Obama Campaign Takes Gamble in Going Negative

With 100 days remaining before Election Day, there is an air of apprehension around the Obama campaign headquarters here. Yet there are few regrets about the tone of the race, only a conviction that the circumstances — a frail economy, intense Republican opposition and a well-financed negative campaign from Mr. Romney and his allies — left Mr. Obama no option but to fight back even if it sullies his image as a candidate of hope and change.

“Is it a different kind of race than 2008? Of course,” said David Axelrod, a senior campaign strategist. “If we were passive in the face of this onslaught we are facing, our folks would be unhappy. There are few on our side who are counseling us to sit idly by.”

Mr. Romney and his allies are giving as good as they get, lacerating Mr. Obama as hapless in promoting job creation, feckless with allies like Israel and determined to expand government until the United States resembles Sweden.

As the campaigns prepare for the next phase of the race, the two sides are taking stock of what they have achieved in their first sustained engagement, a relentlessly negative effort over the last two months to define the other. The exchanges have been so fierce that hardly a positive ad has been broadcast in July.

But both the opportunities and the risks in the definition wars are greater for Mr. Obama. Mr. Romney is less well known to the public, giving Democrats a chance to shape perceptions of him just as more voters are starting to tune in to the race.

The president’s prospects for re-election now rest in part on one of the biggest gambles of his career: that the benefits of trying to eviscerate Mr. Romney outweigh the costs to his own image and reputation.

With a political climate ripe for unseating an incumbent, the president’s campaign team signaled long ago that it had no intention of trying to replicate the 2008 race, and made it clear last year that if Mr. Romney won the Republican nomination, they would rush to aggressively define him before turning to a forward-looking message in the fall.

Mr. Obama, whose competitive and confident streaks seem to have been rekindled by the challenge from Mr. Romney, has shown no inclination to hold back in trying to portray his rival as a secretive Bush-era throwback whose wealth puts him out of touch with the middle class.

The president not only approves of his television ads, as federal election law requires him to say in each commercial, he also screens many of them in advance, either on his iPad or during a regular Sunday evening meeting with political advisers at the White House.

Fearful of the tone becoming too shrill, he took the rare step of speaking directly to the camera in a new ad that elevates the conversation, a hint of his approach when the campaign moves beyond summer.

“Sometimes politics can seem very small,” Mr. Obama said, sounding almost apologetic. “But the choice you face, it couldn’t be bigger.”

His aides wondered in particular whether a recent spot showing Mr. Romney singing “America the Beautiful,” while headlines about outsourcing and overseas bank accounts flashed, was too negative. The president and some of his strategists were unsure, aides said, but a focus group of voters found it to be fair. They still tested the ad again before showing it.

The ratio of negative ads, which are defined as those in which a campaign mentions its rival by name, tells the story. Since April, after Mr. Romney became the presumptive nominee, Mr. Obama broadcast negative commercials 118,775 times compared with 56,128 times for positive commercials.

In the same time period, Mr. Romney ran negative spots 51,973 times and positive spots 11,921, according to an analysis from Kantar Media, which tracks political advertising. This does not include the Republican “super PAC” ads that are almost entirely attacks on the president.

“President Obama was keeping a more balanced mix, but by the end of June he turned off the positive spigot,” said Elizabeth Wilner, who studies advertising for the group.

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The Politics of Going to College

An unexpected issue in the 2012 election is whether or not rank-and-file Americans should aspire to a college degree. Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum have both made comments about higher education that could come back to haunt them in a general election.

“President Obama once said he wants everybody in America to go to college. What a snob,” Santorum told a Tea Party meeting in Troy, Mich., on Feb. 25. “I understand why he wants you to go to college. He wants to remake you in his image.”

Romney, the all-but-certain nominee, was blunt when speaking in March at a metal assembly plant in Youngstown, Ohio: “It would be popular for me to stand up and say I’m going to give you government money to pay for your college, but I’m not going to promise that.”

There is a partisan logic to the Republican hostility to higher education: the well-educated — a reliable source of conservative support as recently as the 1980s — have been moving steadily toward the Democratic Party. In a head-to-head contest, a March 26 McClatchy-Marist Poll shows Romney ahead of Obama 47-42 among those without college degrees, while Obama leads Romney 51-42 among those with them. Similarly, those without college degrees lean toward voting for Republican congressional candidates 49-40, while those with them lean toward Democrats 46-44.

Not only are Democrats making gains among the better-educated, but these voters are becoming a larger share of the electorate. Exit polls show the growth of the college-educated voting bloc.

In 1984, those with college and advanced degrees made up 35.3 percent of the electorate. Reagan’s strongest margins were among the college educated, who backed him over Walter F. Mondale by a crushing 62.7-36.9 margin. Among all those with both college and advanced degrees, Reagan won 58.7 percent, a landslide margin.

Jump to 2008. Even though those with college degrees made up 27.9 percent of the population that year, they cast 45 percent of the presidential vote. These voters register and go to the polls in substantially higher numbers than the less well educated.

By 2008, the Republican advantage of the early 1980s among voters with a college degree or higher had disappeared. Barack Obama carried this demographic with 54.1 percent. He beat McCain 50-48 among those with bachelor’s degrees, and by a decisive 58-40 among the 17 percent of the 2008 electorate with post-graduate degrees.

The shifting allegiance of the better-educated – together with the growth of such pro-Democratic constituencies as single women, Hispanics and African-Americans — has been a crucial factor in the revival of the Democratic Party as a fully competitive force in presidential elections. The party’s gains have, in many respects, made up for losses among white working class voters.

In the 1970s and 1980s, the defection of Reagan Democrats gave the Republican Party a clear edge in national contests; by the 1990s and 2000s, the once reliably Republican affluent suburbs surrounding cities like New York and Philadelphia had moved in the opposite direction, empowering the Democratic Party to win the White House in 1992, 1996, and 2008, and the popular vote, if not the presidency, in 2000. By contrast, in the 1970s and 1980s, Republican presidential candidates won, on average, 59 percent of the upscale suburban vote.

The gains the Democrats made were concentrated in one major segment of the well-educated: professionals — salaried employees in schools and colleges, social workers, the arts, the natural and social sciences, knowledge/information workers, “symbol analysts,” “creatives” and so forth.

Andrew Gelman, director of the Applied Statistics Center at Columbia University, has illustrated the voting trends among different job classifications in his book “Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State: Why Americans Vote the Way They Do.”

The graph below shows how professionals voted compared to the entire electorate.

courtesy of Andrew Gelman

At the same time, the percentage of the population employed in professional jobs has been growing steadily, from 16.4 percent of the workforce in 1970 to 22.2 percent in 2010.

While Democratic gains among those with undergraduate and advanced degrees have clearly benefitted the party, there are costs.

The replacement of working-class whites with upscale professionals has turned the Democratic coalition into an alliance with a built-in class division. Instead of representing the bottom half of the income distribution as it did from the 1930s to the 1960s, the party has become bifurcated, with roughly 60 percent of the base vote cast by relatively poor and heavily minority voters, and much of the remainder provided by relatively affluent social and cultural liberals.

While constituting a minority, the relatively upscale wing clearly dominates party policy and provides the majority of the activists who run campaigns, serve as delegates to the convention and have become the core of the party’s donor base.

The leverage of the highly-educated wing is reflected in the priority placed on the culture war issues that are of key importance to this wing. Support for abortion rights and gay rights, for example, is an essential litmus test for Democratic presidential candidates. There is no parallel demand that candidates protect and expand food stamps, Medicaid, or other means-tested programs for the poor.

On the Republican side of the aisle, the aversion to federally funded scholarship aid – as demonstrated, for example, in the budget passed last week by the Republican House — has significant consequences for the party’s core supporters.

The children of the white working class are in need of financial support to pay for tuition at a two or four-year colleges as a path to upward mobility. The overwhelming majority of Pell Grants, 63.3 percent, go to low income whites, while 11.8 percent goes to African-American students, 13.2 percent to Hispanics, 6.8 percent to Asian-Americans, and the rest to other groups.

This year, Romney will need to win by a wide margin among those for whom access to post-secondary education is a key issue — particularly white men whose wages have stagnated or eroded more than those of women.

The following chart, put together by the M.I.T. economists Daron Acemoglu and David Autor, shows what has happened to the wages of men with various levels of education working full time (high school dropout, high school graduate, some college, college graduate, greater than college).

courtesy of David Autor

For men without college degrees, 1972-3 marked — in economic terms — the best year of their lives, and earnings adjusted for inflation have gone downhill over the forty years since then. Only men with college degrees, and especially those with post-graduate degrees, did better in 2008 than they had in 1973.

A central theme of the Romney campaign is that he intends to replace the Democratic “entitlement state” with the restoration of America as “a land of opportunity and a beacon of freedom.”

In the fight for Republican primary votes, it may make political sense for Santorum to mock higher education as the province of liberal elitists and for Romney to display deficit-consciousness by declaring his opposition to government assistance for college tuition.

In the general election, Romney faces a far tougher sell. Federal aid to education has strong, bipartisan support among voters, with more than 60 percent of Republicans and Democrats opposed to making any cuts, according to a Gallup poll from Jan. 26, 2011.

Romney’s refusal to promise that he will “give you government money to pay for your college” is a risky approach to courting ambitious lower income voters. Democrats see Romney setting a trap for himself and have already begun to lay the general election groundwork.

The increasing salience of education provides Democrats with an effective means of countering the problem of an underperforming economy, as President Obama demonstrated in a speech on Feb. 27: “We can’t allow higher education to be a luxury in this country. It’s an economic imperative that every family in America has to be able to afford.”

Romney, in turn, appears to recognize that he has stepped onto treacherous terrain. His Web site now declares: “Post-secondary education cannot become a luxury for the few; instead, all students should have the opportunity to attend a college that best suits their needs. Whether it is public or private, traditional or online, college must be available and affordable.”

Still, Romney does not specify which actions he would have the federal government take to prevent post-secondary education from becoming a luxury for the few. Instead, his Web site trumpets the potential for initiatives at the state level, where Romney, speaking as a former governor himself, “knows what can be accomplished when governors are empowered to reform their education systems.”

Thomas B. Edsall, a professor of journalism at Columbia University, is the author of the book “The Age of Austerity: How Scarcity Will Remake American Politics,” which was published in January.

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Going off-the-cuff, Romney does himself few favors (AP)

WASHINGTON – Mitt Romney may need a censor. For himself.

In the last few weeks in Nevada, the man who owns several homes told the state hit tough by the housing crisis: "Don't try and stop the foreclosure process. Let it run its course and hit the bottom."

At one point in Iowa, earlier this year, the former venture capitalist uttered, "Corporations are people," with the country in the midst of a debate over Wall Street vs. Main Street. At an event in economically suffering Florida, the retiree — who is a multimillionaire many times over — told out-of-work voters, "I'm also unemployed."

Over the past year, the Republican presidential candidate has amassed a collection of off-the-cuff comments that expose his vulnerabilities and, taken together, cast him as out-of-touch with Americans who face staggering unemployment, widespread foreclosures and a dire outlook on the economy.

So far, the foot-in-mouth remarks haven't seemed to affect his standing in the nomination race.

Romney has run a far more cautious and disciplined campaign than his losing bid of four years ago. He's kept the focus on his core message: He's the strongest candidate able to beat President Barack Obama on the biggest issue of the campaign, the economy. He still enjoys leading positions in public opinion polls in early primary states and across the nation. Few, if any, of the other Republicans in the race have turned his remarks against him.

Texas Gov. Rick Perry, Romney's chief rival with the money to prove it, is all but certain to try. Perry has already started suggesting that Romney lives a life of privilege while he comes from humble roots. In an interview Friday with CNN, another GOP candidate, former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman, painted Romney as "a perfectly lubricated weather vane on the important issues of the day."

And Romney's eyebrow-raising comments are tailor-made for critical TV ads.

Look no further than the Democratic Party and Obama's advisers for proof of that.

Each time Romney says something that makes even his closest aides grimace, Democrats quickly put together a Web video highlighting the remark — a preview of certain lines of attack come the general election should the former Massachusetts governor win the nomination.

"Mitt Romney's message to Arizona? You're on your own," says a new ad by the Democratic National Committee that jumps on Romney's foreclosure remarks.

Romney's team publicly dismisses their boss's occasional loose lips, dismissing them as inconsequential to voters focused on an unemployment rate hovering around 9 percent.

"It's a long campaign and at the end of the day people are going to judge Gov. Romney and his ability to take on President Obama over jobs and the economy. And certainly there will be a lot of back and forth as the campaign progresses," said Russ Schriefer, a Romney strategist.

"This election will be decided on big issues because the issues are so big and so important," Schriefer said. "And not on a gaffe or a mistake or a moment, any particularly moment. It's more about the big moments and who voters see and being able to turn the economy around."

It usually takes more than one gaffe or one mistake to undo a campaign. And other candidates have made their own potentially problematic comments.

Take, for instance, Herman Cain's assertion that the Wall Street protesters are in the streets to distract from Obama's record: "If you don't have a job and you're not rich, blame yourself." Or Perry's suggestion that Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke is "almost treasonous": "If this guy prints more money between now and the election, I don't what y'all would do to him in Iowa, but we would treat him pretty ugly down in Texas." Or former House Speaker Newt Gingrich explaining his infidelity: "There's no question at times of my life, partially driven by how passionately I felt about this country, that I worked far too hard and things happened in my life that were not appropriate."

But a string of unforced errors, when combined, can reinforce unfavorable perceptions of the candidate, as Romney aides privately acknowledge. And that's the trouble Romney faces — just as John Kerry damaged himself when he racked up a series of equivocating comments on a series of issues while the Democratic nominee in 2004.

President George W. Bush's re-election campaign used Kerry's waffling — conflicts between his votes and his quotes — to cast him as an opportunist who would shift his positions to win votes.

Romney gave his critics a similar opening over the past few days. In Ohio, he refused to say whether he would support a local ballot initiative even as he visited a site where volunteers were making hundreds of phone calls to help Republicans defeat it. Issue Two would repeal Ohio Gov. John Kasich's restrictions on public sector employee bargaining.

It turned out that Romney had already weighed in, supporting Kasich's efforts in a June Facebook post. And, a day after the Ohio visit, Romney made clear where he stood, saying he was "110 percent" behind the anti-union effort.

There have been other instances of comments that could come back to haunt him. In Arizona at one point, he tried to highlight his father's role running an auto company but inadvertently painted himself as a have, rather than a have not.

"See, I'm a Detroit guy, so, you know, I only have domestics," he said, then added: "I have a couple of Cadillacs, at two different houses. You know, small crossovers."

During a recent debate, Romney suggested that the discovery of illegal immigrants working on his yard during his first presidential campaign was a problem — not because it was illegal, but because "I'm running for office, for Pete's sake."

Comments like those could partly explain why Romney has kept a limited public schedule and favors closed events and appearances that play down spontaneous interaction with reporters.

Still, in some ways, the damage may already have been done. Expect to hear Romney's impolitic comments frequently as Republicans and Democrats alike try to derail Romney.

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Associated Press writer Beth Fouhy in Boston contributed to this report.

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Who's Going to Drop Out of the 2012 Race First? (The Atlantic Wire)

Here's an immutable truth of the Republican primary: of the many, many contenders for the presidential nomination, all but one will lose. That means that eventually -- this week, this month, this year -- the herd will thin. Who'll be the first to go? The New York Times's  Jeff Zeleny gets the magic 8-ball rolling this morning with a look at former Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty's struggling campaign under the headline: "Will Republican Race’s First In Be the First Out?"

Related: A Guide to Properly Insulting the 2012 GOP Candidates

Pawlenty has been running for president for two years, focusing intensely on Iowa, but he's still polling at just 6 percent in the state. If he doesn't do well in the Iowa Straw poll, a little more than a month away, his campaign is probably finished. Pawlenty told the Des Moines Register's editors that he's behind in the polls because "this week is the first time that I've campaigned in earnest in Iowa," Jennifer Jacobs writes--but Pawlenty has been in the state more times than any of his rivals save Rick Santorum.

Related: GOP Debate Preview: Hey, We're Not So Bad

Pawlenty may stick it out for a little bit longer, but there are plenty of contenders for the first to concede that they won't be going to the White House in 2013. 

Newt Gingrich has had a rough campaign so far too--his staff quit, his Tiffany's habit was revealed, he criticized an unpopular Medicare overhaul plan, his campaign is a million dollars in debt--and Slate's Dave Weigel wonders if he's just waiting till the right moment to pull out of the campaign with dignity. Iowa Politic's Lynn Campbell reports that even groups who've invited Gingrich to speak aren't being nice to him: the Christian group The Family Leader issued a statement four days before his lecture saying,

"Our exceptional and free society simply cannot endure without … nurturing nuclear families comprised of sexually faithful husbands and wives... We acknowledge and regret the widespread hypocrisy of many who say they defend marriage, yet turn a blind eye toward the epidemic of infidelity and the anemic condition of marriages in their own communities."

Gingrich is on his third marriage.

Related: First GOP Debate with Recognizable Candidates Will Be on June 13

Related: The Many Flops of the 2012 Race So Far

Rick Santorum hasn't won an election in 11 years when he was Senator from Pennsylvania. And despite going to Iowa even more than Tim Pawlenty, he's polling at 4 percent in the state. A telling headline from CBS News' Lucy Madison is this: "Rick Santorum: Back of the pack not a bad place to be." Referring to a poll showing a large majority of Republican voters unhappy with any of the 2012 candidates, Santorum explained that it was actually a good thing: "As someone who's sitting at the back of the pack, and probably has the lowest name recognition; they're probably not talking about me... That's a good thing as far as I'm concerned. I think that's an opportunity." So he's probably unlikely to drop out any time soon--thanks to the power of denial.

Jon Huntsman joined the race just two weeks ago, but his campaign announcement earned him zero bounce in the polls. Some assume the pro-gay rights, environmentally-friendly Republican is just planting the seeds for a 2016 run.

Related: Translating the Wall Street Journal's Story on Rick Perry

Herman Cain still polls well, but he's not very good at talking about the things you have to talk about when you run for president. He's flubbed answers on Palestinians' "right of return," said he'd only sign bills three pages long or less, and couldn't explain whether he'd hire Muslims at a primary debate. And his staff quit. But he's rich and he seems to enjoy all the attention. So he'll probably stick it out for the long haul.

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