Obama launches reelection campaign

President Barack Obama launched his 2012 reelection campaign on Monday morning with a video testimonial from voters posted on his website and an email to supporters, echoing his innovative and oft-copied 2008 kickoff.

By inaugurating what could be the first $1 billion campaign in history so early, Obama has gotten the jump on a scattered GOP field reluctant to take the plunge and hits the starting line months earlier than George W. Bush did for his 2004 reelection bid.


The video – entitled “It Begins With Us” – is an effort to rekindle the grassroots fervor that propelled Obama into office and seemed to be a tacit acknowledgement that many of his supporters have been disappointed by the stuttering pace of change and the compromises Obama has made in the last two-and-half years.

The two-minute clip features a series of interviews with voters from around the country explaining why they plan to support the president. It doesn’t include Obama’s voice or any new film footage of him. But it was quickly followed by an Obama email in which the president explained the early start to the campaign.

“We’re doing this now because the politics we believe in does not start with expensive TV ads or extravaganzas, but with you — with people organizing block-by-block, talking to neighbors, co-workers, and friends,” Obama writes, explaining why the launch is coming more than 19 months before Election Day.

“And that kind of campaign takes time to build.”

Today’s announcement puts Obama well ahead of any potential Republican opponent in making his intentions clear. The lack of a clear GOP frontrunner so late in the cycle and the unwillingness of any potential opponent to commit is seen as a mixed blessing by Obama’s political brain trust.

On one hand, Republican disunity is always a plus for a sitting Democrat. On the other hand, the lack of an opponent forces the president to have a conversation about himself with himself – denying him the chance to contrast his record with that of a living, breathing conservative foil.

The launch also comes at middling moment of the Obama presidency. The economy is rebounding but still bad; Afghanistan and Iraq are winding down but Obama has accepted an ill-defined new mission in Libya; and the polls show him in the 42-to-48 percent approval range, basically where he’s been for most of his time in the White House.

Yet both the video and email offer a clear preview of Obama’s 2012 strategy, a hybrid of let-me-finish-the-job optimism combined with a warning about what the country would look like in the hands of a Republican president.

Nearly absent from Monday’s rhetoric is the “hope and change” theme that dominated Obama’s effort for four years ago – a recognition that the meme just wouldn’t float after his failure to deliver on some of his more high profile promises from 2008 such as closing the Guantanamo Bay detention facility, passing immigration reform, attacking global warming and ending the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan more quickly.

And the video made a conspicuous bow to independent voters who are unhappy with what Obama has done. “I don’t agree with Obama on everything, but I respect him and I trust him,” a man identified only as Ed from North Carolina says in the video.

Obama’s fundraising team has already had to answer a lot of tough questions in “listening” sessions around the country with top donors. And Obama himself tackles the issue of disaffection head-on in his statement.

“We’ve always known that lasting change wouldn’t come quickly or easily. It never does,” he writes. “But as my administration and folks across the country fight to protect the progress we’ve made — and make more — we also need to begin mobilizing for 2012, long before the time comes for me to begin campaigning in earnest.”

As another voter - “Gladys” from Nevada – says on the video: “There are so many things that are still on the table that need to be addressed. And we want them to be addressed by President Obama.”

That the widely-anticipated launch was a direct message to supporters – rather than a speech or media announcement – represents a core principle of Obama’s 2008 campaign veterans: Market the candidate directly to his likely supporters, avoiding the less-flattering filter of the national press.

Another of those principles is to try to keep a distance from Washington, and so campaign manager Jim Messina, the former White House deputy chief of staff, has set up shop in Chicago at One Prudential Plaza, overlooking Grant Park, where Obama gave his election night victory speech.

“This campaign is just kicking off,” the front page of BarackObama.com says. “We’re opening up offices, unpacking boxes, and starting a conversation with supporters like you to help shape our path to victory. 2012 begins now, and this is where you say you’re in.”

Reports over the weekend set the drumbeat for the official launch, which came soon after 5 a.m. on the fourth day of the fourth month, symbolic for the 44th president.

“So even though I’m focused on the job you elected me to do, and the race may not reach full speed for a year or more, the work of laying the foundation for our campaign must start today,” Obama says in his email.

An official filing with the Federal Election Commission is expected to come later Monday so that Obama can begin fundraising for what could be the first $1 billion campaign. That will kick off a spate of fundraisers, starting with an April 14 event in his hometown of Chicago.

Two more are set for the following week, in San Francisco and Los Angeles, with ticket prices ranging from $25 for young adults — “Gen44” — to $2,500 for VIPs.

Summoning the grassroots supporters who helped elect Obama in 2008, the two-minute video is an exercise in covering the bases, with backers young and old. Four of the five people featured in the video come from battleground states, the fifth is a college student from New York.

“We’re not leaving it up to chance, we’re not leaving up to, ‘oh, the incumbent,’” the woman identified as Gladys said. “It’s an election that we have to win.” Video footage shows her in a kitchen with three kids.

“Unfortunately, President Obama is one person,” says Alice from Michigan. “Plus, he’s got a job. You know, we’re paying him to do a job so we can’t say, ‘hey can you take some time off and get us all energized?’ So we better figure it out.”

“I had this perception that politics was all show, it’s all sound bites. But politics is how we govern ourselves,” Katherine from Colorado says. “At the grassroots level, it’s individuals talking to other individuals and making a difference.”

“It begins with us,” the screen says as the video closes, segueing into the same “O” logo with a rising American flag that Obama used throughout the 2008 campaign, before zooming out so that the “O” becomes part of “2012.”