Obama plan: Destroy Romney

Barack Obama’s aides and advisers are preparing to center the president’s reelection campaign on a ferocious personal assault on Mitt Romney’s character and business background, a strategy grounded in the early-stage expectation that the former Massachusetts governor is the likely GOP nominee. The dramatic and unabashedly negative turn is the product of political reality. Obama remains personally popular, but pluralities in recent polling disapprove of his handling of his job, and Americans fear the country is on the wrong track. His aides are increasingly resigned to running for reelection in a glum nation. And so the candidate who ran on “hope” in 2008 has little choice four years later but to run a slashing, personal campaign aimed at disqualifying his likeliest opponent.


This is part of the pattern that has emerged during the Obama presidency: blame the other guy. But this could blow up in their face: the candidate who ran on hope can not be the candidate running on a slash-and-burn platform and hope to retain support. He will lose supporters. And while many of those would not vote for Romney, they might well stay away from the presidential election polls, as a means to vote against Obama.

The onslaught would have two aspects. The first is personal: Obama’s reelection campaign will portray the public Romney as inauthentic, unprincipled and, in a word used repeatedly by Obama’s advisers in about a dozen interviews, “weird.”

The Obama campaign might well be careful about portraying the other candidate as inauthentic and unprincipled, as Obama increasingly comes across as, yes, inauthentic and unprincipled. Weird? Is that a code word for Mormon?