Posted on 10/27/2011 8:33:35 AM PDT by smoothsailing
October 27, 2011
President Barack Obama’s political machine is increasingly making common cause with Texas Gov. Rick Perry against a shared enemy: Mitt Romney.
Romney is the opponent Democrats most fear, and whom Obama strategists view as the near-certain Republican nominee. Yet even among strategists who assume Romney will be Obama’s opponent, Perry’s newly feisty performance on the campaign trail has raised hopes that he may drag out the primary fight and bloody Romney ahead of the main event.
Obama supporters aren’t exactly coordinating attacks with Perry. But the Texas governor and national Democrats are reinforcing and amplifying a single, sharply negative message that benefits them both: that Romney is a soulless political opportunist who doesn’t deserve the presidency.
It’s a familiar attack that could resonate with voters in both the primary and general elections — and that strategists say can be delivered from the left and right with almost equal effect.
“It will be hard for Romney to beat Obama if he can’t get out from under the flip-flop narrative,” said former Democratic National Committee spokeswoman Karen Finney. “It plays into concerns the primary voters have that he can’t be trusted [and it’s] equally important in a general election against an incumbent president people like and trust.
“It’s not just that there is an alignment of interests” between Obama and Perry, Finney said. “But more importantly, it illustrates how vulnerable Romney is on this issue.”
As one Democratic operative aligned with Obama explained the strategy: “You get in the slipstream and get in behind the collective anti-Romney message. You jump in and draft off that.”
Far from an attempt to tilt the outcome of the Republican primary, the operative called the Democratic messaging push a “bow to the obvious” — that Romney’s likely to be the GOP standard-bearer.
“The thing that is unique about Romney, though, is that if you close your eyes and have somebody read the attacks on Romney it would be impossible to know if it’s coming from Perry, [Rick] Santorum, the DNC, [Democratic strategist Bill] Burton or [Obama spokesman Ben] LaBolt: that he doesn’t believe anything, that you can’t trust him, that he’s a flip-flopping weasel,” the Democrat said. “The fight he’s having in the primary is the fight he’s gonna have in the general.”
At the moment, Perry is as much a part of that fight as the Obama campaign and its Democratic allies.
The tag-team attack on Romney started last week after he slipped up in a GOP debate, denying an accusation that he knowingly employed undocumented workers — and claiming he told a lawn-care contractor, “I’m running for office, for Pete’s sake.” Perry and the DNC simultaneously leaped on the quote as evidence that Romney’s a callow and calculating politician.
The dual offensive intensified Tuesday, when the Perry campaign called on Romney to release his personal tax returns. Almost immediately, the Democratic independent group Priorities USA Action — led by Burton and Sean Sweeney, two former White House aides — made the same demand.
Romney faced another pile-on a few hours later, after he ducked a question in Ohio about his position on a statewide referendum on collective bargaining. (He later clarified that he supported a restrictive labor law signed by Republican Gov. John Kasich).
Perry spokesman Ray Sullivan immediately accused Romney of practicing “finger-in-the-wind politics.” Backing him up was Ohio Democratic Party Chairman Chris Redfern, who assailed Romney — on a conference call advertised by the DNC — as the “consummate evolving politician who won’t make a decision beyond the headline of the most recent newspaper he’s read.”
“For once in this campaign, Rick Perry is correct in his evaluation of Mitt Romney’s commitment to an issue,” Redfern told POLITICO Wednesday, acknowledging: “We’ve all come to the conclusion that Rick Perry … will be back in Austin signing bills and Herman Cain will be off on the Koch brothers speaking tour. It seems that Mitt Romney is the only legitimate candidate left in the Republican stable.”
For the Romney campaign, the harsh barrage looks like confirmation that their opponents in both parties are spooked. While it’s possible that the attacks may do real damage at some point, at the moment, it feeds the impression cherished by Romney’s campaign: that he’s all but inevitable in the GOP primaries.
“Gov. Perry and President Obama have a lot in common, including their support for tuition breaks for illegal immigrants and opposition to a border fence. They also share abysmal jobs records,” said Romney communications director Gail Gitcho. “It is no wonder their only strategy is to issue false and negative attacks on Mitt Romney.”
Both Obama’s backers and the Perry campaign downplay the idea that there’s a tactical friendship of convenience. Perry spokesman Mark Miner insisted that Perry is “focused on policies that will improve the economy and create jobs — issues that both President Obama and Mitt Romney have failed at.”
And Burton shrugged off suggestions that Priorities USA Action had effectively partnered with Perry to try and rough up the Republican front-runner, scoffing: “Rick Perry just brought on the former head of federal emergency management to save his campaign. I hardly think their tactics were a part of any cogent strategy.”
But several Democrats in touch with the Obama campaign have confirmed that the president’s advisers are concerned about Romney — and have been, as all incumbents do, hoping for a protracted and costly primary that would damage the GOP front-runner. They have been rooting for the success of not just Perry, but also Herman Cain, the latest inheritor of conservative and grass-roots GOP fury.
Democrats with ties to Obama said that it had taken an unusually long time for Romney to start getting dinged in his primary fight — Cain has barely touched him, and Bachmann has said precious little about him. At the same time, Democrats spent weeks publicly casting Perry — their best GOP-based weapon against Romney — as a dopey lightweight, a move that lessened the impact of his attacks on his own rivals.
They had grown increasingly concerned as Michele Bachmann, and then Perry, seemed unable to land a real punch on Romney. And for two weeks now, Democrats have taken it into their own hands to batter Romney — and almost Romney alone.
They’ve organized events and conference calls with Democratic surrogates to counter-program his campaign stops, blasted out a flurry of negativeonline videos and put up paid television ads in Arizona. The comments from campaign officials are directed at Romney. Even in putting out a statement on Perry’s tax plan, the Obama campaign invoked the former Massachusetts governor.
LaBolt called the amped-up messaging against Romney an attempt to lay bright markers around the Republican’s views so that he won’t be able to run from them in the general election.
“There’s been no story analyzing the impact of Romney’s commitment to repealing Wall Street reform, no story on Romney’s commitment to the congressional Republican budget plan,” LaBolt said. “There’s been a void out there in which those questions haven’t been asked and answered and until somebody steps into that void, it’s our obligation to ask them.”
Now, with Perry showing a quickening pulse, Democrats are privately expressing glee over the prospect of having an accidental ally in running an unrelenting, character-based campaign against the Bay Stater.
Democratic consultant Dan Gerstein predicted that the early campaign against Romney could weaken him “in the primary and increases the potential, albeit slim at the moment, that one of the other, far more beatable jokers gets the nomination.”
“It begins to define [Romney] to the general election audience when he can’t really defend himself,” Gerstein said.
Democrats are betting that Perry will keep the pressure on Romney from the right — and hoping he’ll use the millions of dollars he has stockpiled to run TV ads, undermining Romney’s carefully cultivated image.
Either way, Democrats have made clear they don’t have time to wait for Romney’s GOP rivals to take him down a notch, and they’re unlikely to stop whacking him, given the possibility that Perry could falter yet again.
Republican strategist Scott Jennings, a former deputy White House political director under President George W. Bush, said the anti-Romney drumbeat looked like an all-too-transparent attempt to “co-opt the Perry vehicle to run attacks on Romney.
“Their hope would be to soften Romney up and at least plant doubts in the mind of the Republican electorate that Romney is as good a candidate as he is,” Jennings said. “They have concluded that Mitt Romney is their strongest opposition, so now they’re employing tactics to meddle in the Republican primary specifically to damage Mitt Romney.”
He added: “I just think they’re running a big risk of tipping off the Republican rank and file that, gee whiz, Obama is scared to death of this guy.”
© 2011 POLITICO LLC
I thought we were all against Romney. We are not all like Obama. Your logic is missing, once again.
Bless your little heart, Naps...
Exactly!
This whole article was written to make it look like it is a two man primary race: Romney and Perry. Not one mention of Cain. The MSM can’t attack Cain after they set the ‘racism’ bar so low with Obama, so they ignore him.
Here we have a perfect example of Politico being part of or being used as an agit-prop tool to get the GOP to put up the one candidate Obama is sure to beat - Romney.
Mitt Romney does not have to be our nominee!
Fox News just yesterday said over 50% of Republicans have not even settled on their candidate yet, waiting for all the dust now to settle, and we all know Romney can’t get over 25% of the vote anyway, no matter what.
Once we get serious about things and get a conservative candidate there to finally put Romney to rest, we’ll get Obama out the door too!
No Obama!
No Romney!
Is that article slanted to discredit Governor Perry by unfairly lumping him with the zero!? Sounds that way to me.
They're lowballing it. A more accurate figure is 75-80%. The anti-Romney field is wide open.
“Perry’s newly feisty performance on the campaign trail has raised hopes that he may drag out the primary fight and bloody Romney ahead of the main event”
‘Cause it worked so well with Clinton last time.
Leave it to Politico to promote the inevitability of Romney.
The Journolist deems it so.
Exactly, for anybody who read beyond the headline, the article said an entirely different thing.
One of the problems nowadays is that they expect people to read only the headlines and then react to the way the headline writer has presented it, rather than to the actual event itself. This is a big problem because a lot of people never read beyond the headlines.
You’re right, but I still don’t know who it is that they fear. Perry has some good ideas but unfortunately he’s not very good at presenting them in the face of a hostile audience. Texas likes him , but most people there are basically on the same page, be they Anglo or Hispanic, and therefore he’s not used to attacks and misunderstandings.
So I don’t think the Dems are worried about Perry. But I don’t really think they’re worried about Cain, either, because while he is a glib speaker (he had his own radio program, after all), he doesn’t have the substance to really make a difference.
Nobody examined Bambi on his substance, and he wasn’t even glib (he’s a terrible speaker) but his melanin protected him from examination by Democrats. In the case of Cain, his melanin will not protect him and the Dems will do what they did with Clarence Thomas: they’ll say he’s not “really” black, even though their boy Bambi has nothing in common with the black American experience and should NOT be referred to as “African American.” The child of a well-off white hippie and a foreign African graduate student has nothing to do with the US black experience.
So then they will start to grill Cain and he won’t hold up because his area of knowledge is pretty limited and he also seems to be somewhat gaffe-prone. His mouth gets in motion before his mind gets in gear, just like Biden.
In any case, my feeling is that he wants to be Romney’s VP, which might work because while Romney doesn’t know anything outside of being a big deficit spending governor of an NE state, he seems to really impress the GOP bosses. Romney is probably equally ignorant on foreign affairs, but that doesn’t seem to matter to his fans.
However, I don’t think Romney having Cain as a VP would draw in enough conservatives to make a difference. Right now, we’re hearing mostly from the very vocal Cain supporters, who probably recently transferred from Palin, but I don’t think enough people would vote for VP to get Romney a win - we voted for VP in the last election and it didn’t work.
Just my opinion, of course, and probably wrong as usual. But I say this as a veteran of several campaigns. People of all kinds and conditions were enthusiastic about W, who is a good speaker in person but does lousy press conferences. But nobody I know likes Romney and nobody I know (including me) would work for him.
That said, I’m still not sure who it is that the Dems are really worried about.
I think they'd like to run against CAIN also. Axelrod would make Cain's inexperience and amateur background the focus of their attacks.
One thing I can give Romney credit for, and maybe Obama does fear this about him - he's the best liar of anyone. Even better than Obama and Axelrod. He can lie his way out of a paper bag and make an audience laugh. Especially in Nevada.
Well reasoned, thanks for posting.
I think they fear Perry. Not the Perry of the debates, no one need fear that Perry. He’s terrible.
They fear Perry the man. He is the furthest thing from Obama. He is the startling contrast, the bold opposite.
They fear that Perry can indeed come back, improve his debating skills to a level that makes them not worth sniping at. If that happens, they’re in trouble.
Perry on the offensive full time will show the American people that there is a bold and positive alternative to the defeatist anti-American agenda put forth by the statist Obama.
It’s all up to Perry, I hope he can rise to the challenge.
Yes, I agree. Cain would be easy pickings for the Dems, who completely ignored the fact that their VP candidate in the last election, Biden, was a total idiot and a complete gaffe machine. But they were protected by the press, and Cain would certainly not be protected by the press.
Romney is the best liar of them all, but I think he’s lied so often by now that few solid GOPers would vote for him, and I can’t even think of one I know who would work for him. People discount what volunteers on the ground do, but I know that during the last elections, I convinced many people who weren’t even going to vote to go out and vote for McCain because they were (a) voting for Palin and (b) he might get us better Supreme Court appointments.
In the case of Romney, I don’t think he’d get us better anything, and in fact I think he’d reinforce Obama’s statist program and even make it worse by driving conservatives out of the GOP.
It’s possible that Perry could make a comeback. He is pretty solid, but I think his big problem is that he’s not used to speaking to people outside the state of Texas, who are therefore people who already know what’s going on and share his terms of reference. So he’s got to think bigger, on the one hand, but also be more specific, on the other.
And as for the TV “debates,” I think more and more people are wondering if this is American Idol or a political campaign. I’d like to see a serious debate (so far, Gingrich is the only one who has called for them), but not these little sound-bite opportunities, managed by people who are hostile to the GOP in the first place.
I like your second point about the debates. There are way too many, and folks will get tired of them. The gotcha questions and the soundbite answers make them a turnoff. Folks can see through the media bs.
Perry has hinted that he may forgo some of the upcoming debates. It’s a dicey call, but just the sort of bold move that might win the respect of voters who are wondering why any conservative would put up with such a circus in the first place.
I agree. Obama would beat Romney hands down. And I don’t know why the GOP heirachy is so devoted to Romney.
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