A ... “we shall see” factor looms over what is arguably Obama’s crowning achievement: the Affordable Care Act. In passing a bill that provides near-universal health care to the American people, Obama succeeded where five previous presidents over the course of a century had failed. He did so against the advice of some of his closest aides and the fervent, united opposition of Republicans. The law manages not only to extend coverage to 32 million uninsured Americans but also to cut the deficit and put in place dozens of new policies and programs aimed at reducing health care costs, the single greatest driver of America’s long-term fiscal problems.
Yet the measure’s major effects are yet to be felt, and its ultimate fate is highly uncertain. Most of the law’s benefits, including subsidies for the uninsured, do not kick in until 2014. Little wonder, then, that voters have a hard time getting excited about the ACA. And the bill’s various experimental policy measures to control health care costs are just that— experiments that might or might not work. Moreover, the law might not survive a legal challenge that the Supreme Court is currently considering, and will almost certainly be killed or gutted if the Republicans are victorious in November.
You can understand, then, why Obama was afraid to make more than a glancing mention of the ACA in the State of the Union. But the lukewarm-to-hostile attitudes people have about the law now are likely to fade if he manages to get reelected. With four more years to oversee the implementation of the law and protect it against whatever the courts and congressional Republicans hurl at it, Obama can ensure that it will be politically and programmatically secure. The benefits will have started flowing, and businesses and the medical industry will have begun to adapt to it. Over time it will likely become as much a permanent fixture of American life as Social Security (Glastris 9-10).
In 2009, when the health care law was still being written, Sarah Palin coined the phrase "death panel" in a widely shared Facebook post. …
… that Aug. 7, 2009, social media post from the former Alaska governor and GOP vice presidential candidate included a dire warning:
"The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama's 'death panel' so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their 'level of productivity in society.' "
Conservative op-ed pages were on board. Talk radio, too. On his syndicated national radio program, Rush Limbaugh said of Palin, "She's dead right."
The specter of "death panels" became an instant rallying cry for the still-new Tea Party movement, whose supporters crowded into town hall meetings that summer and shouted down Democratic lawmakers considering support for the Affordable Care Act.
Republican members of Congress tapped into that anger. U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley told a crowd back home in Iowa, "We should not have a government program that determines you're gonna pull the plug on Grandma."
As the summer of 2009 wore on, the president stayed above the fray. Anita Dunn, who was the White House communications director at the time, told NPR in a recent interview that the team didn't take the attacks seriously at first, "simply because they did seem so crazy."
But the president himself would need to directly respond. He went on the road, first to a mid-August town hall in Portsmouth, N.H., where he said that this is how politics works sometimes, "that people who want to keep things the way they are will try to scare the heck out of folks, and they'll create boogeymen out there that just aren't real."
Days later, in Grand Junction, Colo., Obama kept at it.
"The notion that somehow I ran for public office or members of Congress are in this so that they can go around pulling the plug on Grandma? I mean when you start making arguments like that, that's simply dishonest," the president said.
Ultimately, the Affordable Care Act was approved by the then-Democratic-controlled Congress. The president signed it in the spring of 2010. Meanwhile, the allegations regarding "death panels" would be "Lie of the Year" by the fact-checking organization PolitiFact.
[Anita] Dunn, currently a managing director at the D.C. firm SKDKnickerbocker, says that the early disinformation campaign had a lasting negative effect nonetheless.
"One of the hallmarks of the Affordable Care Act is that people don't know what is in the bill, or realize the benefits they've gotten," Dunn says, adding, "a huge part of that is how it was defined early by the opposition" (Gonyea 1-2).
… Republicans used the court system and the states to weaken Obamacare. For instance, a June 2012 Supreme Court decision made it possible for many Republican-controlled states to refuse to participate in the expansion of Medicaid so central to Obamacare, a move that deprived millions of low-income Americans of coverage. At the same time, an even greater number of states refused to implement their own health-insurance exchanges — regulated marketplaces where uninsured people buy coverage — which forced the federal government to step in, something that it had not anticipated and that created new policy challenges. As a consequence of these Supreme Court and state decisions, and in the context of Republican and Tea Party mobilizations against President Obama and “his” health care reform, the implementation of the reform proved highly contentious and uneven across the country (Beland, Rocco. and Wadden 1).
… When he came into office, Detroit was in free fall. Without additional government help (the Bush administration had provided $13.4 billion in bridge loans), Chrysler and possibly GM could have been liquidated, putting at risk the entire network of domestic auto suppliers on which Ford and other carmakers depend. The Obama administration injected an additional $62 billion into GM and Chrysler in return for equity stakes and agreements for massive restructuring— eliminating brands, closing dealerships, renegotiating pay and benefit agreements, and, in Chrysler’s case, facilitating a merger with Fiat.
The federal takeover was deeply unpopular with the public and condemned by conservatives as socialism. But it is hard to argue with the results. Since bottoming out in 2009, the auto industry has added upward of 100,000 jobs. The Big Three are all profitable again, and last year they each gained market share, the first time that’s happened in two decades. Most of the $80 billion in bailout funds have been paid back; Washington is likely to lose only about $16 billion, less if the price of its GM stock rises. Even on its face, the policy has been one of the most successful short-term government economic interventions in decades.
But Obama’s restructuring of Detroit goes even deeper. A big part of the reason U.S. automakers were in such bad shape on the eve of the recession was a spike in gas prices that had left them with lots full of SUVs and light trucks they couldn’t sell. Unlike their foreign-owned competitors, who could shift from, say, Tundras to Corollas and weather the storm, Detroit simply didn’t know how to make money producing small cars, though they were belatedly trying to learn. So, as a condition of the bailout, Obama’s White House secured commitments from GM and Chrysler to put even more emphasis on building more fuel-efficient cars in the United States. Meanwhile, with money from the stimulus, the administration invested in companies that manufacture advanced batteries of the kind needed to make electric cars. And, while the automakers were feeling beholden, the administration convinced them to agree to a doubling of auto fuel efficiency requirements over the next thirteen years.
Or consider higher education. Obama has pushed through two major reforms in this area. First, working with Democrats in Congress, he ended the wasteful, decades-old practice of subsidizing banks to provide college loans. Starting in the summer of 2010, all students began getting their loans directly from the federal government. The move saves the Treasury $67 billion over ten years, $36 billion of which will go to expanding Pell Grants, the most significant form of aid to lower- and lower-middle-income students. Second, the administration has issued so-called “gainful employment” rules for career-focused colleges, especially for-profits. Those schools whose students don’t earn enough to pay off their loans—because they never graduate, or don’t learn marketable skills—will be cut off from the federal student loan program, effectively putting them out of business.
While these are big moves, they might also turn out to be first steps. As the think tank Education Sector has written, by kicking the banks out of the student loan program, Obama has effectively eliminated the biggest lobbying force standing in the way of an über-reform of student aid: turning the confusing plethora of loan programs into one simple federal loan payable as a percentage of a person’s income over a working lifetime. Such a single “income-contingent” loan would make it possible for virtually every American to afford a post-secondary education without risk of going bankrupt. ...
If it’s too early to know what history will think of Barack Obama, it is possible to ask today’s historians what they think. Two polls have been conducted since Obama took office that ask experts to rate America’s presidents based on measures of character, leadership, and accomplishments. A 2010 Siena Research Institute survey of 238 presidential scholars ranked Obama the fifteenth-best president overall. Last year, the United States Presidency Centre at the University of London surveyed forty-seven UK specialists on American history and politics. That survey placed Obama at number eight, just below Harry Truman.
…
… With Republicans unified in opposition and willing to abuse the filibuster such that to pass any legislation has required sixty Senate votes that Obama has seldom had, it is unrealistic to think he or anyone could have done a whole lot better.
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The view that Barack Obama is overly cautious must also take into account the many times in his presidency when he took extraordinary risks. He did so when he turned down Detroit’s first bailout request, demanding more concessions, including government ownership and the resignation of GM’s CEO, before saying yes. He did so when, after passing the stimulus, he made health care reform his number one legislative priority, against the advice of some of his top political advisers; and when, after Scott Brown’s victory in the Massachusetts Senate race, he chose to jam the health care bill through reconciliation despite cries of outrage from the GOP. And he did so, most famously, when he chose to send special forces into Pakistan to go after Osama bin Laden, without certainty that the terrorist leader was even there, with his senior national security advisers waffling, and with the clear understanding that if the mission went wrong, as a similar one did under Jimmy Carter, it could ruin his presidency.
It should be clear by now that I don’t believe that Obama’s record has been crippled by an excess of caution. Indeed, his last-minute decision to order extra helicopters into the bin Laden raid illustrates that daring and caution are compatible virtues, and he has a winning mix of both. It should also be clear that, on the strength of his record so far, I think he’s likely to be considered a great or near- great president.
That’s not to say that his instincts and decisions have always been right. I cannot, for instance, find a good reason why he should not have at least threatened to use Fourteenth Amendment powers to unilaterally raise the debt ceiling to break the hostage standoff with the GOP last year. Time and again, he has allowed himself to be played too long by Republicans pretending to be interested in bipartisanship.
… A president has to remind the public every day of what he’s already done, why he’s done it, and how those achievements fit into a broader plan that will help them in the future.
With his State of the Union and some subsequent speeches, he has only begun this task. And while it’s very late in the day, the election is still eight months away. The irony is that, while Barack Obama has achieved a tremendous amount in his first term, the only way to secure that record of achievement in the eyes of history is to win a second. And to do that, he first has to convince the American voters that he in fact has a record of achievement (Glastris 11-20).
For Republicans, the only thing harder than losing to Barack Obama might be explaining it.
By any reasonable standard, Obama is a seriously vulnerable incumbent: a president overseeing a limping economy, whose party got thumped in the 2010 midterm elections and whose signature accomplishment of health care reform is highly controversial. Whatever his strengths on national security and personal likability, Obama probably began the 2012 campaign as the most beatable sitting president in 20 years (Burns and Haberman 1).
The Democrats’ stance on the economy: in favor of modest stimulus, increased tax rates on the wealthiest citizens, health care, cultural issues such as abortion and gay rights, immigration reform that emphasizes a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, and environmental legislation to address global warming ….
Republican positions on the economy: paring down the national debt, opposing tax increases, and cutting government spending, health care (opposed to Obamacare), support for traditional marriage and school prayer, and against abortion, favoring immigration reform that focuses on border control, and skeptical about global warming and the need and economic advisability of environmental regulations ….
… The Republicans called for stronger measures against China’s economic imperialism and evinced unambiguous support for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s rightist government (a popular position among the party’s evangelical Protestant base) than the Democrats’ position ….
… After years of eluding American detection, Osama bin Laden was killed on orders of President Obama. The removal of the architect of 9/11 neutralized a potential campaign issue for Republicans who had claimed that the Democrats were “soft” on terrorism. Also, President Obama’s [avowed] … “pivot” away from the Middle East and Europe and toward Asia ….(Goldfields 11-13).
Romney’s campaign, scrambling to catch up after a protracted GOP primary, was not only outclassed by the incumbent, but held too long to the mistaken assumption that the election amounted to a referendum on Obama’s economic policies. By the time the candidate and his top adviser, Stuart Stevens, realized a message of “Obama isn’t working” was insufficient, it was after Labor Day and too late. By then — never having made his own case in a sustained and effective way and giving Obama fodder at a crucial moment — Romney had been defined as a cartoonishly out-of-touch fat cat.
The former Massachusetts governor kept open a line of communication with his former strategist, Mike Murphy, and brought former Republican National Committee Chairman Ed Gillespie and Ohio Sen. Rob Portman into his confidence. But the ever-loyal Romney stuck with Stevens until the end and never seriously doubted his pollster Neil Newhouse, who produced a steady stream of fatally over-optimistic poll data rooted in a skewed model of the electorate that vastly underestimated Obama’s support.
Yet it all came down to Romney himself, a resilient and cool-headed executive who could never quite stop trying to apply his idiosyncratic boardroom method of operation to the vastly different task of modern campaigning.
Obama was saved, in the end, by a game plan that focused on “nine governor’s races” in key battleground states and an audacious decision to raid his campaign’s end-of-the-line budget to spend more than $100 million in an early summer negative ad blitz that caught Romney flat-footed.
...
Obama – who privately joked Romney wasn’t quite “human enough” to get elected as the campaign hit the homestretch – bounced back after the first debate and roared back to life in the final three weeks (Thrush and Martin 2-3).
The Obama campaign representatives … believed they would lose the election if it was a referendum on the president. His team felt they needed to launch an expensive ad campaign attacking Romney immediately after he wrapped up the GOP nomination because the president was already a known commodity.
“We knew we had to make it a choice,” said Jeremy Bird, national field director for the Obama campaign.
Romney national political director Rich Beeson marveled at the customization of the Obama campaign. They tailored advertisements in key media markets to key constituencies, sometimes airing nine different spots on one day.
“We were going after it with a meat cleaver, and they were going after it with a scalpel,” he said.
The Obama campaign believed they needed to add more voters to the rolls.
That required beefing up a massive, costly field operation in 2011. “We had time, and that was very beneficial to us,” said Marlon Marshall, the Obama campaign’s deputy national field director. “We were able to figure out early on in a state like Florida we have to change the electorate in order to be successful. We spent a year, almost a year-and-a-half, registering voters … in order to keep Florida on the map.”
The Obama team believes that the selection of Paul Ryan cost Romney Florida, eating into his support among Cubans because of his past opposition to the embargo, galvanizing Sunshine State volunteers for Obama and raising doubts among seniors over what his budget plan might do to Medicare.
“We needed to make this a state-by-state race, and we needed to take a state like Florida and turn it into a battle over each precinct,” Bird said.
He added that the Obama team felt “we were just barely up in Florida” going into Election Day, even though the Romney camp thought they had the state in the bag.
Romney over-performed John McCain’s 2008 vote total in every targeted state except Ohio, but he got smoked in every swing state but North Carolina.
The Obama campaign was deeply attuned to focus groups.
With swing voters giving Romney high marks for bipartisanship as governor of Massachusetts, Chicago decided to send Bay State Democrats to swing states to criticize Romney’s record. Romney saved the bulk of his bipartisanship messaging for late October, but by then, the Obama campaign felt they’d mitigated a potential big asset for the opposition.
Internally, they saw an appetite from focus-group voters for more specifics from each candidate. ...(Hohmann 1-2).
Obama sought to replay Clinton’s 1996 strategy of winning the race early. He framed the race in the Summer as a choice between fairness versus tax cuts for the rich. Using attacks on Romney’s finance background at Bain Capital and failure to disclose tax returns, and GOP proposals to cut income taxes by 20 percent, Democrats characterized Romney as a rich and out-of-touch businessman who had little understanding of the economic plight of ordinary Americans. By the fall, many voters believed Romney would protect the rich while Obama would help the middle class.
Romney paid significantly more than Obama for his advertisements and therefore got less bang for the dollar. During October, according to Kantar/CMAG data, Obama ran 160,000 commercials costing $400 million versus 140,000 for Romney costing $500 million. The Republican strategy of waiting until late to place its commercials created great inefficiencies in ad expenditures. In some states such as Iowa, Ohio, and Wisconsin, Republicans outspent Democrats by three-to-two, but reached fewer people. And in places such as Florida, Obama’s ads reached 20 percent more viewers. Based on the Wesleyan Media Project, Obama spent $265 million on 503,255 ads in 63 markets with an average cost of $528 per spot. Romney devoted $105 million on 190,784 commercials in 78 markets at a cost of $552 per advertisement, or about 5 percent more on average.
Obama spent about 10 percent of his advertising budget on digital outreach through Facebook, Google, and Bing, which was considerably higher than Romney. This allowed the campaign to engage in highly targeted outreach and reach people beyond the traditional electorate. This expanded the Democratic base and gave the President an advantage in certain states.
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Obama’s organization built a large, in-house operation that was well-integrated into its overall strategy. It brought experts aboard who specialized in online outreach, social media mobilization, and data mining. The campaign also developed a website dashboard that allowed field organizers to enter data based on phone calls, home visits, and event attendance. Through Twitter and Facebook, it created a comprehensive data base with detailed voter profiles, which it could use to turnout people for events or from whom they could raise money. In contrast, the Romney organization did not have a lot of time to build its own digital campaign. After a bruising primary campaign that went well through the Spring, the GOP nominee out-sourced its data management and social media outreach activities using outside vendors. This is an expensive approach to communications and provides limited control over messaging (West 1-3).
SEPTEMBER, 47 PERCENT VIDEO — A video from a May fund-raiser in Florida showed Romney characterizing nearly half of Americans as “victims’’ who want government aid. It seemed to confirm the worst views of critics (Kranish 25).
The video, showing Romney at a closed-doors fundraising event, captures him dismissing 47% of the nation as government-dependent. "My job is not to worry about those people," he says.
He adds: "I'll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives."
The release of the video, on the liberal Mother Jones website, came at an awkward moment for the Romney campaign amid reports of internal strife and bickering among his campaign managers.
The Republican presidential candidate is also running behind Barack Obama in the polls, albeit only by 3%, after a lacklustre Republican convention in August.
"All right, there are 47% who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to healthcare, to food, to housing, to you-name-it," he [Romney] said.
He added: "These are people who pay no income tax."
Apart from offending a large part of the population, the comment is also inaccurate. The 47% are not people who pay no income tax and encompasses sections of the population who have earned their entitlements (MacAskill 1-3).
The bartender did it.
Scott Prouty came forward to say he secretly taped the video last year in which GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney told donors that 47% of Americans are "dependent on the government" and "believe they are victims."
Prouty was revealed Wednesday night during an MSNBC interview with Ed Schultz. The Huffington Post also interviewed Prouty, a Florida man, several times and agreed not to disclose his name until after the TV appearance.
The secretly taped video was posted online by Mother Jones magazine in the fall, several months after the fundraiser in May in Boca Raton where Romney spoke. The video created a national uproar as President Obama and his Democratic allies used Romney's words to illustrate how the Republican was out of touch.
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Prouty, who worked for a catering company hired for the fundraising event, told MSNBC he wanted people to hear the candidate and make their own judgments about his motivation.
"The guy was running for the presidency, and these were his core beliefs. And I think everybody can judge whether that's appropriate or not or whether they believe the same way he does," he told MSNBC. "I felt an obligation to expose the things he was saying."
Prouty described himself as a "regular guy," who is middle class and hard working. He said he agonized for weeks about what to do, fearful that the video could be traced back to him because of where he positioned the camera at the fundraising event.
In his first post-election interview, Romney told Fox News last week that his videotaped comments were "unfortunate" and "very harmful."
"What I said is not what I believe," Romney said. "My whole life has been devoted to helping people, all of the people. ... But that hurt. There's no question that hurt and did real damage to my campaign" (Camia 1-2).
Works cited:
Beland, Daniel, Rocco, Philip, and Waddan, Alex, “Eight Years of Attacks and Obamacare Still Stands.” Policy Options, May 15, 2018. Web. https://policyoptions.irpp.org/magazines/may-2018/eight-years-attacks-obamacare-still-stands/
Burns, Alexander and Haberman, Maggie, “If Romney loses…” Politico, November 5, 2012. Web. https://www.politico.com/story/2012/11/if-romney-loses-083302
Camia, Catalina, “Man Who Taped Romney's 47% Comments Speaks Out.” USA Today, March 13, 2013. Web. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2013/03/13/romney-47-percent-videotape-bartender/1984425/
Glastris, Paul, “The Incomplete Greatness of Barack Obama.” Washington Monthly, March/April 2012. Web. https://washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/marchapril-2012/the-incomplete-greatness-of-barack-obama-2/
Goldfields, David, “What We Can Learn about America from the 2012 Presidential Election.” American Studies Journal, 58 (2014). Web. June 9, 2020. http://www.asjournal.org/58-2014/what-we-can-learn-from-the-2012-presidential-election/
Gonyea, Dan, “From the Start, Obama Struggled with Fallout from a Kind of Fake News.” NPR, January 10, 2017. Web. https://www.npr.org/2017/01/10/509164679/from-the-start-obama-struggled-with-fallout-from-a-kind-of-fake-news
Hohmann, James, “Campaign Officials Dissect Election.” Politico, December 8, 2012. Web.
https://www.politico.com/story/2012/12/campaign-officials-dissect-election-cycle-084796
Kranish, Michael, “The Story behind Mitt Romney’s Loss in the Presidential Campaign to President Obama.” Boston.com, December 22, 2012. Web. https://www.boston.com/uncategorized/noprimarytagmatch/2012/12/22/the-story-behind-mitt-romneys-loss-in-the-presidential-campaign-to-president-obama
MacAskill, Ewen, “Mitt Romney under Fire after Comments Caught on Video.” The Guardian, September 17, 2012. Web. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/sep/18/mitt-romney-secret-video
Thrush, Glenn and Martin, Jonathan, “Plenty of 2012 pitfalls for Obama and Romney.” Politico, December 17, 2012. Web. https://www.politico.com/story/2012/12/politico-ebook-plenty-of-2012-pitfalls-for-obama-and-romney-085152
West, Darrell M., “Communications Lessons from the 2012 Presidential Election.” Brookings, November 6, 2012. Web. https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2012/11/06/communications-lessons-from-the-2012-presidential-election/
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