signs: Hiring was widespread across many high-paying industries, pay increased, and 2011 numbers were revised upward.
If that trend continues, Obama’s reelection prospects will continue to strengthen.
The Solyndra election
The Republican-supporting nonprofit Crossroads GPS is out with a new ad attacking President Obama over the collapse of Solyndra.
The $500,000 week-long buy on national cable is the conservative group’s second attack focused on the badly bungled stimulus investment in the solar energy company.
“$500 million to Solyndra now bankrupt,” the narrator says. “Laid-off workers? Forgotten. Typical Washington.” The ad quotes a Washington Post story calling the White House handling of the green-technology program “infused with politics at every level.”
President Obama, Mitt Romney and the empathy gap
Presidential elections are more about hearts than heads. That is, most voters — particularly those loosely affiliated with the two parties — tend to vote based more on how they feel about a particular candidate than about the specific policy positions that the candidate espouses.
Voters want a candidate who they believe understands their problems, even if he or she doesn’t share them in their own lives.
That’s why new poll numbers from the Washington Post and Pew Research Center are so noteworthy.
Here’s a chart of how President Obama, Mitt Romney and former House speaker Newt Gingrich fare on what we like to call the “empathy question”:
Obama’s memos in the New Yorker: The highlights
In this week’s New Yorker, Ryan Lizza delves into the decisions made by President Obama over the last three years, using previously-unreleased White House memos.
The piece shows Obama’s increasing willingness to listen to political advisers’ opinions on policy as his own popularity declined, and his attempts to compromise with Congress, business interests and members of his own administration in passing major legislation.
Here are some of the highlights:
Will President Obama be the first billion dollar man? Probably not.
In a web video released in the wee hours of Thursday morning, Jim Messina, who is managing President Obama’s re-election race, had a message for those speculating about how much the incumbent might raise in pursuit of a second term.
“The billion dollar number is completely untrue,” Messina said, addressing speculation that the Obama fundraising operation will break ten (!) figures in 2012. (Messina has previously referred to the idea of raising a billion dollars as “bullsh**”.)
The middle class question: Can Democrats keep their edge in 2012?
We’ve written quite a bit about the rhetorical attention President Obama — and Democrats more generally — are paying to middle class voters of late.
The belief within the party — and this appears to be a rare moment of strategic agreement between the House, Senate and White House — is that focusing on inequality, particularly as it relates to the middle class, is the path to winning the economic argument in 2012. And now they have some polling data to back up that belief.
Why the middle class matters so much in 2012
In President Obama’s speech earlier this week in Kansas, he mentioned the words “middle class” an astounding 18 times. (Yes, we counted.) That was, um, not accidental.
A look back at the last four elections — two presidential, two midterm — reveals that middle class voters are a critical swing voting bloc that serve as a key indicator of which party will make gains at the ballot box.
Press release hoax claims SEIU has withdrawn Obama endorsement
In the first big prank of the election cycle, a fake press release circulated late Tuesday night led some reporters to believe that the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) had voted to withdraw its endorsement of President Obama in 2012.
SEIU International President Mary Kay Henry was quoted in the press release as saying, “Our members gave $60.7 million dollars to the Obama campaign in 2008 and fought hard for his election because we were promised change. We’re still waiting.”
President Obama channels Elizabeth Warren in Kansas speech
In a nearly hour-long speech that had a distinctly political feel to it, President Obama borrowed rhetorically from Massachusetts Senate candidate — and liberal heroine — Elizabeth Warren to make his case on the economy in Kansas today.
Warren, who helped Obama create the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, drew national headlines earlier this fall when she insisted that “there is nobody in this country who got rich on his own” as a way to rebut charges that Democrats were engaging in class warfare (The video of Warren’s remarks has been viewed more than 807,000 on You Tube.)
Afternoon Fix: Obama camp goes after Romney
President Obama’s campaign is after Romney, Pennsylvania is not splitting its electoral votes, Mike Huckabee is having his own presidential forum and we’re liveblogging tonight, so don’t leave town (yet).
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The Obama base problem myth
There’s no more persistent storyline in Democratic politics these days than the one that goes something like this: Liberals, the foundation of President Obama’s 2008 victory, have grown increasingly disenchanted with him over the intervening years and might not be there for him in 2012.
In a New York magazine profile of Arianna Huffington — founder of the Huffington Post and a leading voice of the liberal left —that was posted earlier today, Huffington said that she might not even vote for Obama in 2012; “Trust me, I realize how hard it is to change the system, but Obama has demonstrated only the fierce urgency of sometime later, and at the same time the middle class is under assault,” she said.
Elizabeth Warren: Obama’s natural heir?
Ever since she formally decided to challenge Massachusetts Sen. Scott Brown (R), Elizabeth Warren has been a national Democratic phenomenon.
She raised more than $3 million in just the first few weeks of cash collection, rang up more than 796,000 hits on You Tube for her pronouncement that “there is nobody in this country who got rich on his own”, and is regularly drawing large number of volunteers to her campaign headquarters almost a year before the 2012 election.
Barack Obama, the blurry president
When Barack Obama swept to the presidency in 2008, he was whatever you wanted him to be.
Democrats saw him as the next great liberal hero. Independents regarded him as the man who could bring comity back to Washington. And many Republicans saw him a historical figure of major proportions.
Obama’s twin slogans of “hope” and “change” allowed partisans of varying stripes to convince themselves that he was the person they — and the country — had long been waiting for.
Rick Perry’s comeback strategy: Attack Obama
Looking to claw back to relevance in the Republican presidential race, Texas Gov. Rick Perry appears to have settled on a simple strategy: attack President Obama.
His latest ad, which began airing today in Iowa and on national cable stations, takes Obama to task for a recent comment that America has grown “a little bit lazy” in selling the country overseas over the past few decades.
President Obama and the old college try
It’s a near-certainty that the economy — measured in political terms by the unemployment rate — won’t have recovered in any meaningful way by November 2012.
That reality means that for President Obama to win a second term next year, he must convince voters that he is doing everything he can to turn things around — whether or not his actions are working.
Afternoon Fix: Webb not sure he’ll campaign for Obama in 2012
Jim Webb says he’ll see what it looks like next year, Herman Cain is the Koch brothers’ other brother (from another mother), Paul Ryan is impressed with Mitt Romney and Rick Perry has disclosed new debts.
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No good news for Obama in 2011 Virginia races
Virginia’s 2011 state Senate races have become a national battleground, with money pouring in from both sides for a fight that Republicans are hoping to turn into a referendum on President Obama.
Democrats currently control the state Senate by a tenuous 22 to 18 majority. If Republicans win three seats in the chamber on Nov. 8, they will control the governor’s mansion and both chambers of the key legislature in this all-important swing state. If they win two seats, Republican Lt. Gov. Bill Bolling will have the tie-breaking vote in the state’s upper chamber.
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Moammar Gaddafi, President Obama and the 2012 election
The death of deposed Libyan dictator Moammar Gaddafi will be touted by Democrats as another foreign policy success story for President Obama but seems unlikely to seriously affect his political fortunes heading into a 2012 campaign still laser-focused on the struggling U.S. economy.
Reports of Gaddafi’s passing come just days after Secretary of State Hillary Clinton visited Libya and expressed hope that he would be either captured or killed. It’s been nearly eight months since President Obama authorized military intervention in Libya, an involvement that led to Gaddafi’s removal from power.
Afternoon Fix: Obama says gray hair just genetic
Pressure isn’t making Obama go gray, Chuck Grassley isn’t endorsing, John Sununu is endorsing — and soon.
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New poll: Democrats losing enthusiasm in presidential campaign
As the 2012 election draws closer, Democrats are getting less — not more — enthusiastic about the prospect of voting for president.
In a new CNN/Opinion Research Corporation poll just more than four in 10 (42 percent) Democrats said they were either “extremely” or “very” enthusiastic about the 2012 vote.
What John Edwards can teach Barack Obama
John Edwards is persona non grata in the Democratic Party these days. And for good reason.
The former North Carolina senator, two-time presidential candidate and 2004 vice presidential nominee wrote his own political obituary with his marital infidelities and an ongoing investigation into campaign finance irregularities during his 2008 campaign.
The fallacy of generic presidential ballots
The headline writes itself: “Obama losing to a ‘generic’ Republican candidate in 2012 matchup!”.
But while new numbers out of Gallup do show the “Republican party’s candidate for president” taking 46 percent to President Obama’s 38 percent in a general election face-off, drawing any sort of conclusions about the incumbent’s relative vulnerability off of that data point is a major mistake.
Obama’s money: How big an advantage is it?
In his first six months of active fundraising, President Obama has raked in $90 million for his 2012 re-election campaign not to mention an additional $65 million for the Democratic National Committee.
While not all of the Republican presidential candidates have filed their fundraising reports for the third quarter, it’s a certainty that Obama’s $43 million haul will be more than the combined total for all of them over the past three months. (Texas Gov. Rick Perry is expected to lead the Republican field with $17 million raised between July 1 and Sept. 30.)
Is Occupy Wall Street overblown?
Just how closely is the American public watching the ongoing “Occupy Wall Street” protests going on in New York City and around the country? Not very, according to new data from the Pew Research Center.
Just 17 percent said they were following the protests “very closely”. Independents — at 19 percent — were keeping the closest eye on the “Occupy” efforts while just 12 percent of Republicans did the same.
Obama the loner
The Post’s Scott Wilson penned a provocative piece over the weekend that cast President Obama’s current political problems through the lens of his loner tendencies.
Wrote Wilson:
This president endures with little joy the small talk and back-slapping of retail politics, rarely spends more than a few minutes on a rope line, refuses to coddle even his biggest donors. His relationship with Democrats on Capitol Hill is frosty, to be generous. Personal lobbying on behalf of legislation? He prefers to leave that to Vice President Biden, an old-school political charmer.
September jobs report is a political push
The September jobs report — 103,000 jobs created, unemployment rate steady at 9.1 percent — is neither good enough to provide President Obama a real boost as he makes the case for passage of his jobs bill nor bad enough to significantly embolden his Republican critics on the campaign trail and in Congress.
Does President Obama still have political juice?
The central question of President Obama’s Thursday press conference was asked in its early moments by NBC’s Chuck Todd.
“Are you worried about your own powers of persuasion and maybe that the American public is not listening to you any more?” Todd asked.
What Todd — a Fix friend, in the interest of full disclosure — was really getting at is this: Does Obama still have the political juice to convince his party in the Senate to pass some version of his $447 billion job-creating proposal?
President Obama’s press conference: The Live blog!
President Obama will hold a press conference at 11 a.m. this morning as he seeks to build momentum behind his jobs bill.
And, the Fix will be there — live-blogging, naturally!
Haven’t participated in our live blogs before? Think of it like “Mystery Science Theater 3000” but for politics. And without the robots.
The live-blogging will get started right around 10:45 a.m.. Come hang out with us!
President Obama to hold Thursday press conference
President Obama will hold a press conference today at 11 a.m. as he continues to pressure Congress to pass his jobs plan.
(President Obama will hold a press conference today to sell his jobs plan.)
It’s Obama’s first press conference since July 15 — in the heart of the debt-ceiling negotiations. Of late, he has been on an aggressive nationwide push for passage of the American Jobs Act, which neither the House and Senate has acted on yet.
We’ll be live-blogging the proceedings here on the Fix. Stay tuned.
Professional left hopes ‘Occupy Wall Street’ not the end
The ‘Occupy Wall Street’ protest movement is already being described as a liberal tea party movement. Unions have quickly endorsed and pledged to join the protesters, but they also want this momentum to spill over into their own activism. Whether it will is unclear.
For months, former Obama administration official Van Jones has been trying to rally liberals under a common banner, one that could counter the tea party. The American Dream Movement was created, and a contract or legislative platform was born, with input from hundreds of thousands.Yet since its launch, the liberal contract has gotten little attention outside the groups involved in writing it.
Opposition to Obama grows — strongly
Four in 10 Americans “strongly” disapprove of how President Obama is handling the job of president in the new Washington Post-ABC News poll, the highest that number has risen during his time in office and a sign of the hardening opposition to him as he seeks a second term.
Democrats on 2012: Blah.
One in an occasional series of posts looking at the most important number in politics; check out past “MINP’s” here.
Elections are all about intensity. People who are excited about their candidate — or excited to send a message to the other guy or gal — are much more likely to vote.
And that’s why new numbers from Gallup out this morning are such a major problem for President Obama and Democrats on the ballot in 2012.
Bipartisanship is dead. At least until 2013.
As politicians in both parties pat themselves on the backs for averting yet another government shutdown after a deal was reached Monday evening on disaster funding, it’s instructive look at what that fight tells us about Congress, comity and the 2012 election.
A warning sign at a traffic signal post illuminates as framed next to the US Capitol Building dome at dusk in Washington, DC, on July 29, 2011. (JEWEL SAMAD/AFP/Getty Images)
That Congress was willing to even raise the specter of a government shutdown — if a deal wasn’t reached on the disaster money the funding mechanism for the federal government would have run out on Friday — so soon after a fight over the debt-ceiling that proved politically disastrous for both parties tells us two important things.
Obama to Democrats: Get pumped up. Now.
President Obama spent the weekend on the West Coast delivering a forceful call-to-arms to his somewhat beleaguered base, a recognition that he must find ways to energize his core supporters with the 2012 election rapidly approaching.
“I have to make sure that our side is as passionate and as motivated and is working just as hard as the folks on the other side because this is a contest of value,” Obama said at a fundraiser in San Jose.
Obama ignores D.C. echo chamber. Should he?
From the time that then-Illinois Sen. Barack Obama made the decision to run for president in early 2007 until today, the Democrat and his team have held firm to one core belief about the political-media world: the D.C. chattering class doesn’t have any idea what regular people think.
It was pundits who predicted that Obama could never beat then-New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton in the Democratic primary, talking heads who declared the race over when Obama was stuck in place in December 2007 and professional talkers who speculated that his relatively thin political resume would be a handicap against Sen. John McCain in the 2008 general election.
Why Rick Perry’s debate performances haven’t hurt him (yet)
Texas Gov. Rick Perry has been an uneven — to put it nicely — presence in the first two debates of his 2012 Republican presidential bid.
Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, left, and Texas Gov. Rick Perry during a Republican debate Tuesday, Sept. 13, 2011, in Tampa, Fla. (AP Photo/Mike Carlson)For every strong moment, Perry has had two (at least) where he seems either taken aback by the level of vitriol directed his way by his rivals or simply uncertain of exactly how he should address some of his more problematic past positions.
From Social Security to the HPV vaccine to immigration, Perry has struggled to find answers that put those issues behind him.
And it doesn’t matter. Or at least it doesn’t matter yet.
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