Obama Retools 2008 Machine for Tough RunBy JEFF ZELENY and JIM RUTENBERG
CHICAGO — Saddled with a faltering economic recovery, President Obama is rebuilding the campaign machinery that vaulted him into office, hoping it can overcome the challenges of persistently high unemployment and a fractured coalition of supporters.
Under the cover of an intensifying Republican nominating contest, the Obama campaign’s top fund-raisers gathered for their first meeting here last week. To galvanize them, they were shown a presentation of potential rivals, including Sarah Palin, and given access to senior advisers to the president, including the White House chief of staff, William M. Daley.
They pledged to reach a fund-raising goal of $60 million for the campaign and party before June 30 as a first installment to create a state-by-state organization. Their goals include reactivating the network of faithful supporters, registering young and Latino voters and fighting restrictive new election laws in battleground states now led by Republicans.
While Mr. Obama will not fully engage in campaign activity until next year, aides said, he is embarking on weekly economic-focused trips throughout the summer. Doing so will allow him to use his bully pulpit to show that he is focused on addressing joblessness, the issue that more than any other could shape his electoral prospects and that Republicans are using to assert that his policies have failed.
He will also continue to be the main draw in a fund-raising campaign that has a goal of taking in at least $750 million by Election Day, which would match his 2008 figure even though he does not face the long primary battle that he did four years ago.
“I’m confident that the things that we can control, we will do a good job on,” said David Axelrod, the president’s senior political strategist, who returned to Chicago to help with the re-election effort.
The campaign is shaping up as a test of whether the much-vaunted organizing abilities of Mr. Obama and his team can offset the headwinds he faces. In battleground states, volunteers are fanning out by the thousands to reach out to neighbors who helped Mr. Obama in his first presidential campaign and persuade them to re-up.
Campaign officials said they know that in some cases, 2008 supporters will have to be coached to overcome what they see as disappointment that Mr. Obama has not achieved as much as they hoped. Several thousand times a week, still-committed volunteers knock on the doors of potential new recruits and neighbors involved four years ago to see if they will join in. The idea is to get face-to-face, neighbor-to-neighbor commitments that will have more staying power than those collected by strangers over the phone.
And in the re-election nerve center here, where a handmade calendar counts down the more than 520 days that remain before the election, campaign officials are sorting through census and polling data as they work to chart a variety of routes to the 270 electoral votes Mr. Obama will need to clinch a second term.
The early focus is on the same collection of states that Mr. Obama carried in 2008, with the exception of Indiana, which advisers believe is out of reach. But among these, strategists are digging deeper into Colorado, Florida, Nevada, North Carolina and Virginia — where census figures show surging populations of Hispanics and blacks, groups that supported Mr. Obama in 2008 by wide margins. The campaign sees possibilities for gains, for example, around Charlotte, N.C., which is where Mr. Obama chose to hold his party’s nominating convention next year, a decision that aides said signaled how serious they are about competing in North Carolina.
So far, the regrouping of the campaign is a methodical, nuts-and-bolts operation. It is oriented toward rekindling a grass-roots movement that had been the envy of Republicans in 2008 but has shown severe signs of strain over two years of partisan rancor in Washington and economic struggle across the country.
But for all of the planning, the biggest challenges of the election remain largely out of the organizers’ control, as the bleak jobs report on Friday showed.
So uncertain are the economic indicators that Mr. Obama’s aides say they have not fully settled on an overarching campaign theme for next year.
For now, the president faces a delicate task in arguing that things have improved under his watch when they remain so grim for so many — and that the programs he has put in place are working but need time to show their benefits. With their hopes dashed of substantial improvement in unemployment anytime soon, aides indicated that the theme was likely to be less “morning in America” and more “don’t change horses in midstream.”
Mr. Axelrod said: “We’re not going to be putting up a ‘Mission Accomplished’ sign. Part of the message is going to be we have to see these things through.”
In an interview at his Chicago consulting offices, Mr. Axelrod repeatedly said “stability” for the middle class would be central.
Advisers said the president was just beginning to plug into the campaign, and even then, sporadically. While the campaign manager here, Jim Messina, briefs him on the organizational effort, aides said Mr. Obama was not focused or very interested in the nitty-gritty details, for now.
“He’s doing his day job,” Mr. Messina said. “When he and I are talking about these things he wants to know, ‘What are we hearing on the ground?’ ”
But at the White House and in Chicago, aides are also keeping a close eye on the Republican field.
The president’s advisers are most closely watching the candidacies of Mitt Romney and Tim Pawlenty, but they are mindful that the rise of the Tea Party movement makes the course of the race hard to predict and makes it difficult to determine the strength of potential populist candidates like Ms. Palin.
“We’re doing our due diligence in terms of really understanding where this race is at and where people are at,” Mr. Axelrod said. “That’s the most important work we can do right now.”
In several interviews, aides to Mr. Obama said they were impressed with the early campaign tactics of Mr. Romney and Mr. Pawlenty. They said Mr. Romney had been wise to remain out of the fray for as long as possible — giving rivals less time to attack him — and Mr. Pawlenty wise to barnstorm important states, early, to become better known. Mr. Romney’s previous experience as a candidate, they suggested, could help him deal with the problems he faces.
They said they viewed former Gov. Jon M. Huntsman Jr. of Utah, until a few weeks ago Mr. Obama’s ambassador to China, as a potentially formidable candidate if he did not have to modulate his policy stances to navigate the Republican primary.
They said they would be ready to pounce on any candidate who switches positions in the hunt for the nomination as lacking core convictions, indicating that they were particularly keen on doing so against Mr. Romney, who is still facing such accusations from his 2008 campaign.
As Mr. Romney and other Republicans gear up their campaigns, they will bump into Mr. Obama’s troops, who are already on the ground.
*
JOE LEGAL AMERICAN vs LA RAZA JOSE ILLEGAL: Joe Legal Still Gets the Tax Bills To Pay For the LA RAZA Welfare State!
Los Angeles County alone puts out (property taxes) $600 MILLION per year to illegals on welfare!
*
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2011/05/joe-american-legal-vs-la-raza-jose.html
*
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2011/05/feds-allow-illegal-aliens-to-cross.html
*
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2011/06/ice-has-released-more-than-8000.html
*
8 Out of 10 Illegals Apprehended in 2010 Never Prosecuted
http://www.alipac.us/article-6162-thread-1-0.html
Eight Out of Ten Illegal Aliens Apprehended in 2010 Never Prosecuted, Says Border Congressman
Thursday, March 17, 2011
By Edwin Mora
Washington (CNSNews.com) – An illegal alien apprehended by the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency during the last fiscal year had an estimated 84 percent chance of never being prosecuted, according to figures compiled by the office of Rep. John Culberson (R-Texas).
Culberson submitted the figures for the record during a hearing Wednesday of the House Appropriations subcommittee on homeland security.
Of 447,731 illegal aliens apprehended by the U.S. Border Patrol during fiscal year 2010 (which ended last September), only 73,263 (16.4 percent) were prosecuted, according to the submitted data. That means that 374,468 illegal aliens that were taken into custody (83.6 percent) were never prosecuted
*
OBAMA HANDS TAX DOLLARS TO MEXICAN SUPREMACIST:
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2011/05/obama-first-hispandering-la-raza.html
*
In 2005, the Latino group known as La Raza (The Race) was given $15.2 million in U.S. federal grants.
SOME HISTORY OF THE MEXICAN FASCIST PARTY of LA RAZA:
ON THE GROWIN POWER OF “LA RAZA” FASCISM FOR MEX SUPREMACY
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2011/04/history-of-mexican-fascist-party-of-la.html
*
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2011/04/obamas-promise-to-illegals-catch.html
*
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2011/05/alipac-obama-sabotages-us-immigraiton.html
*
OBAMA’S ASSAULT ON BLACK AMERICANS – HIS LA RAZA AGENDA
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2011/05/obamas-assault-on-black-america.html
*
Obama Quietly Erasing Borders (Article)
Article Link:
http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=240045
*
Lou Dobbs Tonight
Monday, September 28, 2009
And T.J. BONNER, president of the National Border Patrol Council, will weigh in on the federal government’s decision to pull nearly 400 agents from the U.S.-Mexican border. As always, Lou will take your calls to discuss the issues that matter most-and to get your thoughts on where America is headed.
*
Three Convicted in Terror-Related Cases Later Granted U.S. Citizenship by Obama Administration | CNSnews.com
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2011/04/three-convicted-in-terror-related-cases.html
*
Obama Administration Caught Arming Mexican Illegal Alien Rebels
DISCUSS THIS NATIONAL PRESS RELEASE WITH OUR ONLINE ACTIVISTS AT...
http://www.alipac.us/ftopicp-1205835.html#1205835
BACKGROUND ARTICLES ON OPERATION GUN RUNNER AND FAST AND FURIOUS...
http://www.alipac.us/ftopict-230424.html
Update and Release on NC Victory against bogus Mexican ID for illegals
ALIPAC Responds to NC Legislator's Personal Attacks
http://www.alipac.us/article6196.html
*
“PUNISH OUR ENEMIES”… does that mean assault the legals of Arizona that must fend off the Mexican invasion, occupation, growing criminal and welfare state, as well as Mex Drug cartels???
OBAMA TELLS ILLEGALS “PUNISH OUR ENEMIES”
Friends of ALIPAC,
Each day new reports come in from across the nation that our movement is surging and more incumbents, mostly Democrats, are about to fall on Election Day. Obama's approval ratings are falling to new lows as he makes highly inappropriate statements to Spanish language audiences asking illegal alien supporters to help him "punish our enemies."
*
WHILE BARACK OBAMA GIVES HIMSELF A B+ (HIS BANKSTERS GAVE HIM THE GRADE) JUDICIAL WATCH’S GRADE IS A BIT MORE REALISTIC:
JUDICIAL WATCH.org
With trillion dollar bailouts, government-run healthcare, banks and car companies, ACORN corruption, attacks on conservative media, illegal alien amnesty, unprecedented and dangerous new rights for terrorists, perks for campaign donors—this is the Obama legacy—and we haven't even gotten through the first year of his presidency!
No comments:
Post a Comment