President Obama's political advisers expect to face Republican front-runner Mitt Romney in the 2012 election, and they're preparing a "ferocious personal assault" on his character and business background, say Ben Smith and Jonathan Martin at Politico. Resigned to campaigning in the midst of a sour economy, Team Obama is apparently planning to "destroy" Romney by highlighting his time as CEO of the financial firm Bain Capital, which outsourced jobs abroad, and by painting the former Massachusetts governor as unprincipled, inauthentic, and just plain "weird." (The Romney campaign responded with a web video blasting the president's strategy.) Is this a smart approach for the former purveyor of hope and change?
This negative strategy makes complete sense: It would seem that Politico is overdramatizing the Obama campaign's intentions, says Steve Benen at Washington Monthly, but the basic plan it's outlining sounds about right. "When voters are frustrated and discouraged," of course the incumbent will try to cast his opponent in a negative light. And a "weird, unlikable, and unprincipled flip-flopper with no core values" like Romney makes that job easy.
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