President Barack Obama is running for re-election in 2012. Bradley C. Bower/Bloomberg President Obama may have launched his reelection campaign earlier this week but he and his aides have given little indication about the message on which that campaign will be based.
Read between the lines, however, the first faint traces of the message have begun to emerge.
The first clue came in the two-minute web video released by the campaign to coincide with Obama filing papers with the Federal Election Commission to allow him to raise money for a 2012 bid
“I don’t agree with Obama on everything,” says a man from North Carolina identified as “Ed”. “But I respect him and trust him.”
Then, in an energy-themed event in Philadelphia on Wednesday, Obama reiterated that sentiment — hearkening back to a line he used during the 2008 campaign.
“I said, ‘I am not a perfect man and I will not be a perfect president,’” Obama reminded the audience. “But I can promise you this: I will always tell you where I stand. I will be honest with you about the challenges we face and how we can solve these problems.”
The emergence — or re-emergence — of the “no one’s perfect” message suggests that the Obama campaign wants to do two things simultaneously heading into 2012: acknowledge that his first term had its fair share of bumps and play into the fact that, through it all, the American public still likes him.
Let’s take the second point first.
In a March Pew poll, 58 percent of people had a favorable impression of the President on a personal level while 39 percent had an unfavorable view of him. In that same survey his job approval rating was 51 percent while disapproval stood at 39 percent.
Those numbers are in keeping with a long-term trend for President Obama; his policies are often less popular than he is.
That reality gets us back to the first part of the Obama messaging strategy.
Knowing that he retains a considerable amount of personal goodwill among independents, the Obama campaign will try to leverage those positive feelings into a reelection argument that focuses more on the personal than the policy.
In many ways, that’s a return to the Obama messaging of 2008. Because he had a very limited record on which to run, Obama focused the campaign on the idea that he — and not any specific policy for which he advocated — was the key to transforming the wy Washington worked.
Of course, Obama now has a record he will need to run on and the 2010 election proved that some of his policies — the health care bill most especially — were not particularly popular with electorally critical independent voters. (Democrats lost independents by 19 points in 2010 after winning them by 18 points in the 2006 midterms.)
While the White House has continued to insist that the health care bill can be turned into a political positive by the time 2012 rolls around, the focus on Obama the person (and, left unsaid but not unimportant in this conversation, the historical figure) is an insurance policy of sorts for this White House.
Political independents, much less so than partisans, tend to not be all that motivated by a candidate’s specific positions on issues. What typically motivates them more are personal traits — does the candidate understand the problems of people like you, does he seem to have the country’s best interests at heart etc. And that sentiment is where Obama hopes to make political hay with the “not perfect but worth trusting” idea.
With 2012 almost certain to pull out both parties’ bases in equal fervor, independents will likely be the deciding factor in deciding whether Obama returns to the White House for a second term. It’s no surprise then that the early messaging of his re-election bid is focused squarely on that group.
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