And So We Begin

And so , after a summer ,fall and winter of the wackiest primary in modern American political history...The real campaign begins...We've laughed at Herman "Big Daddy" Cain, been flabergasted by 'Mad Michelle" Bachman, Just laughed out loud at the campaigns of Rick Perry, Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich and Ron Paul (Is he still running?) and their twilight zone campaigns....Now it's time to focus on Preisdent Obama's campaign for re-election...The real campaign ..if you will.

  After back-to-back speeches in two key swing states, the Obama  re-election campaign indicated how it wants to define the general election: As a choice between a tool of congressional Republicans who wants to undo the president’s first-term agenda and  as an incumbent looking to spend the next four years building on his achievements.

The president seemed to tie his presumptive Republican challenger Mitt Romney to Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget plan, which Democrats have been using to represent congressional Republicans’ entire agenda. President Obama warned that in  Mitt Romney, the House GOP has a candidate who would be willing to gut Medicare and end regulations on insurance companies and banks – policies “that created this mess,” the president said.

After a long and spirited primary, Republicans in Congress have found a nominee for president who has promised to rubber-stamp this agenda if he gets the chance,” President Obama said at Ohio State University, his first stop of the day, later adhering to the same script at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond. “We cannot give him that chance,” President Obama continued.


The president also sought to define himself in his two speeches Saturday, employing populist themes that touch on those of several past presidential campaigns while remaining entirely unique to the Obama campaign. Using a sort of “values play” evocative of the pitches used by the Clinton campaign, the president’s wife, Michelle, underscored that he grew up in an environment where everybody played by the rules, sometimes struggling to get by.

“He is the son of a single mother who struggled to put herself through school and pay the bills. That’s who he is. He’s the grandson of a woman who woke up before dawn every day to catch a bus to her job at the bank,” the first lady said of her husband in Columbus. “So believe me, Barack knows what it means when a family struggles,” she continued.

The First Lady's speech also employed a tactic from George W. Bush’s re-election campaign, in which the incumbent is portrayed as the familiar choice against an unknown risk.
“We all know what Barack Obama is -- who he is,” she said. “We all know what our president stands for, right?” she implored the audience.
There’s also a little bit of Harry Truman’s campaign evident in  President Obama’s pitch, as he warns supporters that they need to re-elect him in order to stop “those guys” in Congress who are threatening to pass items like the Ryan budget.  Indeed, we do!

"As long as I’m president of the United States, I will never allow Medicare to be turned into a voucher that would end the program as we know it,” President Obama said. “That’s what’s at stake in this election.”

And in preventing Republicans from accomplishing their agenda, President Obama is arguing, the lives of average Americans will continue to improve – even as he acknowledges they are not where they need to be currently.

So in a twist of Ronald Reagan’s “Are you better off than you were four years ago” trope, which Mitt Romney is using, the president is asking his supporters if they think they are on the right direction to being better off, say, four years from now.

The real question, he said, “is not just about how we’re doing today. It’s about how we’ll be doing tomorrow.”

And if you really care about how you'll be doing tomorrow...You can't possibly see yourself voting for Mitt Romney or any of these (to borrow from Michael Baisden) crazy and deranged Republicans.