Obama Plan: Destroy Romney

By Ben Smith and Jonathan Martin
August 9, 2011 04:29 AM EDT

Barack Obama's aides and advisers are preparing to center the president's reelection campaign on a ferocious personal assault on Mitt Romney’s character and business background, a strategy grounded in the early-stage expectation that the former Massachusetts governor is the likely GOP nominee.

It's a safe bet that the Obama campaign, being a political campaign, will engage in some pretty rough stuff.  But this piece makes it sound like something terrible is already happening (look at the headline!).

Politico talks about a "dramatic and unabashedly negative turn" in a campaign that hasn't really started, but concludes nonetheless that

the candidate who ran on "hope" in 2008 has little choice four years later but to run a slashing, personal campaign aimed at disqualifying his likeliest opponent.

Smith and Martin explain:

The onslaught would have two aspects. The first is personal: Obama's reelection campaign will portray the public Romney as inauthentic, unprincipled and, in a word used repeatedly by Obama's advisers in about a dozen interviews, "weird."

I'm not sure how that would necessarily qualify as a plot to "destroy" Romney. It's been more or less the consensus view after his 2008 campaign that Romney had trouble with authenticity--something Republicans have talked about.

They go on:

The second aspect of the campaign to define Romney is his record as CEO of Bain Capital, a venture capital firm that was responsible for both creating and eliminating jobs. Obama officials intend to frame Romney as the very picture of greed in the great recession--a sort of political Gordon Gekko.

They're going to use his record against him?!

The piece goes on to say that the campaign will make an issue of Romney's flip flops--again, I'm not sure how this is any different than saying they're going to run a political campaign.

The piece talks about how Obama's campaign has studied Bush's 2004 campaign against John Kerry;  they seem to express some professional admiration of the Bush team's ability to turn the campaign into something other than a vote on Bush's first term in office. This doesn't seem all that remarkable, given that campaigns study other successful campaigns in order to figure out what made them successful.

I don't doubt Obama's people feel like they'll need to play dirty in order to win. There's some speculation that "weird" means "talking about his Mormonism." That could be true (and an unwillingness to vote for a Mormon has held pretty steady in polling on potential candidates).

But thinking they'll do any of this is different than actually showing that they're doing it. Politico's role in Beltway journalism is to try and drive the narrative; they're already out now with a "Romney campaign responds to Obama campaign" piece.

--Politico's Julie Mason, explaining the amount of coverage of Anthony Weiner (CNN, 6/19/11)

UPDATE:

Jim Romenesko reports that Gannett will be laying off 700 employees:

That’s about 2 percent of the workforce, according to Gannett US Community Publishing division president Bob Dickey. “The economic recovery is not happening as quickly or favorably as we had hoped and continues to impact our U.S. community media organizations,” he says in a memo that’s posted below. “Publishers will notify people today and we will make every effort to reach everyone by end of day.” In March it was disclosed that Gannett CEO Craig Dubow received a $1.25 million cash bonus and had his salary doubled.

The item about those executive salaries is headlined:

Gannett paid CEO Dubow $9.4 million in 2010 – double his 2009 pay

And the others aren't doing too bad either:

* Chief Financial Officer Paul Saleh: $2.9 million; includes a $225,000 bonus, after joining GCI last November.
* U.S. newspapers president Bob Dickey: $3.4 million, including $600,000 bonus. (His total 2009 pay: $1.9 million.)
* USA Today Publisher Dave Hunke: $2.5 million, including $375,000 bonus. (Total 2009: $1.9 million.)
* Broadcasting President Dave Lougee: $2.2 million, including $450,000 bonus. (Total 2009: $1.3 million.)

Like last year, maybe some of the reporters involved find it valuable for the people they cover to get to know them on a more personal level, away from all the tough questions and dogged investigations.

Corporate media routinely treat the alleged Iranian nuclear weapons program as a matter of fact. New York Times reporter Michael Gordon has done it at least twice (2/24/03, 10/19/04), in one case suggesting that a U.S.-friendly regime in Iraq might pressure "Iran to halt its nuclear weapons program." With little variation in wording Gordon's Times colleagues Patrick Tyler  (6/27/05) and Scott Shane (3/26/05) have done the same.  So has the Washington Post's Walter Pincus and Karen DeYoung (9/28/09), and  Post editors and editorials routinely treat Iran's nuke program as a proven fact (e.g., 9/11/10, 6/17/09).

So it's not a big surprise that Hersh is coming under fire in in a corporate media which has largely internalized successive White House claims on Iran.

In a Politico report flagged by Glenn Greenwald , White House sources are quoted disparaging Hersh's New Yorker piece in a report the concludes by reminding readers that Hersh has been criticized in the past for relying too much on anonymous sources. Just a little problem with that angle though, as Greenwald points out:

That's the criticism that ends an article that relies exclusively on anonymous government sources, appearing in a D.C. gossip rag notorious for granting anonymity to any powerful figure who requests it for any or no reason.  The difference, of course, is that the Pulitzer Prize-winning, five-time-Polk-Award-recipient investigative journalist who uncovered the My Lai massacre and the Abu Ghraib scandal grants anonymity to those who are challenging the official claims of those in power (that's called "journalism"), while Politico uses it (as it did here) to serve those in power and shield them from all accountability as they spew their propaganda (which is called being a "lowly, rank Royal Court propagandist").