It’s been unofficially on — BOY has it been unofficially on. But now it’s official: President Barack Obama has formally launched his re-election campaign and it confirms the growing belief that this campaign will be a rough and tough (and perhaps silly) one. He gave a preview today:
The gloves are off.
Opening what is likely to be a bitter and grueling election, President Obama held his first official campaign rally here in the Buckeye State, cranking up his populist pitch while slamming his likely opponent Mitt Romney and congressional Republicans.
Speaking at his first official campaign rally six months and a day before Election Day, a fiery and combative Obama, his sleeves rolled up, touted a “forward-looking American” while taking a series of shots at his likely opponent before a raucous audience in this swing state.
“Ohio, we cannot give him that chance. Not now. Not with so much at stake,” Obama said at Ohio State University, his voice growing louder with every line. “We’ve been through too much to turn back now.”
“We’ve come too far to abandon the change we have fought for,” Obama said speaking before a large banner “Forward,” which has emerged as the president’s re-election slogan. “We have to move forward.”
Hitting the stump with first lady Michelle Obama — who introduced him — the president mentioned his almost certain opponent Mitt Romney by name, a practice he had largely avoided until Saturday.
In his speech, he complimented Romney for being a successful businessman. But he also knocked him for being an out-of-touch billionaire who “has drawn the wrong lessons from those experiences” in the business world.
“Corporations aren’t people,” Obama said, slamming Romney’s previous comments. “People are people.”
Part of his speech:
CNN:
“We are making progress and now we face a choice Ohio,” said the president, at a rally at the Schottenstein Center on the campus of The Ohio State University in Columbus. “This is a make or break moment for the middle class and we can’t turn back now.”
In his 36-minute-long address, Obama tied presumptive GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney to Republicans in Congress, saying that if elected, Romney would rubber-stamp the congressional GOP agenda, telling the crowd that “we cannot give him that chance.”
“That’s the choice in this election, and that’s why I’m running for a second term as president of the United States,” added Obama.
The speech highlighted the narrative that the Obama campaign hopes to push this year: reminding voters how many millions of jobs were lost before the president took office.
The president said that in the final six months of 2008, “nearly three million of our neighbors lost their jobs.” But he said when he took office, “we didn’t quit. We don’t quit. Together we are fighting our way back.”
Obama touted the federal government’s rescue of the big auto companies, and he criticized his challenger, saying “when some wanted to let Detroit go bankrupt, we didn’t turn our backs.”
“Today, America’s auto industry is on top of the world,” he said.
A former Massachusetts governor who was born in Michigan and whose father was a former auto executive and governor of the state, Romney opposed the bailout, saying a structured bankruptcy could have achieved the same result without the massive cost to the U.S. government. Moreover, he has argued the Obama administration made too many concessions to auto unions as part of the bailout.
The president also touted his foreign policy achievements, saying that “for the first time in nine years, there are no Americans fighting in Iraq.” He said that “Osama bin Laden is no longer a threat to this country” and “al Qaeda is on the path to defeat.”
He then pledged that “by 2014, the war in Afghanistan will be over,” and pointed out that Romney had opposed setting a troop withdrawal deadline in the Afghanistan conflict.
On the controversial issue of illegal immigration, Obama declared that “it’s time to stop denying citizenship to responsible young people just because they’re the children of undocumented immigrants.”
The Guardian’s blogger Richard Adams has a long must-read live blogging account that includes this:
2.33pm: My colleague Paul Harris has filed his concluding thoughts having had the privilege of sitting through the entire Obama speech, unimpaired by ad breaks and talking heads:
He says there are a few points to take away:• He was not shy in attacking Mitt Romney as a defender of the rich and big business.
• His lines on ending the war in Iraq, wanting to end it in Afghanistan and killing Osama bin Laden will give him some powerful national security lines in any debate against Romney.
• The crowd seemed fired up and ready to go. Sort of. It was a reminder of how good a campaigner Obama can be. But this was not 2008. There were a lot of cheers but it was not the rock star stuff of four years ago. There was also a lot of anger at Romney (I heard one member of the crowd shout “traitor” when his name was mentioned).
So it is less positive than four years ago. Those large numbers of empty seats will worry some on Team Obama too. In 2004 he packed out outdoor stadiums. On this first campaign event he could not fill a basketball indoor arena.
The big Obama show — heralded by a huge “Forward” banner atop OSU’s Schottenstein Center and a fire-’em-up presidential introduction from first lady Michelle Obama — was less targeted at the national media than his 2007 announcement in Springfield, Ill., when the Obama campaign sought to project the image of an unstoppable nationwide movement.
This time, Obama’s team is localizing its message and targeting key constituencies — students, veterans, women, Latinos, African Americans — in too-close-to-call states such as Ohio and Virginia, while firing up young voters and volunteers whose support Obama sorely needs.
If the carefully choreographed kick off was any indication, Obama will face some challenges in recapturing the 2008 magic — especially among young voters who weathered three years of souring job prospects and rising college costs.
The campaign was only able to muster 14,000 supporters in an arena designed to hold more than 18,000. Several thousand empty seats ringed its upper deck, mostly out of view from the cameras.
Looking trim, rested and ready for a fight to rival anything Rocky Balboa has ever encountered, President Barack Obama kicked off his 2012 presidential campaign on Saturday with a rousing appearance in Columbus, Ohio, that was plastered across cable news networks.
…..Michelle Obama, who has remained popular through the president’s first term, introduced her husband, delivering an address that called for a return to “American values” and the need for better “parents and grandparents” to raise the nation’s youth. Pointing out that Obama was raised by a single mother with limited means, the first lady stressed, “These experiences made him the man and the president he is today,” she said.” The president then took the podium a little after 1:30 p.m.
His sleeves rolled up and voice slightly hoarse, Obama launched into an impassioned speech in which he touched on the return of U.S. troops from Iraq and Afghanistan, support for middle-class families and the benefits of his historic health care reform. He attacked Republican rival Mitt Romney on supporting tax breaks for the richest Americans, saying the wealthy should be willing to “pay a little bit more.” In a sly jab at Romney’s oft-repeated quote, “Corporations are people,” Obama stressed, “I don’t care how many ways you try to explain it: Corporations aren’t people. People are people.” The crowd responded with wild cheers and chants of “four more years.”
Plunging into his campaign for a new term, President Barack Obama tore into Mitt Romney on Saturday as eager to “rubber stamp” a conservative Republican congressional agenda to cut taxes for the rich, reduce spending on education and Medicare and enhance power that big banks and insurers hold over consumers.
Romney and his “friends in Congress think the same bad ideas will lead to a different result, or they’re just hoping you won’t remember what happened the last time you tried it their way,” the president told thousands of cheering partisans at what aides insisted was his first full-fledged political rally of the election year.
Six months before Election Day, the polls point to a close race between Obama and Romney, with the economy the overriding issue as the nation struggles to recover from the worst recession since the 1930s. Unemployment remains stubbornly high at 8.1 percent nationally, although it has receded slowly and unevenly since peaking several months into the president’s term. The most recent dip was due to discouraged jobless giving up their search for work.
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Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.