Obama makes it official: He's running for reelection

Have you heard? President Obama is officially kicking off his reelection campaign today, traveling to rallies in battleground states Ohio and Virginia.

We know what you’re thinking: Hasn’t he been running for reelection for months? Years?

Well, yes, that’s the way it is for all first-term presidents. But just as Mitt Romney pivoted from the primaries and caucuses once he’d virtually been declared the Republican nominee (don’t tell Ron Paul), so Obama will try to reignite 2008’s “fired up, ready to go” spirit at campus rallies Saturday at Ohio State and Virginia Commonwealth.

Getting bin Laden and five other boosts to Obama's reelection bid

Gone is the campaign slogan “Hope and change,” replaced by “Forward.” Or as Politico.com put it in a headline: “Obama 2012: Less aspiration, more function.”

“What their choice of ‘Forward’ is recognizing is that this isn’t going to be an election of passion,” Drew Westen, the author of “The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation,” told Politico “The passion that can be built into ‘Change We Can Believe In’ – that this time is going to be different – people don’t believe that anymore. They were smart not to try to go with something like that. ‘Forward’ is more workmanlike.”

It’s also pretty easy to mock, as the conservative political action committee American Crossroads did in a new video Thursday titled “Backward.”

"The only thing moving forward under Barack Obama – our national debt, up $5 trillion," the narrator intones in the ad.

Of course, the Obama campaign is launching campaign videos left and right too – suggesting that Romney might not have gone after bin Laden; taking a dig at Romney’s Swiss bank account; tracking the life of a fictitious “Julia” to prod the GOP’s alleged “war on women;” stringing together a bunch of Newt Gingrich’s attacks on Romney.

So how is Obama doing six months before the election?

His overall message can pretty much be bumper stickered with something Joe Biden said recently: “Bin Laden is dead and General Motors is alive.”

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