Saturday, April 2, 2011

Obama to announce re-election campaign -- now?

CNN reported Saturday that Democratic sources indicated President Barack Obama intends to send supporters a text or email message as early as Monday announcing he intends to run for re-election in the November 2012 presidential election.

That's a little early, no? It seems to me as if Obama would be better off waiting a while to do such an announcement, simply because of, well...the state of the country, you know? Obama's US of A isn't exactly in great shape at the moment, and people are starting to blame him for it.

Hey, at least they're not going to make a whole big shebang out of it. Obama's plan, CNN reported, is simply to get the word out there among his big-time supporters so he can officially start raising the money he'll need to contend against whichever Republican candidate comes out of the woodwork to run against him next year.

I still don't agree with it.

Reads the article:

"These Democrats say no public event is planned because the White House wants to downplay the announcement and minimize the political distraction...The president is making his campaign official slightly earlier than is typical for an incumbent so he can get a jump on fund-raising in a season that's likely to shatter all records."

The campaign fundraising season's likely to shatter all records, again? It really is ridiculous how much these costs are trending upwards in recent decades, but that's a blog post for a different day.

And today's blog post? Here it is in summation: it can't be good for Obama, from a PR standpoint, to announce his re-election campaign at this point during his current term. His approval ratings are frighteningly low and on a downward trend right now, too.

Instead of announcing it now, why not announce it in another month or two, giving him some time to do some good in the eyes of American public and repair his image even the slightest bit. There is no downside to that plan. Every informed American knows he's going to run for re-election, so it's not as if he's going to be late to the party if he announces in June. All he'll lose is a couple months of fundraising while he'll gain -- hopefully, of course -- a bunch of possible supporters in on-the-fence voters over the next month or two.

And this is simply in his best interest, disregarding any particular political views I may have. Say what you will about Obama, but one thing he and his camp have always been good -- no, spectacular, at -- is crafting a great public-relations image in the campaign season.

This seems to be at least a slight departure from that, but I guess time will tell which one of us is right.

No comments:

Post a Comment