Politics
Election 2012: President Obama re-election in doubt?
And campaign manager Jim Messina warned that GOP success in the Wisconsin recall, aided by independent group spending, confirmed that “all the outside money that’s poured into elections this cycle can and will change their outcome.”
“And it’s exactly what could happen on the national stage unless we can close the gap between special interests and ordinary people,” he said.
In 2004, it was the Democrats who had the big money operation on their side. Groups like America Coming Together and the Media Fund raised about US$200 million to help John Kerry’s presidential campaign with grass-roots organizing and advertising. But the donors who helped that effort, financier George Soros, film producer and donor to liberal causes Steve Bing and billionaire Peter Lewis, have vastly reduced their political participation or stayed away all together this time.
Democratic operatives say the long and combative Republican primary left some in their own party overconfident. Obama supporters expected Romney to emerge from the GOP contest bruised by attacks from his party and pigeonholed by his attempts to placate conservatives by shifting to the right on everything from immigration to foreign policy.
But five months from Election Day, several national polls show Obama and Romney locked in a tight race, as voters vent their frustrations over the nation’s economic woes. May figures showed that employers created a meager 69,000 jobs and the jobless rate ticked up to 8.2 percent. And this week, the Federal Reserve released data showing that median family net worth shrank in 2010 to levels not seen since 1992 after adjusting for inflation.
Obama campaign spokesman Ben LaBolt said the president’s team “always anticipated this would be a close and competitive election.”
But some strategists worry that time is running short. While many Democrats believe party loyalists will get more engaged as the election draws closer, other operatives say the terms of the election will be set over the next two months.
