The 2012 Obama campaign is surprisingly inept

John Podhoretz:

So how good is the Obama reelection campaign going to be? 

By “good,” I mean competent, able to plan elaborate events and respond quickly and effectively to fast-breaking news. Obama supporters have every reason to be concerned — which is not to say Romney supporters have any reason to be complacent. 

Today’s case in point is a two-minute attack ad about job losses at a steel plant that had been bought by Mitt Romney’s firm, Bain Capital, in 1993. The very tough ad features workers blaming Romney personally for the loss of 750 jobs. 

To be sure, Romney ran a takeover firm that eventually shuttered some companies, and his record at Bain is very much a fair political issue. But the attack in question is surprisingly weak.

For one thing, Romney had left Bain Capital two years before the firm declared bankruptcy to take over management of the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, so he wasn’t involved in closing the steel business. 

Katrina Trinko of National Review reported almost immediately after the ad’s release that Bain partner Jonathan Lavine was in charge of the steel plant when it declared bankruptcy in 2002. Lavine is now a top Obama campaign bundler who has raised between $100,000 and $200,000 for the president this year. 

For another, the firm made a specific product that was highly vulnerable to foreign competition; it operated under staggeringly favorable union-shop rules that, like many other US steel plants, helped damage its competitiveness.

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 There is a similar second-day-story problem for Obama in the way his decision to endorse same-sex marriage is playing out — although, in this case, the problem may not be so much with the campaign as with Obama’s head-shaking choice for vice president. Joe Biden’s logorrhea was apparently responsible for forcing Obama’s public endorsement of a divisive issue without adequate preparation. 

What you might not know from the blinding media haloes encircling the president’s head is that Obama’s gay-marriage endorsement isn’t very popular. The early polling suggests that twice as many undecided voters are saying they’re less likely to vote for him because of it than say that they’re more likely to vote for him because of it. That’s a terrible polling stat.
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Considering how effective his 2008 campaign was, it is surprising that this one is so bad so far.  But then considering how poor a job he has done as President perhaps it should not be a surprise.  He is also up against a much more effective crowd sourcing GOP effort that quickly responds to his messages and deflates them.

Others are starting to notice the problem with Obama's campaign:

Some Dems Fretting Over Team Obama's Ineptitude 

Arrogance and ineptitude are a deadly combination.