PRESIDENT BARACK Obama will travel to Baltimore and Philadelphia today as he struggles to right his wobbly campaign and put the disastrous first 10 days of June behind him.
Events though seem to conspire against the US leader. A CNN poll published yesterday showed him tied with Republican candidate Mitt Romney at 45 per cent.
In a special election in Arizona today, the Republican candidate has campaigned on an anti-Obama platform.
The election, to fill the seat of Democratic congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, who was severely wounded in a shooting rampage in 2011, is seen as a test similar to last week’s gubernatorial recall in Wisconsin.
To add insult to injury, even the “Obama Girl” whose video Crush on Obama went viral in the 2008 campaign, now says she doesn’t know for whom she will vote.
“I’m not as excited as I was the last time, that’s for sure,” Amber Lee Ettinger said.
The Obama and Romney campaigns have released duelling campaign videos, highlighting the candidates’ respective gaffes on June 8th.
Obama’s remark in an impromptu press conference that “the private sector is doing fine” has been seized upon by Republicans as proof that he does not understand the economy and is out of touch.
Obama compounded the damage by stating later that day: “It’s absolutely clear the economy is not doing fine” but failing to explain the discrepancy.
The 54-second ad broadcast by the Romney campaign shows Obama uttering the fatal phrase four times, intercut with images of downtrodden Americans saying things such as “We’ve seen layoffs and cutbacks” and “I’m living on $200 a month” against a background of doom music.
Obama had qualified his remark about the private sector with the observation that “weaknesses in our economy have to do with state and local government”.
This led Romney to commit his gaffe, appearing to attack three popular professions: “He [Obama] says we need more firemen, more policemen, more teachers. Did he not get the message of Wisconsin?”
The Obama campaign’s video begins with newspaper headlines about cops and firefighters being laid off, then segues into the Romney remark – “Romney economics: it didn’t work then [when Romney was governor of Massachusetts]. It won’t work now,” it intones.
Things started going wrong for the Obama campaign on June 1st, when the monthly jobs report showed only 69,000 new jobs in May, driving the unemployment rate back up to 8.2 per cent.
Then Republican Scott Walker won the Wisconsin election, becoming the first US governor to withstand a recall and leading to Republican talk of doing away with public sector unions in the US altogether.
It will be awkward for Obama to ask Wisconsinites for their vote in November, after refusing to campaign for the Democratic candidate. He won Wisconsin by 14 points in 2008 – it is now considered a swing state.
Former president Bill Clinton deepened Obama’s woes by telling a television interviewer the economy is so fragile that the Bush- era tax cuts should be extended to avoid the US falling off the “fiscal cliff” – $600 billion in automatic cuts, which would send the economy into recession – at the end of the year. Clinton is campaigning for Obama but his pronouncement – for which he later apologised – is diametrically opposed to Obama’s policy.
It was then reported that Romney raised $16 million or 30 per cent more than the Obama campaign in May. Predictions that Obama’s would be “the first billion-dollar campaign” began to look doubtful.
Republicans raised an uproar over books and press reports detailing Obama’s assassination campaign against al-Qaeda and his cyber war against Iran, accusing the administration of leaking classified information to “make Obama look tough”.
The White House could have defied them to say what secrets had been divulged.
Instead, attorney general Eric Holder assigned two US attorneys to lead criminal investigations into alleged leaks. One of the cruellest assessments came from Peggy Noonan, a conservative commentator for the Wall Street Journal.
“President Obama’s problem now isn’t what Wisconsin did, it’s how he looks each day,” Noonan wrote, “careening around, always in flight, a superfluous figure. No one even looks to him for leadership now. He doesn’t go to Wisconsin, where the fight is. He goes to Sarah Jessica Parker’s place, where the money is.”
Obama will attend a fundraiser at the star’s New York home on Thursday.
Only a few months ago, the US economy was adding 200,000 jobs a month. Romney battled through a messy primary season that looked certain to leave scars, but now Romney’s gaffes are all but forgotten and Obama’s remark about the private sector is widely compared to Republican senator John McCain’s comment in 2008 that “the fundamentals of our economy are strong” as the global financial system teetered on the brink of collapse.
