Jonathan Chait at NYMag‘s Dail Intel has a cheerful perspective on “The Obama-Romney Confidence Gap“:
As the general election begins, it’s apparent that a wide gap in confidence has opened up between the two campaigns. The Obama campaign is bordering on cocky, utterly dismissive of Mitt Romney and warning against overconfidence. Obviously, campaigns always strive to convey confidence, with even the slightest hints of pessimism seen as potentially unleashing a self-defeating cycle of doom.
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So this admission, from the director of the Karl Rove–affiliated Republican Super-PAC “American Crossroads,” is unusual and telling:Mr. Law said, Crossroads research suggests that Mr. Obama’s campaign has started to gain traction among critical swing voters by arguing that Republicans, including Mr. Romney, favor an “economic plutocracy” in which middle-class voters can no longer count on financial security, even though they work hard and play by the rules.
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“His argument is: ‘The reason you feel bad is not because I’ve been an inadequate president but because the rules of the game are stacked against you,’ ” Mr. Law said. Calling it a “dystopian vision,” he added, “that narrative has some gravitational pull.”In other words, their research shows that Obama’s campaign to frame the economic debate is working. It’s genuinely quite rare for campaigns (or, in this case, quasi-campaigns) to make that sort of confession…
From the Buzzfeed article, “It’s ‘Game On’ in Chicago“:
… The Obama machine’s singular goal: to keep the president in his job by raising and spending hundreds of millions of dollars to recreate the momentum of 2008. There are now close to 700 hundred full time employees, an entire floor of office space, thousands of volunteers in well over 100 field offices across all 50 states, and the most impressive digital team a presidential campaign has ever assembled. There’s been experimentation—the tech team figured out a way to make the Obama website display perfectly on any device, a feat that wouldn’t have been possible even a year ago—and the entire office was designed to resemble a Silicon Valley start-up. The digital department is the largest in headquarters. Messina even consulted with Palo Alto execs to find the “best practices,” says an Obama official, including carpets (quieter), mixing the staffs on the floor into teams rather than departments, bouncy balls, and communicating with instant messages and Twitter. “We ensure maximum collaboration so people don’t sit with their departments, they sit in teams,” Messina told BuzzFeed…
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These days, the campaign’s Rapid Response team has reached out to reporters covering Romney, providing a rebuttal to every speech. They’re also in full-on courtship mode with a press that complains of a lack of access to Romney and his top aides. Obama’s headquarters averaged about ten visits a week from reporters over the past month, aides said. David Axelrod, whose official title of “senior campaign advisor” understates his role as guru and decision-maker, was at the office everyday last month. (On Thursday “Axe,” as he is known among the staff, took the afternoon off to attend the Cubs opening day with Mayor Rahm Emanuel; at his seats over the dugout, he caught a foul ball.)
Too, also, there’s this in our favor: