Obama's campaign plans to portray Romney as inauthentic, unprincipled and 'weird.' | AP Photos Obama plan: Destroy Romney

Barack Obama’s aides and advisers are preparing to center the president’s reelection campaign on a ferocious personal assault on Mitt Romney’s character and business background, a strategy grounded in the early-stage expectation that the former Massachusetts governor is the likely GOP nominee.

The dramatic and unabashedly negative turn is the product of political reality. Obama remains personally popular, but pluralities in recent polling disapprove of his handling of his job, and Americans fear the country is on the wrong track. His aides are increasingly resigned to running for reelection in a glum nation. And so the candidate who ran on “hope” in 2008 has little choice four years later but to run a slashing, personal campaign aimed at disqualifying his likeliest opponent.


In a move that will make some Democrats shudder, Obama’s high command has even studied former President George W. Bush’s 2004 takedown of Sen. John Kerry, a senior campaign adviser told POLITICO, for clues on how a president with middling approval ratings can defeat a challenger.

“Unless things change and Obama can run on accomplishments, he will have to kill Romney,” said a prominent Democratic strategist aligned with the White House.

The onslaught would have two aspects. The first is personal: Obama’s reelection campaign will portray the public Romney as inauthentic, unprincipled and, in a word used repeatedly by Obama’s advisers in about a dozen interviews, “weird.”

“First, they’ve got to like you, and there’s not a lot to like about Mitt Romney,” said Chicago Democratic consultant Pete Giangreco, who worked on Obama’s 2008 campaign. “There’s no way to hide this guy and hide his innate phoniness.”

A senior Obama adviser was even more cutting, suggesting that the Republican’s personal awkwardness will turn off voters.

“There’s a weirdness factor with Romney, and it remains to be seen how he wears with the public,” the adviser said, noting that the contrasts they’d drive between the president and the former Massachusetts governor would be “based on character to a great extent.”

The second aspect of the campaign to define Romney is his record as CEO of Bain Capital, a venture capital firm that was responsible for both creating and eliminating jobs. Obama officials intend to frame Romney as the very picture of greed in the great recession — a sort of political Gordon Gekko.

“He was very, very good at making a profit for himself and his partners but not nearly as good [at] saving jobs for communities,” said David Axelrod, the president’s chief strategist. “His is very much the profile of what we’ve seen in the last decade on Wall Street. He was about making money. And that’s fine. But often times, he made it at the expense of jobs in communities.”

Romney officials shrug off the tough talk, arguing that there’s nothing Obama can do that will turn the campaign away from functioning as a referendum on his stewardship of the economy.

“There’s so many wonderful ironies here: Obama spent his whole political career perfecting the best argument against Bush 43, and now he’s going to run as 43?” said Romney strategist Stuart Stevens, who also worked for Bush. “They can try anything they want — but this race is going to be about the economy.”

The Democrats laying the groundwork for this strategy are well aware of its echoes. In 2004, the polarizing incumbent and his allies successfully raised doubts about the character and fitness of another stiff, wealthy patrician politician from Massachusetts with attacks on his alleged “flip-flopping” and even his war record.

“If you were to write the history of his political career, it would be called ‘Extreme Makeover,’” Axelrod said of Romney.

“What made the Bush people successful and made theirs a very smart strategy was that they pitted something deeply ingrained about Bush against something that they were trying to convince people of regarding Kerry,” said another top Obama adviser. “Specifically, they knew Bush was seen as stubborn but very firm in his beliefs. The opposite of that, of course, is not firm in your beliefs, and that’s how they portrayed Kerry from early on. It was a nice, sharp contrast.”

Obama’s team won’t portray the incumbent as stubborn but principled. Voters can expect to see a portrait of a president making the difficult decisions in tough times set against an opponent they’ll claim has bent, like the windsurfing Kerry, with the breeze. And they may do it before Romney has even formally wrapped up the nomination in the event he ends up on a glide path to the GOP nomination.

“When it’s clear we have an opponent in our eyes and in the eyes of public, we’re going to be in that discussion,” the Obama adviser said.

They don’t have a choice. Even Obama’s top aides don’t expect unemployment to be below eight percent when next November rolls around.

“When you have these difficult economic circumstances, everybody is going to have to make a choice,” said the Obama adviser. “We’re going to have to color both sides of that choice.”

Romney, currently the front-runner for the Republican nomination, isn’t the candidate Democrats would most like to face. That honor goes to former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin or Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann, vocal conservatives who may not be able to reach swing voters. Romney’s moderate record as the one-term governor of a liberal state — the target of conservative rivals’ criticism — could also make him a strong general election candidate.

Obama officials, however, believe they’ll have more grist for their flip-flop line of attack after the primary because Romney will eventually have to veer right to convince the GOP base he can be trusted with the nomination.

“He’s going to take some unpopular, right-wing stands,” said an adviser. “That was one of the main things that hung McCain up — how he had to go through the nominating process.”

Democrats say it’s Romney’s decade-plus of political maneuvering to win a Massachusetts Senate seat, the governorship and the White House that collectively will be his undoing.

“There’s a question of public character,” said Axelrod. “Are you principled, consistent — are you who you say you are? Can you be counted on?”

The character attacks on Romney will focus on what critics view as a makeover, both personal (skinny jeans) and political (abortion).

“People already knew that he’s a political opportunist of the highest order — changing his positions to suit the day’s polling,” said Bill Burton, Obama’s former White House deputy press secretary who now heads Priorities USA, an independent group expected to lead Democratic attacks on the Republican nominee. “But the last couple weeks, this lack of principles has translated into a total lack of leadership on issues like the debt ceiling.”

Burton said his group has begun conducting polling and focus groups on perceptions of the Republican candidates and has found doubts about Romney’s character.

Democrats also plan to amplify what Obama strategists described as the “weirdness” quotient, the sum of awkward public encounters and famous off-kilter anecdotes, first among them the tale of Romney having strapped his dog to the roof of his car.

None of the Obama advisers interviewed made any suggestion that Romney's personal qualities would be connected to his minority Mormon faith, but the step from casting Romney as a bit off to raising questions about religion may not be a large step for some of the incumbent's supporters.

And Obama officials have made “weirdness” an epithet for Romney the way they tagged John McCain “erratic” in the fall of 2008 after the Arizona senator suddenly left the campaign trail and nearly backed out of the first debate as part of an attempt to get a deal on the bailout

“Presidential campaigns are like MRIs of the soul,” said Axelrod. “When he makes jokes about being unemployed or a waitress pinching him on the butt, it does snap your head back, and you say, ‘What’s he talking about?’”

“It’s not just a matter of dodging the debate, not just a matter of flip-flopping and putting his finger to the wind — it is that he’s not comfortable in his own skin, and that gives people a sense of unease,” added a Democratic consultant expected to be involved in the reelection campaign.

An aide to Obama’s reelection campaign who declined to discuss the campaign’s strategy framed Romney’s careful positioning on the debt ceiling debate as more than a matter of policy.

“He took six different positions — and I can send you bullet points — during the debt debate and then ended up opposing an agreement that was critical to our economy,” said the aide, who followed up with a set of bullet points. “That’s certainly not the kind of economic leadership the American people are looking for.”

The attack on Romney is, to the Massachusetts Republican, nothing new. Sen. Ted Kennedy used elements of it against him in the 1994 Senate race, and his former adviser, Bob Shrum, summarized the current case this way: “You don’t know what he really believes; he’s been on both sides of issues, and by the way, he didn’t create jobs — he destroyed jobs while getting rich.”

The Democrats who are planning the assault on Romney believe they can avoid a referendum on Obama’s handling of the economy, in part, because both political parties are in such poor public favor.

Romney’s campaign is “making the assumption that the American people trust the Republicans on the economy,” said Giangreco. “People are so frustrated with the economy and so frustrated with both parties, so it’s a wash.”

“And so there’s only one thing left,” he said: “Who do I trust to do the right thing? And that’s the president.”