Early Obama Attack, No Early Romney Defense

At Politico, Jonathan Martin and Glenn Thrush preview their latest campaign e-book.  During the summer, the Obama campaign made an early attack to define Romney.  As mentioned earlier, Romney did not push back.

• At a late May meeting in the White House’s Roosevelt Room, Obama signed off on a risky plan to drop a significant portion of their cash, more than $100 million, on a summer assault on Romney. This meant raiding the campaign’s fall budget, potentially robbing it of cash down the homestretch. That entailed slashing broadcast ad spending in the final weeks to a fraction of what Romney’s was expected to be — a mere 1,500 “points,” in advertising parlance, when the challenger was expected to hammer home as much as 5,500 points over the same period.
“It was an untested proposition, if you could go naked at the end of a campaign and still win,” Plouffe told the authors of this book. “We thought it would work because voters would be so saturated in October, and they would have just lived through the debates. … Better to define Romney early and force him to playcatch-up. … It was a gut-wrenching decision, really. You were staring into the abyss.”

Obama said “OK. Go for it” — but he never stopped fretting about the campaign’s cash situation and told aides he never wanted to go into debt as Hillary Clinton had done in 2008.

• Romney had a way to combat the summer onslaught but never seriously considered it: tapping his own multi-million dollar fortune. But his advisers, recalling the bad publicity the candidate got for steering tens of millions of his own dollars into his 2008 campaign, were uneasy about being perceived as trying the buy the White House. Campaign manager Rhoades never even broached the topic of self-funding with Romney, according to a senior campaign official.

Axelrod and Cutter Look Back at the Romney Campaign

Lynn Sweet reports on a David Axelrod forum at the University of Chicago:

At a U. of C. IOP forum last Monday, Axelrod said Romney, by going hard right in the GOP primary, "made a series of Faustian bargains" that helped him clinch the nomination -- but made it harder to win the November election.

Axelrod revealed several developments that surprised him during the campaign:

† The pro-Romney SuperPACs did not hit Obama early by airing attack ads. They "spent an unbelievable amount of money in this race" but "didn't go on the air until May against us. Our greatest fear, frankly, was that they would go up and use their money to attack us in the first three months of the year when we really weren't fortified to respond. I mean, our air defenses were not ready, we just did not have the resources to do that. They gave us a pass."
† The Romney campaign "did not flesh him out in a more substantial way when they had the opportunity to do so," leaving an opening for Obama's team to define his Bain Capital "business practices" as good for Romney and his investors -- but not for most voters.
† Axelrod did not expect Romney to tap Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) as his running mate. "For the longest time I thought he might pick Tim Pawlenty," he said of the former Minnesota governor. Or Ohio Sen. Rob Portman, to help in that battleground state. The selection of Ryan "played very much to the base of the party at a time he needed to broaden his appeal."

The Huffington Post reports on remarks by spokesperson Stephanie Cutter.  Like Karl Rove, she was surprised by the lack of pushback on the Bain issue.

"I never understood why they never pushed back on our attacks on his business experience," Cutter said at the seventh annual RootsCamp conference for progressive organizers in Washington, D.C. "He ran largely on an argument that, 'I understand the real economy, I know how to fix this and the president doesn't -- he's never been in the real economy,' with his only credential his Bain experience."

The Obama campaign hammered Romney on Bain during the campaign, essentially painting the former Massachusetts governor as a corporate takeover artist who founded a firm that specialized in outsourced U.S. jobs.

While some prominent Democrats initially criticized the Obama campaign for "attacking private equity," the campaign didn't back down.

"We weren't making an argument ... that Bain was bad," Cutter said on Friday. "We were making an argument that this experience does not qualify you to be president of the United States or to understand the real economy. We obviously worked hard to tear that down, and they never built it back up. I never understood why."

Priorities USA Cyber-War

In cyberspace as in direct mail, Democratic Super PACs appear to have spent their money more wisely than their GOP counterparts.  Politico reports:

Priorities USA had a laser focus during the presidential election: to define Mitt Romney as an out-of-touch, super-rich, ruthless business profiteer with little regard for the middle class and poor.

The pro-Obama super PAC accomplished this, according to interviews with Priorities leaders and confidential documents obtained by POLITICO, through a multi-pronged Internet strategy — targeting certain groups of Web users, buying search terms on Twitter and Google like “47 percent” and “dressage,” and airing attack ads featuring laid-off workers and plant shutdowns blaming outsourcing during programming on Hulu and Pandora to reach younger voters.

“The hardest hits on the Bain stuff were not coming from the Obama campaign itself because Obama didn’t want to be the nasty guy,” said Liz Mair, online communications director for the Republican National Committee during the 2008 cycle. “They came from Priorities.”
...


The combined metrics underscore the sense that many GOP digital strategists had throughout the cycle that neither the Romney campaign nor allied outside groups used the Internet effectively.

“They didn’t understand how it worked,” said Eric Frenchman, a McCain 2008 digital strategist who ran the Web component of Rep. Michele Bachmann’s reelection bid this year. “The biggest disadvantage was they didn’t understand what buying online meant.”

[Bill] Burton shares the assessment of his rivals. “They made huge mistakes on how they spent their money,” he said. “They had a huge organization that had a tremendous amount of money and they squandered most of it.”

Coordination, Crossroads, and Romney

Non-coordination coordination does not always work, as we see in the Washington Post interview with Karl Rove:

Others in the Romney campaign, speaking on the condition of anonymity, were bitter that the super PACs didn’t do more to defend the Republican nominee and his business record, particularly in the late summer, when the campaign had run through its own primary-season funding.

“We didn’t have any air cover,” lamented one senior adviser.

That, Rove suggested, was the result of a missed signal.

The law forbids super PACs from coordinating with candidates, so it sets up an interaction that Rove compares to playing bridge, a game in which players make their moves based on cues from their partners. [See other analogies here.]

“We can’t talk to the campaigns,” he said. “But we’ve got to understand what the candidate’s message is by closely following their public statements and campaign activities, do a lot of research to understand what the weaknesses of their opponents are, and read the tea leaves.”

In July, after Obama and his allies began pounding Romney’s record at the private equity firm Bain Capital, Crossroads spent $9.3 million on ads in nine states, in which a female narrator asked: “What happened to Barack Obama? The press and even Democrats say his attacks on Mitt Romney’s business record are misleading, unfair and untrue.”

The response from the Romney campaign? Radio silence, which the Crossroads team read to mean the strategists in Boston did not believe engaging on that issue was important. So Crossroads quit running the spots.

POTUS and Private Equity

In July, CBS reported on an interview with the president:

"When some people question why I would challenge his Bain record, the point I've made there in the past is, if you're a head of a large private equity firm or hedge fund, your job is to make money," Mr. Obama said. "It's not to create jobs. It's not even to create a successful business - it's to make sure that you're maximizing returns for your investor. Now that's appropriate. That's part of the American way. That's part of the system. But that doesn't necessarily make you qualified to think about the economy as a whole, because as president, my job is to think about the workers. My job is to think about communities, where jobs have been outsourced."

At ABC, Jonathan Karl reports:

President Obama has spent much of the past six months hammering away at Mitt Romney’s career in the private equity business, but for a time, as a state senator in Illinois, Obama sang the praises of the private equity sector, saying it offered “the best opportunity for economic vitality” in Illinois.

“As many of you know venture capital and private equity is one of the key mechanisms by which we finance new businesses in the state of Illinois,” state Sen. Obama said in a speech before the Illinois Senate on May 30, 2003. “For a variety of reasons, Illinois has been lagging behind some of our competitor states in the formation of venture capital and its deployment in terms of seeding and funding new companies.”

To help make Illinois more competitive in attracting venture capital, Obama proposed the formation of a special task force on private equity – and made it clear he was doing it at the request of those in the business.

“This is an issue that has piqued the interest of various persons in the industry, and so they have asked that we form this Private Equity Task Force to examine these issues,” Obama said, according to an Illinois Senate transcript from May 2003.

Here’s a link to the transcript (Senator Obama’s speech begins on page 161)

The task force was created with Senate Resolution 89, a bill offered by then Sen. Obama that described private equity as the key driver of the state’s economy.

“The development of the private equity sector of the Illinois economy,” the resolution said, “offers the best opportunity for long-term economic vitality, for the expansion of jobs, for the improvement of productivity and a quality standard of living, and for providing the greatest number of citizens with genuine opportunity.”

American Crossroads v. Obama Attacks

American Crossroads has a new ad attacking the attacks on Romney.  The Wall Street Journal reports:

The Crossroads ad marks a departure for it and most other outside political groups. Until now, they have spent most of their money on such themes as criticizing Mr. Obama for the rising federal deficit. But the new ad is the first from Crossroads to mention Mr. Romney explicitly, and in defending him it serves a role that candidates traditionally have filled themselves.

...

The ad underscores an important feature of how the race is being financed. Outside GOP committees, along with Mr. Romney's campaign, are raising more money than their opponent, and plan to outspend Democrats this week on TV by about 2.5-to-1, according to figures provided by Democratic and Republican media-tracking sources.

But in spending by the campaigns themselves, Mr. Obama is putting more money into TV ads currently. Mr. Obama will spend more than $9.4 million on ads in the coming week, compared with $6.6 million by Mr. Romney. Since the unofficial start of the general election in mid-April, Mr. Obama has outspent Mr. Romney by about 3 to 1.

Campaign officials have suggested that, in part, the disparity is due to the fact that much of Mr. Romney's money was raised under rules that limit its use to the general election, once he becomes the nominee. Mr. Obama is bound by the same restriction, but only Mr. Romney faced an expensive primary campaign that ate into money he was raising.

The campaign won't say what fraction of Mr. Romney's cash is so encumbered.

Romney Draws on Obama, Who Draws on Brown

Sasha Issenberg writes at Slate:

In the primaries, Romney’s advisers had little confidence that there was much logic at all behind his rivals’ moves, and the two-time candidate outmaneuvered analytically amateurish opponents with well-plotted discipline and attention to detail. Now forced to play catch-up against a savvy incumbent, Romney’s team acknowledges they are not aiming to match what Obama has built in Chicago: A unique, in-house analytical empire that has developed an unrivaled capacity to churn through voter data and translate insights into tactics. Because of this capacity, Romney advisers assume that what they see the president doing in public must have a good deal of sense behind it. "The Obama team had the luxury of knowing exactly what they'd be doing on July 1, 2012 because they've been planning for six years—definitely three-and-a-half years,” says Zac Moffatt, Romney’s digital director. So instead of devoting their analytical energies to out-strategizing the president, Romney’s advisers are trying to hack Obama’s code and turn it against him.

As the dataset of Obama activity expands over the course of the campaign, the burden of finding those patterns will shift from the eyes of advisers huddled in weekly meetings to the statistical models they’ve written. Algorithms will test the association between vote goals and the candidates’ travel and ad placement, staring through Obama’s visible tactics to reveal a latent strategy beneath.

At the Los Angeles Times, David Lauter analyzes the Bain attacks as a way for Obama to turn white working-class voters away from Romney:

Obama aides have pointed to a couple of models, including the way California Gov. Jerry Brown defeated Meg Whitman, another wealthy corporate executive and a friend of Romney's, in 2010. Another is the way President George W. Bush's campaign portrayed Democratic Sen. John F. Kerry in 2004 as a rich elite who was out of touch with average Americans.

The Bain attacks further that strategy on two levels. The Obama campaign has been saying at least since January that companies Bain Capital took over had eliminated thousands of jobs. The Romney campaign's answer has been that Bain invested in those companies after 1999, when Romney left active management to run the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics.

That's where last week's attacks began. After the Boston Globe published an article that showed Romney had remained Bain's chief executive for three years after the Olympics, an argument over Bain's record quickly shifted to focus on Romney's truthfulness.

Romney's defense as it evolved over the weekend — that he had remained chief executive but hadn't taken an active role in management and had "retroactively resigned," as one advisor said, in 2002 — may only have reinforced in some voters' minds that his life and his concerns are far distant from theirs.

Romney's Role at Bain

The New York Times reports:

Indeed, no evidence has yet emerged that Mr. Romney exercised his powers at Bain after February 1999 or directed the funds’ investments after he left, although his campaign has declined to say if he attended any meetings or had any other contact with Bain during the period. And financial disclosures filed with the Massachusetts ethics commission show that he drew at least $100,000 in 2001 from Bain Capital Inc. — effectively his own till — as a “former executive” and from other Bain entities as a passive general partner.

An offering memorandum to investors in Bain’s seventh private equity fund that was circulated in June 2000 also suggests that Mr. Romney was no longer actively involved in managing firm investments at the time. The memorandum, first published by Fortune, provides background on the “senior private equity investment professionals of Bain Capital.” Eighteen managers are listed; Mr. Romney is not among them.

On another filing with Massachusetts officials, Bain Capital listed all of Bain’s directors and officers for 2001. The form lists Michael F. Goss as “president, managing director and chief financial officer,” along with seventeen other managing directors. Mr. Romney is not among them, suggesting that while he still owned Bain’s management company, he was not an officer of the company.

Filling Gaps in the White House Website, Part 80

Presidents typically don't get this far into the weeds with oppo against their challengers.

From an interview with Scott Thurman of WJLA-TV:

Thuman - What about Bain Capital? It's a big issue for the past 24 hours right now, and Mitt Romney's campaign says he left in '99, Yours says it's 2001. There's a significant difference. Is he being dishonest with the American public?

 Obama -Well, here's what I know: we were just talking about responsibility and as president of the United States it's pretty clear to me that I'm responsible for folks who are working in the federal government, and you know, Harry Truman said the buck stops with you...now my understanding is that Mr. Romney attested to the SEC multiple times that he was the chairman, CEO and president of Bain Capital. And I think most Americans figure if you're the chairman, CEO and president of a company that you are responsible for what that company does. Ultimately Mr. Romney is going to have to answer those questions because if he aspires to be president, one of the things you learn is you're ultimately responsible for the conduct of your operations. But again, that's probably a question that he's going to have to answer and I think that's a legitimate part of the campaign.

Oppo Week

USA Today reports:

President Obama is keeping up a drumbeat of skepticism over Mitt Romney's insistence — displayed in a blitz of TV interviews — that he stepped down from his private equity firm years earlier than federal records indicate.

Obama planned another day of campaigning in Virginia on Saturday, a state he won in 2008 but before that last supported a Democratic presidential nominee in 1964. Advisers said he would remind voters of the discrepancies between Securities and Exchange Commission filings and Romney's recollection of his role at the Boston-based firm.

The strategy follows calls by Democrats — and some Republicans — for Romney to release tax returns going back several years. Romney has said anew that he won't go beyond releasing his 2010 tax records and, before the election, his 2011 taxes.

"You can never satisfy the opposition research team of the Obama organization," Romney told CBS on Friday. In the same round of interviews in which he defended his account of his role at Bain, Romney said Obama owed him an apology for a top aide's suggestion that the SEC filings, if false, could bring a felony charge.

ABC reports:

In a non-descript Washington, DC office building within sight of the United States Capitol, a team of more than a dozen Democratic researchers have spent the last few months examining every nook and cranny of the records of several GOP vice presidential contenders.

The researchers work for the super PAC, American Bridge 21st Century, which is unveiling a new website on Friday called VeepMistakes.com. The site features more than 1,300 pages of opposition research and scores of video clips.

Political prognosticators can only speculate who is on Romney’s short-list, but now we know who the Democrats are preparing to target. The super PAC is shining their spotlight on three of the mostly likely contenders: former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, Ohio Sen. Rob Portman and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio. Their research files, which the group is making public for the first time, also offers a sneak peek at the attacks the Democrats are poised to use against whichever potential V.P. ultimately gets the nod from Romney

Bain Attacks

The New York Times reports:

Propelled by a torrent of blistering television advertisements, President Obama is successfully invoking Mitt Romney’s career at Bain Capital to raise questions about his commitment to the middle class, strategists in both parties say, as the candidates engage in a critical summer duel to set the terms for this fall.

Despite doubts among some Democrats about the wisdom of attacking Mr. Romney’s business career, Obama commercials painting him as a ruthless executive who pursued profits at the expense of jobs are starting to make an impact on some undecided voters, according to strategists from both sides, who differ on whether they are causing any substantial damage.

Factcheck.org reports:

 Obama accuses Romney in a series of TV ads of being a “corporate raider” who “shipped jobs to China and Mexico,” asking if voters want to elect an “outsourcer in chief.” But some of the claims in the ads are untrue, and others are thinly supported.

Bain Capital, the venture capital firm founded by Romney in 1984, is the focus of the Obama campaign’s attacks. There is no question that Bain invested in some companies that helped other companies outsource work and that some of that work went overseas. That was the core business for Modus Media and SMTC Corp. — two outsource companies featured in a June 21 article in the Washington Post that has been the basis of recent Obama TV ads. Bain also invested in U.S.-based companies that sold goods manufactured here and abroad, and some of those companies closed U.S. facilities and eliminated U.S. jobs.

But after reviewing numerous corporate filings with the Securities and Exchange
Commission, contemporary news accounts, company histories and press releases, and the
evidence offered by both the Obama and Romney campaigns, we found no evidence to support the claim that Romney — while he was still running Bain Capital — shipped American jobs overseas.

• One TV ad, called “Come and Go,” claims that Romney “shipped jobs to China and Mexico.” But two examples cited by the Obama campaign occurred after Romney left Bain. There’s no clear evidence that a third company shipped jobs to China under Romney.

• A second ad called “Revealed” mocks Romney’s tough talk about cracking down on China’s trade practices by saying “all he’s ever done is send them our jobs” and citing the Washington Post article. But the newspaper article contained no examples of U.S. jobs being shipped to China while Romney was working at Bain.

• The “Come and Go” ad casts Romney as a “corporate raider,” but that term, loaded with negative connotations, is simply inaccurate. Bain didn’t engage in hostile takeovers when Romney was at the helm.

• That ad also repeats the claim that as governor of Massachusetts, Romney was “outsourcing state jobs to India.” But it wasn’t the state that outsourced contracts. Rather, Romney vetoed a measure that would have prevented the state from doing business with a state contractor that was locating state customer-service calls in India.

Bain Attack #Fail

Rick Klein writes at ABC:

We all know that conservatives are skeptical of Mitt Romney, he of the shifting positions on social issues and infamous proclamations of not wanting to return to Reagan-Bush.

 But if you need evidence that the attacks on Romney’s record at Bain have backfired, and may be doing more to unite conservatives behind Romney more than anything Romney himself could have done, consider this partial list of those who are defending him — and chastising Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry for their “vulture capitalist” attacks:

Rush Limbaugh
Sean Hannity
Laura Ingraham
Jim DeMint
Karl Rove
Mike Huckabee
Rudy Giuliani
The US Chamber of Commerce
The Club for Growth
The Wall Street Journal editorial page

Peter Landers writes at The Wall Street Journal:

Newt Gingrich is calling on a political group backing his campaign to revise or withdraw a documentary attacking Mitt Romney’s work at Bain Capital.

The political action committee Winning Our Future created the 28-minute documentary, “King of Bain,” and is running ads based on it in South Carolina ahead of that state’s Jan. 21 primary.

The Gingrich statement came after Washington Post columnist Glenn Kessler this morning gave “King of Bain” his four-Pinocchio rating. Mr. Kessler accused the film makers of using “manipulative interviews” and other tactics to create a “highly misleading portrayal of Romney’s years at Bain Capital.”