LITTLE ROCK — The president is a polarizing figure whose re-election is imperiled by his handling of the nation’s No. 1 issue. However, he’s blessed with an opponent who is easy to attack-a rich Massachusetts patrician with seemingly flexible convictions and a personality that impedes any visceral connection with voters.
But enough about George W. Bush and John Kerry.
You see where I’m going with this. The 2012 contest has taken on the broad contours of 2004, when Bush eked out a narrow win by framing the race not as a referendum on his stewardship of the war in Iraq, but as a choice between the devil people knew and the devil they didn’t.
Bush succeeded-ultimately, by a margin of about 118,000 votes in Ohio in the wee hours of the Wednesday morning after the election-by painting Kerry, early and often, as a flip-flopping, out-of-touch elitist. He went after Kerry’s supposed strength, his tenure in Vietnam, and reframed it as a weakness. He defined Kerry because Kerry was too slow to defend himself.
The Obama strategists should be sending royalties to Karl Rove, because they’re clearly working his playbook. They don’t want this race to be a referendum on President Barack Obama’s stewardship of the economy; they can ill afford that, given the numbers. They want it to be a choice between two candidates, and they want to frame that choice to their advantage.
No two elections are identical, of course. And I don’t mean to imply that it’s a foregone conclusion that Obama will replicate Bush’s squeaker in November. But for now, the parallels are almost eerie.
Romney won the GOP nomination for the same reasons Kerry got the Democratic nodeight years ago. Though he didn’t excite the party base-his record as Massachusetts governor was too moderate, just as the Democratic base viewed Kerry’s Senate record as too moderate-Romney was, like Kerry, deemed the most “electable” candidate.
Kerry never imagined his war-hero record would be assailed. When he was readying his bid in 2002, I asked him whether he was prepared for the inevitable GOP attacks. I still have my notes from that conversation, and he replied: “I’m not concerned about it.” And when the attacks came, in the summer of ’04, he was so unconcerned that he dithered for weeks before responding. By then, it was too late: The poll numbers were moving Bush’s way.
The same dynamic may be happening with Romney. For weeks, the Obama campaign has been hammering at his supposed strength-his economic prowess as a longtime businessman-and crafted a counter-narrative that paints him as a rapacious vulture capitalist who shipped jobs abroad, hides his tax returns, and stashes his wealth offshore. Obama’s aim is obvious: To thwart his opponent’s economic message, he has to discredit the messenger.
And for weeks, Romney has been slow to respond. Polls in swing states show that the relentless Obama attack ads are beginning to move voters. Romney supporters are complaining about their candidate, much the way Democrats complained about Kerry eight summers ago.
How could Romney fail to anticipate that he would be seriously attacked in this fashion? He even had a foretaste during the GOP primaries, when Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry assailed him on Bain Capital, the private-equity firm he ran.
But there is one caveat (sorry, Democrats): The economy might be a bigger drag on Obama than Iraq was on Bush.
Editorial, Pages 16 on 07/26/2012