Blogs
The Caucus
The latest on President Obama, the new Congress and other news from Washington and around the nation. Join the discussion.
Mr. Obama’s approval ratings are below 50 percent in electoral battlegrounds like Iowa, Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania, according to recent polls there. His party’s political infrastructure has been weakened in crucial states where Republicans won statehouses last year, though the White House sees potential benefit in a reaction to the unpopular policies of new Republican governors in states like Florida, Ohio and Wisconsin.
Despite an intensive effort by the White House since last November to recapture the political center, Mr. Obama continues to struggle to win back the support of moderate and independent voters, polls show. Having won with their help in 2008 in states where Democrats for years had not seriously competed — Indiana, North Carolina, Virginia and some mountain states — Mr. Obama will now have to struggle not just to duplicate that feat but also to prevail in traditional swing states like Pennsylvania.
A recent Quinnipiac poll there had Mr. Obama two percentage points behind a Republican rival, Mitt Romney, a former Massachusetts governor — essentially a tie, since the difference is within the margin of sampling error.
“You’d have to be anesthetized to be complacent, really, and not only because of economic circumstances,” said Geoff Garin, a Democratic pollster who lately has held focus groups of swing voters for an independent group working for Mr. Obama’s re-election. “There are clearly concerning signs in the polling data.”
“But,” Mr. Garin added, “there’s both a campaign yet to be run for Obama and a real debate to be had about what the way forward ought to look like.”
The next two weeks will signal an informal start to the Obama campaign’s effort to address all those challenges, as he travels to Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota and Virginia. There he will begin doing what incumbent presidents of both parties do when facing a tough re-election race: trying to make the contest less a referendum on their record than a choice between two competing options. He will also work to frame the Republican option as unpalatable to most voters, even at a time of persistently high joblessness.
Mr. Obama’s advisers point to polls showing that voters prefer the president’s approach to the economy over that of Republicans, and that even now he gets far less blame than his Republican predecessor for the problems that persist today.
“Right now, Mitt Romney, Rick Perry and all of these Republicans are just a blank slate,” said David Plouffe, Mr. Obama’s senior strategist and his 2008 campaign manager. “I can assure you this will be made a choice for the American people. And, I tell you, right now the American people in overwhelming numbers don’t want to go back to the same policies that got us into this mess.”
Mr. Obama’s advisers say the plan now is to get the president out of Washington more often and into communities where he can try to show people, on a more intimate level, how the changes he has made have helped their local economies. Advisers describe a campaign shaping up more as individual state campaigns than a national campaign, attentive to the issues and demographics in each place.
Over all, the message will be of Mr. Obama as “someone who kept the economy from falling into a depression, who is fighting for the middle class every day and understands where the economy needs to be not just next month and next year, but for the long term so that we can compete with China and India for the future,” said Dan Pfeiffer, the White House communications director.
0 komentar:
Posting Komentar