The Obama campaign is confident that it has time to convince the public that the economy and employment are recovering fast enough to enable a late election comeback. “We have six to eight months to do it and that gets us to Election Day,” said a top Democratic adviser to the campaign. In past election cycles, most notably 1992, economic recoveries have taken almost a year to settle in before the public noticed or gave credit to the president. But the fast pace of the news, driven by the Internet, and short memories of voters are giving hope to the Obama campaign.
“We are starting to win on the message and we’re inching in the right direction,” said another adviser who also consults with Senate Democrats. And, he added, “Republicans don’t have a plan to deal with Obama optimism.”
Many Obama allies said they can see that optimism in his daily activities. While he used to be more sheltered, the president has stepped out in public more, walking to an art gallery and visiting the Washington Auto Show. And pollster John Zogby added that the campaign’s hopes aren’t far-fetched. “We seen things turn on a dime in the last election cycles,” he said. “If good economic news stays good, there will be plenty of time to feed that.”
Birth control fight threatens Democrats
Armed with a new weapon with which to battle President Obama and congressional Democrats, Republicans are aggressively building a campaign to use the administration’s demand that religious institutions provide birth control to employees against them.
The National Republican Congressional Committee, for example, is alerting supporters in a fundraising email that the president’s decision is another abuse of power. “The Obama administration’s decision to trample on the religious liberty of Christian charities — forcing them to provide free birth control — is a frightening sign of how far Democrats will go to impose their government takeover of health care. In a country founded on religious liberty, Democrats have now done the unthinkable,” said NRCC Executive Director Guy Harrison.
“This issue goes to the heart of everything that is wrong with the big government agenda Democrats are pursuing in Washington,” added NRCC spokesman Paul Lindsay. “What part of our lives with they violate next?”
A senior GOP source added, “This is not a passing problem for Obama and House and Senate Democrats. This is a permanent problem that everyone on the Democratic ballot is going to have to answer for,” said the adviser.
CNN calls CPAC a ‘petri dish’
The annual Conservative Political Action Conference had just started Thursday when CNN angered some prominent players by comparing it to a cauldron of bacteria. Just before noon, two on-air reporters called CPAC, meeting in Washington through Saturday, a “conservative petri dish,” an image disgusting to some.
Reporter Peter Hamby, talking about the conference and its possible reaction to Mitt Romney, said, “It will be interesting to see in this kind of conservative petri dish how Mitt Romney is received and how his challengers are received too.” Anchor Suzanne Malveaux reacted with, “I love that, conservative petri dish. That’s a great way to describe it.”
Conservative media watchers started emailing expressions of outrage immediately. Brent Baker, vice president of research and publications at the Media Research Center, told us: “We are not the Ebola virus, but that seems as if it’s how CNN sees conservatives.” A CNN spokesperson explained that Hamby “was simply making an analogy that significant ideas emerge from this conference.”
Paul Bedard, The Examiner’s Washington Secrets columnist, can be contacted at [email protected]. His column appears each weekday in the Politics section and on washingtonexaminer.com.
