Right Change: Obama vs. Romney Ads

"If you don't have any fresh ideas, then you use stale tactics to scare voters. If you don’t have a record to run on, then you paint your opponent as someone people should run from," said Barack Obama in 2008.

Funny, that sounds about right for the President’s 2012 re-election campaign.

A democratic strategist recently was quoted as saying that “unless things change and Obama can run on accomplishments, he will have to kill Romney,” and that is what is happening. In a recent ad, Obama slams Romney, saying that Bain outsourced jobs to China.  On Friday, Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell called the Obama campaign out for the dishonesty of this advertisement, saying that they are not relevant because they stem from a time after Romney left as Bain Capital’s director in 1999 to head the Salt Lake City Olympics. Obama’s outsourcing attacks have also received countless “pinocchios” from news organizations everywhere.

This is the latest buzz worthy advertisement, but it is not even close to the first slam campaign move by Obama so far in this election. It seems that, at a crucial point in history for America when there are countless problems to be solved, Barack Obama lacks confidence that his solutions are profound or decisive enough to run on. Romney’s website includes a detailed list of solutions to almost every problem in the headlines. Why then does it seem that the election is being powered by an endless (and expensive) series of 1 or 2 minute spots where each tries to convince their audience that their opponent would do a worse job than they would. Is this reflective of the nature of modern day elections? With the infinite barrage of news on the internet and television, there has certainly never been such information overload in an election. Maybe this means that a certain degree of scrappiness is required, that the only effective way to grab the attention of an increasingly apathetic audience is to fight fire with fire, tossing accusations back and forth across party lines like a hot potato. Maybe the way to win this one is by clawing and grasping for each percentage point in the polls one commercial at a time.

Whether or not this is the case, the public seems to be tiring of the YouTube wars that the candidates have engaged in for the past few months, a war that Obama has spent twice as much on as Mitt Romney. This may be the nature of the beast for now, but we are looking forward to the moment when squabbling over the past will no longer overshadow the candidate who has a concrete, detailed plan to truly get our economy growing again.

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