With Rick Santorum safely out of the way, Barack Obama’s re-election campaign has focused all of its weapons on the Romney campaign. In truth, the Obama campaign has assumed that Romney would be the nominee for well in excess of a year – hence their support for Occupy Wall Street, a movement geared toward attacking “the 1%,” people who had worked on “Wall Street,” and capitalists. In other words, people like Mitt Romney.
As Ben Smith and Jonathan Martin reported at Politico back in August 2011, “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 … 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.” As one Democratic strategist put it, “he will have to kill Romney.”
To that end, look for the Obama campaign to resurrect the tried-and-true Bain Capital attacks, which smeared Romney as a job-killer; David Axelrod is already using the Occupy rhetoric to smack Romney, stating, “His is very much the profile of what we’ve seen in the last decade on Wall Street. He was about making money.”
They will call him a phony and a flip-flopper; Axelrod called his political career “Extreme Makeover.” They will try to paint Romney as the second coming of John Kerry, another Massachusetts politician widely perceived as willing to say anything to get ahead.
If you thought the Republican primaries were ugly, get ready: the Obama re-election campaign will be twice as ugly. And Romney is in their sights.
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