A look back at Obama-Romney
When David Simas left Washington in 2011 and set out for Chicago and the Obama re-election campaign, things “looked bleak” for the incumbent president.
For one thing, unemployment remained high in the messy aftermath of the Great Recession, a result of the housing market bust that occurred in the final days of the George W. Bush administration.
Because of the persistently high jobless figures and other factors, Barack Obama’s job approval numbers were “terrible,” Simas recollected. It would take a mighty effort to return the first African-American president to the White House for a second term beginning in 2013.
All the same, Obama had several things going for him, Simas said. Americans seemed to like him personally. In addition, voters didn’t blame Obama for the Great Recession. That was Bush’s doing.
A former White House aide and director of public opinion research for the 2012 Obama campaign, Simas spoke to Nicole Hemmer, a scholar with the Obama Presidency Oral History Project, in 2020. The Simas interviews were released this week, along with hundreds of others, and placed online by Columbia University.
In their totality, the interviews promise an in-depth examination of Obama’s eight years in office. During the period of 2009 to 2017, the Affordable Care Act – Obamacare – became law, and the terrorist leader responsible for the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, Osama bin Laden, was killed by U.S. Navy Seals, acting at Obama’s command.
This period also witnessed the emergence on the national political stage of Donald Trump. Trump’s rise to political prominence was initially fueled by the false doubts he raised about President Obama’s place of birth. On April 27, 2011, Obama took the extraordinary step of releasing his Hawaiian birth certificate to quiet the controversy.
A few days later, Obama drew laughs at Trump’s expense at a glittering Washington, D.C., banquet. Trump followed Obama to the White House in January 2017.
Barack Obama won the presidency in 2008 against Arizona senator John McCain. His opponent in 2012 was the formidable former Massachusetts governor (and future Utah senator), Mitt Romney.
For Obama and the Democrats, the disastrous 2010 midterm elections seemed to foreshadow an equally disastrous 2012. Reams of polling supplemented by tons of political intelligence gleaned from focus groups helped to deflate Romney’s high-riding ambitions. The findings were not always high-minded.
For instance, Simas learned with delight that Romney’s treatment of the family’s Irish Setter, Seamus, during a vacation trip outraged voters. “What kind of monster puts their dog on the [car] roof…. Nope, I’m not for that guy,” one focus group member told the Obama campaign.
The Romney campaign wasted precious days responding to the story. “I mean, it’s absurd,” Simas said, remarking on the unserious twists and turns of the campaign for the earnest job of president.
Learning from the Obama campaign that Romney owned dressage horses, another voter sneered, “That’s horse ballet.” It was another nail in the coffin of Mitt Romney, an average Joe American.
The Obama team had labored for a year prior to the election to put in place the campaign “infrastructure” that was able to take full advantage of Romney’s stumbles, whether fair or foul, according to Simas.
Obama won the election against Romney by a 51-47 margin.
Several weeks later, the Sandy Hook elementary school massacre took place. The subsequent refusal of Congress to pass even watered down gun legislation in an attempt to curb such senseless violence enraged Obama, who had once supposed that “the fever” of rabid partisanship would eventually subside. It hadn’t and wouldn’t.
Even the mass murder of 6-year-olds in a classroom couldn’t convince lawmakers to “put down their political weapons,” Simas said in retrospect.
The president and first lady Michelle Obama traveled to Sandy Hook, where they met for several hours with the parents and siblings of the slain children in small one-on-one sessions.
Even the Secret Service agents cried on that grim mourning day in Connecticut.
The Obama team emerged from the election brimming with renewed hope, Simas said. At Sandy Hook, it again faced the grim realities of governing a deeply divided nation.
Elections are for real.
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.