More than five months from Election Day, the back-and-forth about Mitt Romney’s record at Bain already feels played out. Unfortunately, there’s good reason to expect the campaign continues in this vein indefinitely. Neither Barack Obama nor Mitt Romney are terribly interested in dwelling on policy platforms. Romney’s plan to slash spending and keep taxes low on the wealthy isn’t especially popular, at least not at any level of detail beyond a blithe promise to shrink the deficit. Meanwhile, Obama’s signature first-term achievements, like health care, the stimulus and Wall Street reform, are all unpopular or tricky to sell. (The Dodd-Frank bill is the most popular of these, but hyping it means offending wealthy donors.) So what we’re getting instead is a superficial duel about character–and, worse, one that’s based on the largely false premise that the better man can better “manage” the economy back to health.
The meme of the day in journo-world is that President Obama has stumbled at the outset of the general election campaign. The evidence for this? Well, uh, there isn’t very much, really–except that a few Democrats have criticized his campaign’s attacks on Mitt Romney’s record at Bain Capital and that Obama’s fundraising is merely humongous, instead [...]
When President Obama endorsed gay marriage earlier this month, the media grappled with two basic political questions: Was his personal “evolution” a case of a politician transparently following a national trend toward accepting same-sex unions (accelerated, perhaps, by his chatty No. 2), and would it hurt his re-election chances by alienating socially conservative voters like [...]
President Obama’s goal at the NATO summit this week is looking increasingly clear: wrap up U.S. troops’ combat role over the coming year, and get the allies to pay more money to enable the Afghan military to fill the gap. All signs are that NATO will agree to the first of those two goals Monday in Chicago.
Fox News is slightly less predictable than its reputation–there’s Shep Smith, and Bill O’Reilly can surprise–but nothing on television resembles authoritarian state-run media quite like Hannity. Nothing about Sean Hannity’s nightly show is either fair or balanced; much of it feels like the product of the Republican National Committee, and some of it feels like [...]
Any one remember sending their left overs to Africa? Not so long ago, that food aid consisted of massive amounts of random extra food that developed countries would send to the developing world in response to crises – mostly to rot on airport tarmacs for lack of distribution. On Friday, President Obama hopes to show [...]
Any last hope that this year’s election would be anything but an unprecedented wallow in muck, misstatement and disrespect was lost Wednesday, at a neighborhood spaghetti joint on the border between Ohio and West Virginia.
The much-heralded and long-awaited Obama campaign media attack on Mitt Romney began Monday with a reporter conference call and the release of two videos bemoaning the pain caused after Romney’s former private equity firm, Bain Capital, took over a Missouri steel company called GST Steel. The effort is textbook negative politics, from the sympathetic white [...]
Forget the particulars of JPMorgan’s $2 billion blunder, if it might have been stopped by a robust Volcker Rule or who would’ve done what differently. Here’s what you need to know about how the incident relates to the presidential campaign: Are tougher financial rules popular? Yes. Are people convinced the Dodd-Frank financial reform law completely [...]
The week began here on Swampland with Mark Halperin’s optimistic dispatch from Chicago, “Why The Obama Campaign Is Confident About Beating Romney.” So perhaps it is appropriate that the week get bracketed by a report by William Galston, a Democratic strategist who has worked for Bill Clinton, Al Gore and Walter Mondale, among others. His [...]
