Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney smiles as his wife Ann Romney speaks during a campaign event at the Exhibit Edge building in Chantilly, Va. (Benjamin Myers/REUTERS)
Why does Ann Romney keep calling Mitt a 'wild and crazy' guy? (+video)
Reporters at the blog Stylite.com tracked down the shirt Ann Romney wore on CBS's morning show Monday – and found out it cost $990. We mention this only because we, too, were struck by Mrs. Romney's shirt. It had a very large bird across the front, and was unusually eye-catching and hip for a political spouse. It also made Mitt Romney, who was sitting beside his wife in his customary suit and tie, look somehow even more buttoned-down than usual.
In fact, the shirt almost overshadowed what Mrs. Romney actually said in the interview. Asked about popular misconceptions about her husband, she said she felt he had been wrongly characterized as "stiff" – when in fact, he was a "wild and crazy" guy.
"I still look at him as the boy that I met in high school when he was playing all the jokes and really just being crazy, pretty crazy," she told Charlie Rose. "And so there's a wild and crazy man inside of there."
Maybe she meant it in a Steve-Martin-and-Dan-Aykroyd kind of way.
This was actually just the latest in a series of "wild man" comments Mrs. Romney has made about her husband, in an evident effort to loosen up his image.
Earlier this month, in a radio interview, she responded to another question about Romney's perceived stiffness by saying: "I guess we better unzip him and let the real Mitt Romney out, because he is not!" She also called him "the life of the party."
Likewise, in a recent interview with "Entertainment Tonight," she called him "a very funny guy," and offered as proof: "He doesn't comb his hair when we are not going places."
Even as far back as December, Mrs. Romney was referring to her husband as "my most disobedient child," saying: “The five boys – can you imagine? – at the dinner table, they never behaved. And Mitt was the worst of all.”
Now, it's common practice for political spouses to offer voters behind-the-scenes glimpses of the candidate's lighter side, to make them seem more human. And sometimes these "relatable" anecdotes don't exactly go over the way they're intended – as when Michelle Obama told an interviewer back in 2007 that daughters Sasha and Malia didn't like cuddling with their dad in the mornings because he was "too snore-y and stinky," possibly forever linking President Obama and morning breath in the minds of many voters.
But even more important than not being unnecessarily icky, the picture the spouse conveys needs to seem honest. Efforts to present a candidate's more down-to-earth side still have to comport with voters' general sense of who he or she really is. Otherwise, they ring hollow or smack of desperation.
Back in 2000, Al Gore's wife Tipper – who, like Mrs. Romney, was seen as far more easygoing and personable than her spouse – was repeatedly called on to try to lighten Mr. Gore's image, with decidedly mixed results. (Much of it seemed as forced as the couple's infamous seven-second kiss at the Democratic convention.)
Perhaps it's just us, but when Ann Romney talks about her husband like he's the world's biggest cutup, it doesn't exactly sound convincing – or even all that helpful. We'd argue Mrs. Romney is a far more effective advocate when she speaks about her husband's strengths as a husband and father, or as a fix-it guy.
Given that the Obama campaign is reportedly trying to portray Romney as a Don Draper-esque throwback, maybe Romney should instead try to turn that into a strength. Perhaps some faucet-fixing anecdotes from Ann are in order?
Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney laughs while addressing supporters at a campaign stop in Chantilly, Va., Wednesday. There were no reports of rubber chickens at the event. (Jae C. Hong/AP)
Jimmy Kimmel still at it: What's with Romney and the rubber chicken? (+video)
Jimmy Kimmel hosted the White House Correspondent’s Dinner four days ago, but he’s still continuing to roast politicians. Though by “roast” we mean he’s singeing President Obama while turning up the heat higher on his Mitt Romney jokes.
Take his monologue from “Jimmy Kimmel Live” last night. (OK, the show appears at midnight on the East Coast, meaning it’s technically this morning. We get it.) Mr. Obama got off relatively easy. Perhaps that was because he was in Afghanistan to sign a new strategic relationship pact with Afghan President Hamid Karzai. It’s difficult to mock a president carrying out crucial foreign policy duties.
But Kimmel gave it a go. “President Obama made a surprise trip to Afghanistan today to commemorate the anniversary [of Osama bin Laden’s assassination],” he said. “He had an inspiring dinner with the troops, followed by dinner at ‘TGI’m-leaving,’ and got right the heck out of there.”
Come on, Jimmy, you can do better. How about this: “President Obama just flew back from Afghanistan tonight. Boy is his left arm tired.”
Or this: “President Obama just signed an agreement with Afghanistan to get US forces out. We’re leaving one person behind to help defend the country. Ted Nugent.”
Feel free to groan, we’re not proud. Anyway, Kimmel’s bit on Romney was tougher. Funny, but tougher. The late-night comedian put up a clip of Romney and his wife Ann appearing on CBS earlier in the day. In that CBS interview Mrs. Romney insists that the former Massachusetts governor is not a stiff. Then she leans over and puts her arms around her husband and gives him a hug.
At that point Kimmel stopped the clip. “Look at how stiff he is while she’s holding him!” he says. “It’s like she’s trying to shake him out of it.... By the way, what was that [fabric print] on the shirt she was wearing? It looks like a cross between a parakeet and a serpent.”
Then Kimmel restarted the clip, which his staff had doctored. What followed did not happen in the actual CBS interview, trust us.
“It’s nice for me as a wife to say this is the person that’s really there,” Ann Romney told CBS interviewer Charlie Rose. “I still look at him as the boy that I met in high school when he was playing all the jokes.”
At this point in the clip, Mitt Romney’s arm comes shooting up, holding a rubber chicken.
“And really just being crazy,” concludes Mrs. Romney.
Then, her husband whacks her with the chicken, knocking her backside-over-teakettle out of the chair.
Kimmel’s audience loved the altered clip, roaring with laughter.
It’s true that Kimmel’s treatment of the president vis-à-vis the presumptive GOP nominee is just a bit of entertainment ephemera, with little or no bearing on the campaign at large. But we feel this does illustrate at least one interesting point: In presidential politics, a challenger is just a challenger, someone whom it’s funny to make the butt of rubber-chicken jokes.
The incumbent is the President of the United States, capital “P,” capital “U,” capital “S.” That can be harder for comedians, not to mention their political opponents, to get a handle on.
As the New York Times political blog, The Caucus, notes today: When it comes to campaigns, a sitting president has “incalculable advantages." One minute they’re issuing harsh ads questioning whether their opponent would have killed Osama bin Laden. Then the next, just as opponents are crying “foul” over the ad, the nation’s chief executive is suddenly in Afghanistan, doing the nation’s business on a big stage.
“The weaving of campaign and official business is the hallmark of presidential reelection campaigns, perfected by previous administrations of both parties. And Mr. Obama’s team will be no different in making use of the trappings of his office,” wrote correspondent Michael Shear.
Of course, it's also possible that Hollywood is just full of Democrats who find it easier to relate to Obama's style (and politics) than to Romney's. We'll let you discuss that amongst yourselves.
In this January 26 file photo, Republican presidential candidates, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney participate in the Republican presidential candidates debate in Jacksonville, Florida. Gingrich officially drops out of the presidential race Wednesday, and the Obama campaign is celebrating with a video that trashes Romney – in the words of Mr. Gingrich. (Matt Rourke/AP/File)
Mitt Romney is a Swiss-bank-account-owning liar. So says Newt Gingrich. (+video)
Newt Gingrich officially drops out of the presidential race Wednesday, and the Obama campaign is celebrating with a video that trashes Mitt Romney – in the words of Mr. Gingrich.
Talk about low-hanging fruit. All the Obama camp needed to do was collect the most pungent of Gingrich’s attacks on Mr. Romney during primary debates and interviews, add a heavy dose of sarcasm, and stir.
Gingrich is throwing his support behind Romney?, the video asks.
“As a man who wants to run for president of the United States who can’t be honest with the American people, why should we expect him to level about anything if he’s president?” the former House speaker asks matter-of-factly in one clip.
Next question: Is it Romney’s business record that Newt supports?
“You’d certainly have to say that Bain at times engaged in behavior where they looted a company leaving behind 1,700 unemployed people,” Gingrich says, referring to the private-equity firm that Romney formerly headed.
Then: “There was a pattern, in some companies, a handful of them, of leaving them with enormous debt, and then within a year or two or three, having them go broke. I think that is something he ought to answer.”
Follow that with slams on Romney’s Swiss bank account, a “Romney machine” that’s “not capable of inspiring positive turnout,” positions that are “anti-immigrant,” and another attack on Romney’s honesty, and you’ve got a tidy message against the presumptive GOP presidential nominee.
Romney finished the competitive part of the primary season with the lowest likability of any major-party nominee in modern history – thanks in part to attacks from Gingrich and the other GOP candidates. Now Gingrich is reportedly set to endorse Romney in the next couple of weeks. The Obama campaign is making sure we don’t forget what Gingrich thought just a few months ago.
A screenshot of the Social Victory Center login. (Facebook screenshot)
New GOP Facebook app targets Obama's social-media dominance
The GOP thinks it has a killer app.
The Republican National Committee unveiled its Social Victory Center on Tuesday, a Facebook application that lets users engage in campaign mainstays like phoning undecided voters, joining volunteer efforts, and distributing voter-registration materials from their couches or favorite cafés.
The app is an attempt to reverse the digital edge Democrats built by harnessing social media more adeptly during Barack Obama's 2008 campaign. Republicans hope that it will help them with two key demographic groups, in particular: young voters and women. Fifty-four percent of Facebook's 161 million active US users are women, and 58 percent are under age 34, according to the RNC.
To be sure, the Social Victory Center will get Republicans into the social-media battle, and its use of Facebook is promising, analysts say. But they question whether it will be the game-changer that Republicans hope it will be.
"At some level, what they’ve done is they’ve taken the same kind of tools that were in the MyBarackObama.com toolkit four years ago and posted them to Facebook," says Colin Delany, the founder of epolitics.com. "But at the same time, they will be able to leverage a certain amount of social data – what's being shared, what's being viewed – and there is a possibility that they'll get a higher adoption rate because it's within Facebook."
For their part, Republicans are casting their attempt to play catchup as an advantage.
"Technology changes fast enough that you need to hit the reset button fairly often and frequently, and that's effectively what we've done," said Tim Schigel, chairman of tech firm ShareThis and a consultant to the RNC on technology. "There's a lot of learning from the past but ... to rely too much on technology that was used in the past was a mistake, and that might actually be something that slows down the Obama team because they've built so much.... We don't have that baggage."
It could also mean, however, that the RNC has a long way to go in building up the app. While it has numerous, far-reaching functions, the actual information on the application is sparse, says Karen Jagoda, co-founder of the E-Voter Institute, a nonpartisan trade association for Web companies interested in politics.
For example, Ms. Jagoda notes that the only volunteer opportunity near her California home is 120 miles away.
"I don't think it's quite ready for prime time," she said after looking through the app on Tuesday afternoon.
Though, she added, "I think its got the bare bones of what they're trying to accomplish."
Its features include:
- Piping news and video from the RNC or state Republican committees directly to users.
- Acting as a portal to help users find local campaign events and create their own events.
- Directing volunteers to nearby efforts and providing an online forum for discussion.
- Storing a bevy of documents and information – from absentee-ballot applications to notifications about early voting to handouts for a local PTA meeting.
When users click through each of these things, the app publishes that activity into their friends' Facebook feeds, thus ensuring that their friends see what SVC users are reading, attending, and doing.
But spreading the word digitally is only part of the program. The app also lets users make phone calls to undecided voters in a dozen swing states. Users input their phone number and are given a call from a central database. Once they pick up, their phone is connected to a potential voter. The volunteer, with a script prepared by the GOP's political team on the screen in front of them, asks the voter questions and fills out a form in the app.
It's a function that allows the RNC to use huge numbers of activists in deeply conservative or liberal states that would otherwise find it difficult to contribute in more competitive states.
"We have scores of people around the country in these red or blue states that – in the past – we haven't had anything for them to do," says RNC Political Director Rick Wiley. "The old model was to deploy them across the country and spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on hotel rooms and flights, and now they can do it from their living room."
Jagoda is skeptical that volunteers making calls from one state will be able to do much more than gather information from voters in another state.
"If someone is passionate about politics in Wyoming, are they going to connect with somebody who is an independent voter in New Mexico?" she says. "I'm not convinced that passion in politics translates across state lines as much as some people think it does. It's one thing to get excited about a presidential candidate, it's another for a senator or a congressman or a governor in another state."
Mr. Delany of e-politics agrees: "It’s good for engaging the loyalists and giving them something to do," he says, but "not likely to make a huge difference in the outcome of the election."
What could be more helpful, Jagoda says, is the granular data Republicans get from the app about its users. The party could leverage that information for a variety of purposes, from get-out-the-vote efforts to tailored messages to users who are interested a single issue, like education or the economy.
The degree to which Republicans use this information to forge connections with voters will determine the app's effectiveness, Jagoda says.
After inputting her information into the application, she says: "Let's see how much they encourage me to come back to this app. If they put it out there and just let it sit there, I don't give it too high a chance of succeeding. If they know how to work it, we might see some interesting surprises out of this."
Delany says the RNC could be shooting for around 2 million accounts – a level of participation similar to MyBarackObama.com, the non-Facebook site established by the Obama campaign in 2008.
Republican presidential candidate, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney gestures as he speaks at the state fishing pier, in this April 30 photo, in Portsmouth, N.H. The Obama campaign has just released a new attack ad that accuses Romney of sending jobs overseas and stashing his cash in a Swiss bank account. (Jim Cole/AP)
Obama ad hits Romney Swiss bank account. Effective? (+video)
The Obama campaign has just released a new attack ad that accuses Mitt Romney of sending jobs overseas and stashing his cash in a Swiss bank account.
The 30-second spot, titled (surprise!) “Swiss Bank Account,” begins on the defensive. It describes as “over the top” and “erroneous” a recent commercial from a GOP-leaning super PAC, which charged that billions of dollars from President Obama’s energy projects have gone to factories in foreign countries.
“President Obama’s clean-energy initiatives have created jobs in America, not overseas,” the narration says.
Then the ad pivots, and the rhetorical knives come out. “What about Mitt Romney?” appears on the screen.
As a corporate CEO, Mr. Romney sent jobs to Mexico and China, says the ad. It charges that as Massachusetts governor, he outsourced state jobs to a call center in India.
“It’s just what you’d expect from a guy who had a Swiss bank account,” the spot ends.
Is the ad effective? That’s not going to be clear for a while, if ever: Figuring out the particular reasons that presidential candidate poll numbers rise and fall remains more a dark art than a science. For the record, political scientists are highly dubious that attack ads such as this are as powerful as pundits and consultants think they are.
That said, as communications professionals, we have a couple of comments about the spot. First, it’s got too much going on. The initial defensive burst is confusing, particularly when it’s followed by the quick cut to Romney, swooshing graphics about jobs in Mexico and China, and so on. We think the only thing voters will remember is the phrase “Romney Swiss bank account.”
Of course, from the point of view of Democrats, that would be fine. They’re happy to drive home the theme that Romney is a Richie Rich who’s got Swiss bank accounts and a car elevator in the Cayman Islands. Or some such.
“It’s all about turning Romney into the walking embodiment of the type of economic behavior that led to the meltdown,” writes the left-leaning pundit Greg Sargent on Tuesday on his Plum Line blog in The Washington Post.
And that’s our second point: This ad hits Romney square in his empathy gap. A recent Washington Post/ABC poll found that only 37 percent of voters think Romney “better understands economic problems people in this country are having.” Forty-nine percent thought Mr. Obama the better answer to that question.
That’s what the Obama campaign is trying to do here: define Romney as someone remote from your concerns.
Will that matter? It may not, or at least, not as much as Democratic strategists hope. “Republicans win all the time without closing the empathy gap,” George Washington University political scientist John Sides wrote recently. That’s because voters inherently see Democrats as more empathetic – but that perceived empathy is no guarantee of victory.
All the advantages on personal quality ratings won’t save Obama if the economy nose-dives, writes Mr. Sides on the FiveThirtyEight polling blog of The New York Times.
“In general, be wary of any claim that there is a single path to victory, particularly if that path involves a candidate’s personality,” he writes.
President Obama attends the White House Correspondents' Dinner, Saturday, April 28, in Washington. (Haraz N. Ghanbari/AP)
Obama 'nerd prom' jokes: Did he go too far? (+video)
President Obama’s jokes were pretty pointed at Washington’s “nerd prom” – the White House Correspondents’ Dinner – over the weekend. He went after every subgroup gathered in the giant Hilton ballroom, with the possible exception of rehab-prone starlets.
Journalists? Check. “The White House Correspondents’ Dinner is known as the prom of Washington, D.C. – a term coined by political reporters who clearly never had the chance to go to an actual prom,” Mr. Obama said.
Congress? Double check. “I want to especially thank all the members who took a break from their exhausting schedule of not passing any laws to be here tonight,” joked the president.
Mitt Romney? Send him the check! Obama tripled down on remarks that skewered his presumptive fall opponent. Such as when he said, "Recently, [Mr. Romney’s] campaign criticized me for slow-jamming the news with Jimmy Fallon. In fact, I understand Governor Romney was so incensed he asked his staff if he could get some equal time on ‘The Merv Griffin Show.' ”
Hmm. Did Obama go too far? We’d say that if nothing else, Obama’s humor was edgier than that of past presidential performances. For instance, he referred to the recent flaplet over the fact that when young, he was served dog in Indonesia. (“As my stepfather always told me, ‘It’s a boy-eat-dog world out there.' ”) He waved Republicans' talking points back in their faces. (“I have not seen ‘The Hunger Games.' Not enough class warfare for me.”) He even sort of made an I’m-looking-at-you gesture toward the Supreme Court. (“In my first term, we passed health-care reform. In my second term, I guess I’ll pass it again.”)
Not everyone approved. At one point over the weekend, the Drudge Report led its home page with the headline, “Barack bizarre: President jokes about eating dogs?”
But we’ll agree with The Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza on this one: What Obama did was what presidents usually do with such appearances, which is to appeal to their committed voters. Only partisans follow this kind of thing closely, and Democratic partisans will chortle at Obama’s humor. Partisan Republicans wouldn’t have approved of it under virtually any circumstances.
“What these presidential speeches tend to do is affirm the already deeply-held feelings of each party’s base,” wrote Mr. Cillizza on his blog The Fix on Monday.
We’ll add this: If you combine Obama’s performance with other campaign-related events of the week, Democrats are sending the Romney campaign a message. That message is, “We’re not Rick Santorum.”
In other words, Obama’s reelection effort is not going to sit there and let the Romney team pour money into negative advertising that defines the president in the way Republicans would prefer. Obama is going to hit preemptively and hard, and he is going to walk right up to the line of propriety, and maybe past it, when it comes to campaigning.
After all, in recent days the Obama reelection team has questioned whether Romney would have ordered the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. Politics ain’t beanbag, as pundits like to say on cable news. (What is beanbag? How do you play it? We have no idea, and we bet they don’t either.)
In that context, a little humor about Romney (“It’s great to be here this evening in the vast, magnificent Hilton ballroom – or what Mitt Romney would call ‘a little fixer-upper’ ”) may be just a foretaste of the dialogue to come.
Comedian Jimmy Kimmel speaks at the White House Correspondents Association annual dinner in Washington on Saturday. (Larry Downing/Reuters)
Jimmy Kimmel wows Washington's 'Nerd Prom.' What's he get paid for that? (+video)
Jimmy Kimmel was pretty much en fuego on Saturday night, wasn’t he? As our own publication’s report said of his appearance as headliner at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, he had them “rolling in the aisles” of the huge Hilton ballroom.
We’re pretty sure that’s a figure of speech. They cram so many tables into that event you couldn’t roll a foot without knocking a waiter into Lindsay Lohan’s lap.
Anyway, Kimmel was bipartisan in his targets. Of failed GOP hopeful Rick Santorum, he said, “I guess it just wasn’t Rick’s year. Rick’s year was 1954.” He said libertarian Ron Paul “looks like the guy who gets unhooded at the end of every Scooby Doo episode.” Prior to telling a risque joke about the Secret Service, he told President Obama to cover up his ears, “if that’s physically possible.”
Looking out over the assembled journalists, government officials, lawmakers, lobbyists, and celebrities, he sighed and said, “Everything that is wrong with America is here tonight.”
Very nice. Maybe "The Colbert Report" will be able to work you in, Jimmy. But here’s our nerdish question: How much did Kimmel get paid for that? Is it lucrative to fly to DC and entertain a roomful of former student body vice presidents, and their guests?
Looks like it is to us. The exact amount of Kimmel’s pay isn’t public, or at least not yet. But you can get a pretty good idea of the financials of this whole dinner by leafing through the paper the WHCA has to file with the IRS. (Tax-exempt groups file a Form 990 that’s available to the public.)
We figure he made around $50,000, give or take ten grand.
In 2009, the latest year for which that form is available, the White House Correspondents’ paid $43,233 for the entertainment at their annual dinner. Since the headline comedian is the main entertainment, we’ll assume they get most of that.
In 2009, that comedian was Wanda Sykes, who was also pretty funny. But Ms. Sykes is not as big a star as Kimmel. Her talk show got canceled. His “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” appears to be going strong. So we’ll guess that Kimmel got a bit more than she did, a few years ago. That’s where our $50,000 estimate comes from.
The dinner expense data from 2008 and 2007 confirm this general estimate. Overall, the entertainment at the journalists’ dinner gets paid more than many journalists.
The dinner itself is a big financial deal. Gross receipts are about $600,000, which is more than twenty times what the WHCA takes in from other sources. About half of that pays for the room and meals, though, and $200,000 of it is used for journalist scholarships and other charitable endeavors.
In this photo, President Obama speaks at the Building and Construction Trades Department Legislative Conference, Monday, April 30, in Washington. A campaign ad produced by Obama’s reelection team that questions whether presumptive GOP nominee Mitt Romney would have ordered the Special Forces raid that killed Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, is generating political controversy. (Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP)
Why did Obama issue controversial Osama bin Laden ad? (+video)
A campaign ad produced by President Obama’s reelection team that questions whether presumptive GOP nominee Mitt Romney would have ordered the Special Forces raid that killed Osama bin Laden is generating considerable controversy in US politics, in advance of the anniversary of the raid.
Mr. Obama’s supporters have defended the ad, saying the president had long pressed his national-security apparatus to find the Al Qaeda leader. Obama then made a courageous decision to approve a raid despite less-than-perfect intelligence about Mr. bin Laden’s whereabouts, they say.
Mr. Romney, in his first run for the White House in the 2008 cycle, had questioned whether targeting one terrorist leader was a good use of US military resources.
The ad was “not over the line," said Robert Gibbs, a senior adviser to the Obama reelection campaign. "There’s a difference in the roles they would play as commander in chief, and I certainly think that’s fair game.”
But Republicans and even some Democrats are questioning the propriety of invoking bin Laden’s killing in such nakedly political terms. It’s one thing to promote the president’s role in bringing justice to one of the nation’s primary enemies, noted Sen. John McCain (R) of Arizona, Obama's opponent in 2008. It’s quite another to spin that event into a political attack ad.
“Shame on Barack Obama for diminishing the memory of September 11th,” said Senator McCain in a statement issued by the Republican National Committee last Friday.
Over the weekend, senior Romney adviser Ed Gillespie said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that Obama was turning an event that had unified the nation into something divisive. By the time Obama had to make the “go” decision on the raid, it was not that difficult an executive call, Mr. Gillespie implied.
“I can’t envision, having served in the White House, any president having been told, ‘We have him, he’s here, you know, should we go in?’ and saying, ‘No, we shouldn’t,' ” he said.
Even Arianna Huffington, founder of The Huffington Post and generally an Obama supporter, called the ad “despicable” in an appearance Monday on CBS News.
The ad is the sort of political discourse that “makes politicians and political leaders act irrationally when it comes to matters of war because they’re so afraid to be called wimps,” said Ms. Huffington.
So why did the Obama team launch such a potentially controversial ad? Almost certainly, one reason is that it highlights an Obama strength: Voters rate his foreign-policy decisions higher than his economic ones.
Plus, national security is often an area of weakness with Democrats. As author and former Newsweek editor Jon Meacham notes in Time magazine, Democratic presidential candidates have continually learned the lesson that they have to act tough to counteract the GOP’s inherent advantage on defense issues.
“The lesson of the Clinton years and of Obama’s win of both the nomination and the general election in 2008 is that Democrats need to be as tough as [John F. Kennedy] was,” Mr. Meacham writes.
Finally, Wednesday is the anniversary of bin Laden’s death. With the subject resurfacing in the media, the Obama team probably felt they should act fast to define the subject in the way most favorable to them. [Editor's note: The original version of this paragraph listed the incorrect day for the anniversary.]
“Is the bin Laden ad fair to Romney? No, not really. But politics is not for the faint of heart,” writes Meacham.
Ron Paul gets in his car after speaking to supporters at the University of Texas LBJ Library Lawn in Austin,Thursday (Rebeca Rodriguez/The Daily Texan/AP)
Ron Paul beat Mitt Romney in 10 states! Kind of.
Here’s something you hear on cable news all the time: Ron Paul hasn’t won a primary. He hasn’t won a caucus. Sure, he’s stealing a delegate at state conventions here and there, because his forces are well organized. But he’s lost. He should drop out and settle for an early-afternoon speaking slot at the Republican convention.
Here’s something you don’t hear: Representative Paul actually beat Mitt Romney in 10 states. In a manner of speaking.
What are we talking about? Money, that’s what. Political pros are fond of talking about the “money primary,” in which candidates compete, not for votes, but for campaign donations. It’s a crucial part of any nomination race, because a candidate without cash is like a shark that’s not moving forward, if you understand what we’re saying.
Look at Newt Gingrich: Don’t you think that deep down he really doesn’t want to drop out? But his campaign has run up millions of dollars in debt. He’s a sinking shark. (He loves zoos and aquariums, too, so he’d understand the reference.)
Paul, on the other hand, is still swimming. In the money primary context, the GOP nomination race has almost always been a two-man contest between Mr. Romney and Paul. Through the first quarter of 2012, Romney raised $87 million and Paul $37 million, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Mr. Gingrich’s soon-to-be-extinct effort garnered $22 million, while Rick Santorum raised $21 million before he dropped out.
What’s more, Paul currently has about $1.7 million cash on hand, and debts of $0. Gingrich has $1.2 million cash on hand, and debts of $4.3 million, according to the latest public figures.
OK, OK, presumptive nominee Romney has $10 million in the bank, no debts, and a general election looming on the horizon. But before we pivot toward November, let’s remember that Paul outraised Romney in 10 states, including some that will be key battlegrounds in the fall, according to figures compiled by Eric Ostermeier, a political scientist at the University of Minnesota’s Hubert H. Humphrey Center for the Study of Politics and Governance.
“Ron Paul leads Mitt Romney in large donor itemized fundraising in 10 states, representing all four geographical regions from the northeast (Maine), the South (Arkansas), the Midwest (Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota, North Dakota, Wisconsin) and the West (Alaska, Hawaii, New Mexico),” writes Mr. Ostermeier on his Smart Politics blog.
If small-donor contributions were rolled into the figures, it is likely Paul would have won the money primary in a few other states, such as Vermont, Delaware, and Montana, Ostermeier writes.
Of course, Romney had a big cash lead in rich states such as New York and California. That’s how he ended up with all those tens of millions of campaign simoleons. But Paul did beat Romney somewhere, in something. You can take it to the bank.
President Obama speaks at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, Iowa, Wednesday. (Carolyn Kaster/AP)
Obama ad questions Romney's will to get Osama bin Laden. Fair? (+video)
President Obama’s reelection campaign has released a new ad that questions whether presumptive GOP nominee Mitt Romney would have ordered the Special Forces raid that killed Osama bin Laden.
The ad, titled “One Chance,” opens with narrator Bill Clinton talking about the difficulties presidents face with national-security decisions. If the Navy SEAL raid in Pakistan had gone wrong, for Mr. Obama “the downside would have been horrible,” Mr. Clinton says.
But Obama “took the harder and more honorable path,” says Clinton.
Then the hard-hitting stuff starts. A screen fades in that says, “Which path would Mitt Romney have taken?”
This morphs into a quote from a 2007 Reuters article, “Mitt Romney criticized Barack Obama for vowing to strike al-Qaeda targets inside Pakistan if necessary,” followed by another 2007 Romney quote in which the former Massachusetts governor questions whether it’s worth “moving heaven and earth ... just trying to catch one person.”
The ad ends with the now well-known photo of Obama alone at a White House window, staring out, at the time of the raid. “That’s what you hire the president to do ... to make the calls when no one else can do it,” says narrator Clinton.
Hmm. Is this over the line? After all, during the current campaign Mr. Romney has given Obama credit for launching the raid, though he then usually pivots to criticize the president on lots of other stuff.
The Romney campaign itself has pushed back hard against the spot. In a statement, press secretary Andrea Saul said that the OBL killing “was a momentous day for all Americans," adding, "It’s now sad to see the Obama campaign seek to use an event that unified our country to once again divide us.”
In political terms, however, we’ll note that the ad is well timed and constructed. The anniversary of the SEAL raid is Tuesday, meaning the subject will get more media coverage than it has in some time. The spot was released a day after Vice President Joe Biden gave a wide-ranging address criticizing Romney on foreign-policy issues. Foreign policy is a relative strength for Obama, vis-à-vis Romney, according to polls. (Unlike Obama’s handling of the economy, which is not.)
As for the nuts and bolts, getting former President Clinton to do the voice-over gives the ad a subtext of been-there-know-what-I’m-talking-about. At least, that’s what the Obama campaign hopes. It begins with a shout-out to George W. Bush, too, as Clinton says that Mr. Bush was right: The president really is the "decider in chief."
Plus – and this is wonky, we admit – Clinton’s use of the word “hire” is clever, when he sums up the ad’s premise as, “That’s what you hire the president to do.” He’s trying to frame the election as a hiring choice: Do we need a new person in that job?
Are you scoffing? Trust us: They poll-test many of the individual words used in campaign communications.
Is it fair that Romney’s words from five years ago are being used against him today? This is politics as it’s practiced in the United States: Opposition research teams are busy digging up old stuff and reframing it to make the other guy look as bad as possible.
Perhaps the more relevant question is whether voters may judge this invocation of OBL as over the top. After all, it wasn’t the White House that caught him. It was the US national-security apparatus, working as a team over the span of two presidencies.
The video shows that the Obama team won’t be shy about invoking the Osama bin Laden raid as a counter to Romney’s assertion that Obama is weak, notes liberal Greg Sargent in his Plum Line blog in The Washington Post on Friday.
“The campaign will regularly cite it as evidence of his leadership qualities and decisiveness under pressure,” Mr. Sargent writes.
Of course, shortly after last year’s raid, Obama promised that he wouldn’t trot out the killing as a political trophy, counters Daniel Halper on the blog of the conservative Weekly Standard. The president told CBS News he didn’t need to “spike the football” of that success.
With the Obama campaign’s latest ad, it’s pretty safe to say that the president is now OK with " ‘trot[ting] out this stuff’ and ‘spik[ing] the football,’ as long as it helps him get reelected,” writes Mr. Halper.
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