Romney’s Favorables Rising Despite Attacks
By Chris Stirewalt
Power Play
Published May 18, 2012
FoxNews.com
“I hope that our campaigns can respectively be about the future and about issues and about a vision for America. I’ve been disappointed in the president’s campaign to date, which is focused on character assassination.”
-- Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney when asked by reporters about a rejected proposal to a billionaire political activist to run an ad campaign reminding voters of the decades President Obama spent in the Chicago congregation of Rev. Jeremiah Wright.
The two most important questions in any presidential re-election bid are these: Do we want to keep the guy we’ve got and is the alternative acceptable?
Americans pretty clearly would like something different than what they’ve got. The president has been on the wrong side of the electorate since 2009 when he began the push for his health law, and the sputtery economy has reinforced the main doubt about Obama in 2008: that he wasn’t up to the job.
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Obama’s problem is the strong suspicion among voters that someone with more experience and more knowledge of the economy could have avoided the pitfalls of the past 40 months. Liberals and conservatives disagree about the remedies, but on the big issues of the day; the economy, the health law, Afghanistan, debt , etc.; the status quo is deemed unacceptable. The best the president’s team can muster is to say that Obama staved off something much worse and, having trained on the job for four years, will do better next time.
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Obama is in the company of the other five incumbents: Harry Truman, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, George H.W. Bush and his son. The public is grouchy and certainly open to the idea of a change. Obama’s case is particularly difficult because he promised so much – cut the deficit in half, create 7 million jobs, hyper-transparency, ban lobbyists from his inner circle, etc. – and then failed to deliver.
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The best bit of news for Mitt Romney is that his Gallup favorability rating has just crested 50 percent, only 2 points behind the president. Better still, Romney’s negative rating is lower than Obama’s – 46 percent to 41 percent. Much of Romney’s 11-point rise since February can be attributed to the end of the bruising Republican primary process. Not only have Republicans coalesced, but the daily news cycle is no longer dominated by reporters gleefully repeating the latest attacks from Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich.
Moderates and independents are open to the idea of a Romney presidency. They may not find him as likable as Obama, but they find him acceptable. That’s why Romney’s first general election ad asks voters to imagine “Day One” of a Romney president: See, it’s not scary, it might even be kind of nice.
Obama, meantime is working overtime to make Romney unacceptable. Lots of attack ads and frothy, personal jabs by Vice President Joe Biden in the Ohio Valley. Obama still believes Biden is a good emissary to the blue-collar, white voters who distrust the president.
Good article! More here: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2012/05/18/romneys-favorables-rising-despite-attacks/
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