...“C’mon. Let’s get real,” an exasperated David Axelrod, Obama’s top campaign strategist, said when asked if Obama’s attacks are boomeranging. “Romney’s been beating us up in a very direct and personal way for a year. This is a guy who’s offering himself to the country as a kind of economic savior, as a wizard. It behooves us to pull the curtain back, and that’s what we’re going to do.”
Axelrod disputed the revisionist notion that Obama ran a strictly positive campaign four years ago — just ask Hillary Clinton and John McCain if they agree that Obama played patty-cake — and said the campaign is doing what it did in 2008, drawing a contrast between Obama and the opposition. The difference now, he said, is that the pundit class is holding the president to a phony, Catch-22 standard.
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But several top Democrats interviewed by POLITICO said Obama’s recent attacks — including his long defense, at a press conference in Chicago last week, of his decision to target Bain — may further damage a hope-and-change persona already dented by three years of partisan combat and economic turmoil.
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Republicans, and a few Democrats, see an ominous downward trend for Obama and say his direct attacks on Romney are eroding a robust personal popularity rating north of 50 percent, his top electoral asset.
“Obama’s got this Reagan thing going, the 1983, 1984 dynamic — he’s personally popular even though people aren’t personally enthralled with his policies or performance,” said Frank Luntz, a veteran Republican pollster who thinks Romney’s lack of personal appeal guarantees a deadlocked race until the end. “But his campaign has gone very negative, and at some point, people are going to stop giving him the benefit of the doubt.”
...“The problem he’s got this time is … the enthusiasm,” said veteran analyst Charlie Cook. “People can dislike Romney all day long. If [Obama’s supporters] don’t show up, what in the hell difference does it make that everybody likes him?”
The generalized ennui is less dangerous for Romney, who seems to be the beneficiary of low expectations. His supporters are united, according to recent polls, by the common desire to oust Obama.
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Obama's campaign is not working because his hypocrisy is showing and the media is not ignoring it. It is too obvious to ignore and the voters are also reacting to it. He has a record he can't defend and he is trying to define Romney in ways that are not persuasive. There are many in the media who still want to support him and probably will by the fall, but right now they are resisting his charms.
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