Obama's New Election Strategy

Inside the Obama re-election campaign. We’ll hear a deep report on how the president’s team hopes to get the job done.

Last time out it was hope and change and a crumbling economy under a Republican president that put Democrat Barack Obama in the White House. Now it’s 2012. Re-election campaign time. Challenger Mitt Romney is out of the primary woods, swelling in the polls, loaded with cash. And Team Obama is steering into battle. Hope is still a message. But fear is a message weapon this time, too. The campaign is pushing fear of Romney as killer capitalist. Of Romney as rich and retro. Uncaring.

This hour, On Point: inside the Obama re-election campaign, and the strategy this time.
-Tom Ashbrook

John Heilemann, national affairs editor at  New York Magazine.  He is co-author of "Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime."  His new article in New York Magazine is "Hope: the Sequel."

New York Magazine "The Obama effort at disqualifying Romney will go beyond painting him as excessively conservative, however. It will aim to cast him as an avatar of revanchism. 'He’s the fifties, he is retro, he is backward, and we are forward—that’s the basic construct,' says a top Obama strategist."

Politico "'The problem he’s got this time is … the enthusiasm,' said veteran analyst Charlie Cook. 'People can dislike Romney all day long. If [Obama’s supporters] don’t show up, what in the hell difference does it make that everybody likes him?'”