Axelrod to Kick Off Obama’s Re-Election Effort Early in 2011

Talk about getting desperate – from USA Today:

In case you were wondering if President Obama will seek re-election: Top adviser David Axelrod confirmed today he will leave the White House in the first half of next year to start organizing Obama’s 2012 campaign.

“Sometime in the spring, late winter, early spring, I’ll be going back — coming back here — to Chicago and beginning to work on that project,” Axelrod told Fox News Sunday today…

Translation: “if we don’t do something quick, we’ll have Obama calling President-elect Palin by 8pm, Eastern on November 6th, 2012″.

A first term President always has an eye on the next election – its natural. But, usually, a President doesn’t start the ball rolling until, oh, October or November of the year before. Its not like a sitting President has to gear up for the primary season, right? Normally, that is a coast and you don’t start really putting your plan together until (a) you’ve got a fix on the condition of the country and (b) have a good idea of the two or three people you’re most likely to be fighting on the other side. Moving this soon signals that Obama and Co know that they’ve lost the country and need to essentially start from scratch on selling Obama to the American people.

It would be just too good to be true to think they’d try to run on Obama’s record. Leaving aside that sort of suicidal run, we have to expect that Obama’s plan will be to in some manner demonize the GOP. To do for the national GOP what Reid did to Sharron Angle here in Nevada…just rip and shred to the point where even a horrifically unpopular incumbent can come out on top. We already know that Obama’s people are muck-raking the possible GOP contenders – Axelrod’s job may be to set up a smear campaign against all of them, and then let it go once a real front runner emerges.

Our best defense against this is to settle on our nominee fairly quickly. We’ll have to see how that comes out – a lot of people want a crack at Obama. And that is fine – but we rank-and-filers should be exerting pressure on all the GOP prospects to hold fire on each other and reserve that for Obama and the Democrats. GOP to GOP, it should all be kept on a high road, and let the primary electorate decide. Once a few primaries have come and gone, if there’s a front runner, then all the rest should gracefully bow out.

Outside of the nominee, conservative groups should look to hammer Obama in independent expenditures starting in December of 2011. This should be done for two reasons – to remind people just how lousy Obama has been, and to force him to expend resources defending himself, as opposed to attacking Republicans. Pressure must be kept up on the Democrats while we Republicans determine whom are nominee will be – we can’t leave the field clear for the Democrats as that allows them to define us, perhaps disastrously.

Still and all, it is a clearly much weaker Obama heading in to 2012. We must have no illusions – beating a sitting President is extraordinarily hard and we must work on the assumption that Obama will be re-elected in 2012. We can, however, beat him – and beat him very badly, if we keep stout hearts, lay aside internecine bickering and remember that we’re doing this for America, not for the Republican party.

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