OCTOBER 2, 2011, 8:36 PM Obama Campaign Borrows From Bush ‘04 Playbook
By JOHN HARWOOD WASHINGTON — The last time an incumbent president faced re-election, George W. Bush exploited social and national security issues to offset his economic vulnerabilities.
Over the next year, President Obama will try the same thing.
Circumstances have changed drastically since 2004. America’s economic woes stand to dominate the 2012 dialogue no matter what — probably to Mr. Obama’s detriment.
Yet in important electoral battlegrounds, Mr. Obama’s strategists intend to use abortion, gay rights, the environment and successes in the fight against Al Qaeda to counter economic attacks and drive a wedge between Republicans and swing voters.
The Democratic shift from defense to offense on those issues stems from evolving public attitudes, intensifying Republican conservatism and the raid that killed Osama bin Laden on Mr. Obama’s orders. The perilous state of the American economy undercuts the president’s assertions that he prevented something worse.
The result: over the weekend, Mr. Obama accused his Republican challengers of displaying a “kind of smallness” by not denouncing a debate audience that booed a gay soldier. He used the incident to question their readiness to become commander in chief.
Days earlier at a California fund-raiser, Mr. Obama cast his re-election bid as an appeal to “people of like mind, people who believe in a big and generous and a tolerant and ambitious and fact-based America.”
Those “people of like mind” include the affluent, college-educated residents of suburbs around Denver, Philadelphia, Raleigh-Durham, Orlando, Boston and Washington — the epicenters of Mr. Obama’s fight for Colorado, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Florida, New Hampshire and Virginia.
The ‘Monied’ Suburbs
In his 2008 victory, Mr. Obama broke through among several important voter groups. Exit polls showed that he carried suburbanites, college graduates and those earning more than $200,000.
Mr. Obama won handily in areas that the research organization Patchwork Nation calls “Monied ’Burbs.” Residents of these high-income suburbs, which add up to roughly a quarter of the United States population, tend to be less religious and more tolerant of homosexuality and abortion rights, said Dante Chinni, Patchwork Nation’s director.
They narrowly backed Republicans in the 2010 House elections. Their disappointment over the economy cloud Mr. Obama’s 2012 re-election prospects.
But their distance from the Republican right on social issues gives Mr. Obama a tool for fighting back.
“The question is whether it’s possible to pop those issues when the economy is this bad,” said Jim Jordan, a campaign manager for Senator John Kerry’s bid for the White House in 2004. “The answer is maybe.”
Recent evidence is mixed.
In Colorado, the incumbent Democratic senator, Michael Bennet, survived the 2010 Republican wave after he “shifted a chunk of the conversation off the economic and onto social issues,” said Laura Chapin, a Democratic strategist in Denver. Mr. Obama’s strategists view that victory as an object lesson.
It didn’t work in the 2009 race for governor of Virginia. Democrats tried to cast the Republican nominee, Bob McDonnell, as an extremist on social issues; Mr. McDonnell, now governor, focused relentlessly on the economy.
Truce Proposed
That’s why Gov. Mitch Daniels of Indiana, a Republican, has called for “a truce” on social issues. With Mr. Obama faring so poorly on the economy, the topics that rallied the conservative base for Mr. Bush now carry more costs than benefits.
Nor can Republicans capitalize on national security as they did in 2004. No leading Republican candidate has foreign policy experience. Mr. Obama’s successes in targeting Al Qaeda, from the Bin Laden raid to the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki on Friday, give him potent tools for defusing a traditional Democratic vulnerability.
Mr. Obama’s success in using social issues to attract affluent suburbanites will depend significantly on the outcome of Republican primaries. Former Gov. Mitt Romney of Massachusetts now opposes abortion rights and backs a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage.
But Mr. Romney, a former finance executive, has focused overwhelmingly on the economy. Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, who is reconsidering whether to join the race, has defined himself politically through his drive to cut government spending.
The emphatic social conservatism of Gov. Rick Perry of Texas, who opened his campaign soon after addressing a “Call to Prayer” Christian gathering in Houston, would provide a bigger target. “You can’t have a big religious rally and not scare the hell out of suburban Philadelphia,” said Kim Alfano, a Republican consultant who advises Mr. Daniels.
Mr. Perry’s insistence that man-made climate change remains unproved, mocked by Mr. Obama at that California fund-raiser, provides another opening among college-educated swing voters. Jill Hanauer, who directs the Democratic consultancy Project New West, said the issue could weaken Republicans’ economic message by making the party appear to be “looking backwards” in an era of global competition.
Republicans have their own strong economic arguments for upscale suburbanites, including Mr. Obama’s proposals to raise taxes on households earning more than $250,000. Those will echo Democrats’ 2004 warnings to working-class voters — that social issues obscured how Mr. Bush had hurt their pocketbooks.