To hear former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney tell it, the problem with President Obama is that he’s incompetent.
Not a bad person. Just bad at his job. A new hire that didn’t work out.
Think you know the GOP candidates for presidency? Test your knowledge in this matching game.
A look at how the 2012 Republican candidates for president differ on key issues.
“I think he’s a nice guy. I’m sure he loves the country and wants it to do well,” Romney told a crowd in New Hampshire earlier this month. “I just don’t think he understands the principles that make us who we are.’’
To hear former House speaker Newt Gingrich (Ga.) tell it, however, Obama is actually quite competent. But that’s the problem: Gingrich says Obama is a leftist “radical,” using his considerable political skills to undermine treasured American values.
He’s so good, Gingrich warns, that only another skilled politician can beat him.
By which he means: me.
“Who do you think could go on that platform against Barack Obama and effectively articulate your values, defend your beliefs and communicate his failures without flinching?” Gingrich asked a crowd in Iowa. In case the answer wasn’t clear, he added: “Almost everybody seems to think that I’m a more effective debater than Mitt Romney .”
In their disparate portraits of Obama, the GOP’s two leading candidates have revealed something important about themselves.
Romney is trying to reach a general-election audience, including many people who voted for Obama in 2008 and still like him personally. So he casts the president as an honest mistake, a low performer who simply needs to be replaced.
Gingrich, by contrast, is aiming at a Republican primary electorate that never liked Obama much to begin with. So he portrays the president as the representative of a whole poisoned way of thinking: an adversary who needs to be not just defeated, but repudiated.
Saturday’s results in South Carolina — and Romney’s own recent shifts toward more belligerent language — seem to indicate that Gingrich’s approach might be working better now.
“When Romney attacks Obama, he says, you know, ‘He said he was going to create jobs. And he didn’t. He’s lost jobs. He said he was going to do this, and he didn’t.’ It’s very operational,” said Lynn Vavreck, a professor at UCLA who studies presidential campaigns.
“Gingrich is basically saying that, ‘This is a war for the future of America, between my vision and Obama’s vision,’” Vavreck said. “And that, I think, is a much better message than the Romney message.”
The difference starts, most likely, in the minds of the two candidates. Romney, a longtime chief executive officer, seems to imagine that voters will see this election as a choice of two job applicants.
He opened his campaign, then, with an attack on the other guy’s resume.
“Barack Obama has failed America,” Romney said when he announced his candidacy in June. Then Romney listed all the data that proved it: unemployment still up, home prices still falling, foreclosures still too high.
“Mr. President, you’ve had your chance,” Romney said.
Romney has also attacked Obama for being weak in foreign-policy tussles with Iran and Russia. He also has accused the president for looking to the social-welfare states of European countries for inspiration — trying to turn the United States “into a European-style entitlement society.”
Loading...
Comments