Champagne corks popped in Mitt Romney's headquarters when Barack Obama declared 'The private sector is doing fine', says former Bush strategist Mark McKinnon.
Barack Obama
The political environment and conventional wisdom in America has undergone a tectonic shift over the last couple of weeks. Everything flipped upside down.
In a matter of days, Mitt Romney went from a crippled survivor of the circus-like Republican primaries to a confident, focused and disciplined giant killer.
And President Barack Obama went from a larger-than-life, invincible incumbent to an off-message, weakened and seemingly small commander-in-chief who has lost his command.
First came the May jobs report which signalled that any hope of sustained economic recovery was a pipe dream. Combined with the economic travails in Europe, the outlook for any economic good news in the near future in the US, or certainly before November, looks terribly bleak.
So the political physics were already setting in when President Obama made the kind of mistake that, with just a few words, can change the outcome of an election.
The worst thing that can happen in a campaign is if your candidate does or says something that helps cement an impression that your opposition has been strategically trying to set.
Romney has been attempting to make the case that Obama is a big-government liberal who neither understands the private sector nor how jobs are actually created. And, helping to make that case, Obama said in an unscripted moment: "The private sector is doing fine."
As he did so, the champagne corks popped in Romney's Boston headquarters.
It reminds me of the moment in President George W Bush's 2004 re-election campaign when Senator John Kerry stepped on to a stage in front of a roomful of military veterans and said defensively, in reference to a military budget appropriation he decided not to support: "I actually did vote for the $87 billion, before I voted against it."
We had a live feed of the event at Bush headquarters, and when those words passed his lips, a cheer echoed through the building. And I thought, "Game, set, match." Kerry had, with his own words, just made the case we had been trying to make ourselves, which was that he had no core principles and made decisions simply on the basis of politics.
So we were now in position to say, "You don't have to take it from us. Take it from John Kerry."
We had been prepared for this possibility and had already baited the trap. We knew about Kerry's problematic vote and, on learning that he was going to West Virginia, a key state that Bush had previously won from the Democrats, to address a group of veterans, we cut a TV ad in 24 hours focusing on that bad vote. The spot was on the air when he arrived, and that's all anyone was talking about.
Aware of this, Kerry got up on the stage and tried to defend himself. We had got into his head. He took the cheese, and the trap shut as he uttered the line he will for ever regret - a line that we replayed in some form almost every day for the rest of the campaign.
That is what the Romney campaign is already doing with Obama's "doing fine" gaffe. And, smartly, Team Romney's framing is: "It wasn't a gaffe.
The problem is that this is actually what Obama believes, because he is so disconnected from how the economy really works and how jobs are created."
Suddenly, the president and his team, who could do no wrong with the press, are being savaged. The first to sound the alarm was the New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd: "In some ways, he's still finding himself, too absorbed to see what's not working. But the White House is a very hard place to go on a vision quest, especially with a storm brewing."
Then the Washington Post ran a story asking, "Is it time for Democrats to panic?" Critics of the Obama campaign included eight anonymous Democratic strategists, meaning strategists not given jobs by the campaign. (Shouldn't it be a rule of political journalism that if someone is going to criticise a candidate, they have to do so on the record? Cowards.)
And former President Bill Clinton's celebrity strategists James Carville and Stanley Greenburg released focus group findings suggesting that Obama's current campaign message - that he inherited the worst economy since the Great Depression but that now things are getting better - is absolutely the wrong one.
"We will face an impossible headwind in November if we do not move to a new narrative, one that contextualises the recovery but, more importantly, focuses on what we will do to make a better future for the middle class," they concluded.
Further exacerbating the deteriorating situation, key Democrats, including and especially Bill Clinton, have been veering wildly off message, suggesting that Romney's business record in the private sector was "sterling" and that the Bush tax cuts on all income earners should be extended.
In politics, it's often your friends that hurt you more than your enemies.
The reality is that Obama and his team are no less smart than they were when they won in 2008. But this time the wind is in their face, not at their backs.
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