The video threatens to stop the campaign’s accelerating momentum. Video potential worry for Obama

The five-year old video showing President Barack Obama talking bluntly about race, Hurricane Katrina and the Rev. Jeremiah Wright is a source of worry for a campaign that’s already on a knife’s edge over Wednesday night’s high-stakes debate in Denver and thinning leads in national polls.

Obama’s aides and top Democratic officials projected an air of nonchalance and nothing-to-see-here Tuesday night as Fox News and Tucker Carlson’s Daily Caller promoted the 2007 speech at Hampton University as a racial rant with the capacity to change the game. But the reelection campaign is concerned especially by the possibility of re-litigating Wright’s role in Obama’s life — a storyline long seen in Obamaland as among the most damaging to the president.


( Also on POLITICO: Media gives little play to Obama 2007 tape)

That’s made even stronger by the new focus on the tape coming at a key moment in the run-up to the debate — timing that could become a distraction for the campaign as the president prepares to take the stage.

The larger threat posed by the video isn’t its content — many of the statements Obama makes have been made by the president or other Democrats — but its capacity to stop the campaign’s accelerating momentum. Taken in combination with several other pre-debate problems for Obama — from tightening polls in Florida and Wisconsin and Vice President Joe Biden’s declaration Tuesday that the middle class has been “buried” over the last four years — the tape could be part of a movement that might make the race not the blowout many pundits have been predicting.

( Also on POLITICO: Obama's 2007 speech: How they covered it)

Robert Gibbs, the former White House press secretary, called the video a “distraction,” but added on CBS’s “This Morning,” “If Republicans want to defend the Bush administration’s response to Katrina, I’m sure the president would give them his time during the debate to do that.”

And sources inside the campaign tell POLITICO that they believe Carlson — and the Drudge Report — risked a backlash by emphasizing Obama’s use of church-pulpit African-American cadence. One top Democrat called that a “gift from our enemies.”

The video promoted by several conservative outlets was of then-Sen. Obama addressing a crowd at historically black Hampton University in Virginia in 2007. In it, Obama’s speaking style is markedly different as he spoke bluntly about race, Wright and the federal government’s response to Hurricane Katrina.

( See also: 10 facts about the Katrina response)

The Romney campaign said Tuesday that it played no role in distributing the video, which has shifted the focus of an important news cycle thanks to Drudge’s hypnotic command over much of the national media. And unlike after the last Drudge video leak – a 1998 clip of Obama saying he is for the redistribution of wealth that Drudge unearthed in September – Romney didn’t himself appear on Fox News to talk about the video.

Romney is seeking to draw a bright-line contrast with the president on tonight’s debate stage and the distracting, Drudge- and Hannity-promoted video doesn’t help that goal.

( Also on POLITICO: Romney camp moves away from tape)

To that end, his team spent Wednesday touting the latest misstatement from Vice President Joe Biden, even selling $30 T-shirts with Biden’s face and his Tuesday quotation that the middle class “has been buried the last four years” over an all-caps “honest Joe” flag.

Republicans said there’s no reason to expect that Romney-land will lean any harder into a message on the videotape, which Obama critics on the right say shows a heavily racialized view of politics and government.

In Colorado Tuesday afternoon and Wednesday morning – amid mounting hype surrounding the video – the Romney campaign was trying hard to keep attention on Biden’s “buried” statement.

Romney officials threw together a press conference in Denver featuring Colorado officials, including Rep. Cory Gardner and former Rep. Bob Beauprez, pummeling Biden even as Hannity and Drudge waved a shiny object elsewhere.

On Wednesday, Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus continued to swing away at Biden’s comments in a RedState column blasted out by the RNC.

“As every family struggling to make ends meet knows all too well, the last four years have been devastating for the middle class,” Priebus wrote.

Despite the heavy cross-promotion on conservative media and discussion on the network morning shows, the tape hasn’t broken through to swing-state undecided voters, according to Obama officials. The campaign hasn’t distributed talking points on the video to its surrogates, former Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland said, and in Iowa it hasn’t come up in a single field report, an official there said Wednesday afternoon.

“No one is talking about it at all,” the campaign official said.

And unlike other straight-to-Drudge oppo dumps, this one didn’t prompt a gleeful, triumphant response from the Romney campaign.

In a line used by other campaign spokespeople Wednesday, Romney adviser Kevin Madden said on CBS’s “This Morning” that voters can “look at that video and make up their mind on that individually.”

“What’s much more important to this debate right now are the president’s policies, the president’s record over the past four years. That’s what’s going to be the most important topic on stage tonight,” Madden said.

A key difference between this Obama video, filmed at a public event and already part of the 2008 campaign ecosystem, and the footage of Romney declaring at a Florida campaign fundraiser that 47 percent of Americans consider themselves victims is the nature of where each man delivered the remarks.

Because Romney was speaking to what he thought was a private audience, the tape of him carries a larger punch than Obama, who spoke to a crowd that included the national and local press corps, Strickland said.

“I just can’t imagine this being significant,” he said. “I do think the 47 percent thing was and is significant but it’s gotten such incredible exposure that everyone knows about it already. I just can’t imagine this old video, which in my judgment is not all that controversial, becoming a big deal.”