“It was very scary,” said Chris Sinclair, a strategist for Billie Redmond, the Republican candidate for mayor in Raleigh. “You don’t know what’s going on until you wake up after Election Day and go, ‘Oh my gosh, what happened?’ ”
What happened was that candidates supported by Democrats trounced Republicans in the Raleigh and Charlotte mayoral races this fall, and even wrested control of the Wake County school board from Republicans associated with the Tea Party.
It was only after the damage was done that local party leaders learned of the hidden hand of thousands of Obama for America volunteers and staff members. Never publicizing their work, they went door-to-door across the state, successfully getting their voters out to the polls in a highly effective dry run for 2012.
“I have said to all of my Republican friends, ‘This is real,’ ” Mr. Sinclair said of the Obama organization. “I’ve seen it; I’m coming off the front lines — it ain’t fun and we better be ready.”
Mr. Obama’s aides point to the victories in North Carolina and elsewhere as vindication of their insistence that all is not as bleak for them as the Democratic chatter has it. But, in a series of interviews about their strategy for the year ahead, they also indicated that they knew they were in for a feisty slog, one that would look and feel quite different from Mr. Obama’s first, uplifting presidential campaign.
Back in the short-lived “recovery summer” of 2010, Mr. Obama and his aides were looking at a version of Ronald Reagan’s 1984 “Morning in America” campaign. Now, with unemployment stubbornly at 9 percent and consumer confidence at or near record lows, they are settling on a strategy that incorporates the combativeness of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1936 drive, the anti-Congress zeal of Harry S. Truman’s 1948 campaign and the disciplined focus of George W. Bush’s 2004 blitz against Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts.
The result is not your college-age daughter’s Obama campaign of hopeful, transcendent politics. If 2008 was about lifting Mr. Obama up, 2012 will have at least some strong element of dragging down his Republican opponent (who the campaign believes will most likely be Mitt Romney). If 2008 was about “Yes We Can” and limitless possibility, 2012 will be to some degree about why we couldn’t (“Republican intransigence”), and why we shouldn’t, at least when it comes to anything the Republican nominee proposes (“His party got us here in the first place”). As Mr. Obama recently told a group of supporters in the deflated liberal bastion of San Francisco, “The Hope poster is kind of faded and a little dog-eared.”
David Axelrod, the president’s senior political strategist, put it this way to me, “The country has gone through a very difficult time, and any incumbent is going to bear some dings for that.” Expressing optimism nonetheless, he added, “It’s a closely divided country, so by definition it’s going to be a close race.”
The Message
As his team sets out in earnest for Mr. Obama’s re-election, they tried to find a guide in history.
So there was a session with the historian Michael Beschloss at a White House staff retreat at Fort McNair last spring, where he walked them through various elections of the past.
And the Obama campaign manager, Jim Messina, has studied the losing stay-the-course campaign of George Bush in 1992 and the winning stay-the-course re-election of his son in 2004.
Jim Rutenberg is a national political correspondent for The New York Times.
Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/27/sunday-review/Team-Obama-Gears-Up-for-2012.html
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