Democracy | Economy | News-Opinion
Obama Should Forget About Dogs And Focus On Jobs
Jonathan Alter, Bloomberg View, Op-Ed - Stuart Stevens, who is Mitt Romney’s chief strategist, is also a novelist and memoirist, and last week he offered me a couple of bon mots that help frame the challenge President Barack Obama faces as the economy sputters.
“They think this campaign is ‘Travels with Charley,’ Stevens says. “We think it’s more ‘The Grapes of Wrath.’”
“Travels with Charley” is John Steinbeck’s gentle quasi-memoir of traveling across the country in 1960 with his poodle. “The Grapes of Wrath,” for those Americans who slept through eighth-grade English, is his searing novel of the migrant Joad family in the Depression.
The crack was aimed in part at Stevens’ opposite number, David Axelrod, who in January famously tweeted a picture of the Democratic president with his dog Bo in a car and the message: “How loving owners transport their dogs.” Axelrod was exploiting the oft-told story of the Republican Romney putting the family dog Seamus in a kennel on the roof of the car en route to Canada.
Stevens insists that this election will have everything to do with the economy and nothing to do with how Romney treated his dog, and his second quip reflects the same analysis in a more positive context. “They think the election is about eHarmony.com,” he says, referring to the dating website devoted to measuring compatibility. “We think it’s about Monster.com,” the job-finder site.
This is part of the Boston team’s effort to make the balloting a rehire-or-fire referendum on the president’s economic performance. The Chicago team, of course, wants the whole thing to be a choice between a president you like and trust to be on the side of the middle class, and a candidate you don’t.
Obviously, any election involving an incumbent is both a referendum and a choice, but this one has recently become more of a referendum than Chicago would care to admit.
The president had shifted early this year from a 1948 Harry Truman-style attack on the “Do-Nothing” Congress to a modified 1984 Ronald Reagan-style “Morning in America” message, about the economy rebounding after the crisis Obama inherited. Now, given the dispiriting economic news, it’s back to 1948, with a little of George H. W. Bush’s 1988 attacks on the competence of a former Massachusetts governor (Michael Dukakis) and George W. Bush’s 2004 attacks on a flip-flopping Massachusetts stiff (John Kerry) thrown in.
The president’s poll numbers aren’t down much yet, but just wait. Even if Obama fully inhabits the role of Trumanesque brawler that liberals hunger for (and which doesn’t come naturally to him), sooner or later he’ll need to adjust his strategy.
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