hurricanemaxi
Joined: 10 Aug 2011
Posts: 120
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 Posted: Wed Dec 14, 2011 12:51 am Post subject: Obama Aides Say Long GOP Race an Advantage |
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President Barack Obama’s re-election advisers say Republicans are likely to face a drawn-out primary contest and that their analysis of public polls shows Mitt Romney would be a tougher general-election opponent than Newt Gingrich.
David Axelrod, Obama’s chief political adviser, and campaign manager Jim Messina highlighted in a briefing for reporters what they said was the president’s 7-percentage-point advantage over Gingrich in aggregated national polls, compared with a 2-point margin over Romney.
While declining to say who they’d rather run against, both indicated that a contentious contest between the former speaker of the House and the former Massachusetts governor that push the two candidates toward appealing to the most conservative primary voters would make the eventual Republican nominee easier to run against.
“They’re being tugged to the right every day,” David Axelrod, a campaign adviser, told reporters in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters in Washington. “They’re mortgaging themselves for the general by tacking as far as they are.”
The 2012 election campaign will take place against the backdrop of an economy still struggling to emerge from the worst recession in seven decades. While employers added 120,000 jobs to their payrolls last month and unemployment fell to 8.6 percent, the jobless rate will average 8.7 percent in 2012, according to the median forecast by economists surveyed by Bloomberg News from Dec. 2-8. Obama’s approval rating in Gallup’s daily tracking poll has been hovering at about 45 percent since late May.
No ‘Slam Dunk’
In an address to fundraisers today in Washington, Obama said he will have to “fight” to win re-election.
“It’s not a slam dunk,” Obama said.
Axelrod argued that voters will take into account the magnitude and origins of the recession and Obama’s latest proposals to spur economic growth. “This is not an ordinary year and you can’t apply ordinary models,” he said.
Neither Axelrod nor Messina would predict whether Gingrich or Romney would emerge at the Republican presidential nominee. They cited the many lead changes in the early campaign as other candidates, such as Texas Governor Rick Perry and businessman Herman Cain, have risen to front-runner status only to drop as they made stumbles while campaigning or in debates.
“Whether it’s Romney or Gingrich or if someone else were to surprise us again, the debate is going to be largely the same because the economic theory on their side is largely the same,” Axelrod said.
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