CHICAGO (Reuters) - On the day after the 2010 midterm election that swept Republicans into control of the House of Representatives and decreased Democrats' majority in the Senate, senior White House adviser David Axelrod had a message for President Barack Obama.
"I think they just planted the seeds of your re-election," he told his boss.
"The most strident voices had seized control of the Republican Party and you knew that the nominee who would emerge either would come from that Tea Party base or would have to yield to it in order to be the nominee," Axelrod told Reuters.
That nominee ended up being former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, and Obama's campaign went on to exploit his ties to the conservative wing of his party and outmaneuver him to victory in the November 6 general election.
Axelrod, who left the White House to oversee strategy for the president's 2012 campaign, and fellow Democrats attribute Obama's decisive win on Tuesday to Obama and to a consistent strategy that sidelined Romney in key swing states.
An early and effective effort to define the former private equity executive as unfriendly to the middle class, a superior ground operation to get out the vote, and a deft response to missteps by Romney and his allies helped Obama overcome his own perceived weaknesses in presiding over a slow economic recovery.
"They successfully made this a choice election as opposed to a referendum on the president and the economy," said Michael Feldman, a Democratic strategist and former adviser to Vice President Al Gore. "They also used the critical months between the end of the (Republican) primary and the general election to better define Mitt Romney than the Romney campaign did."
That defining process turned out to be key.
In the spring and summer, Obama's campaign used a massive advertising package to highlight concerns about Romney's tenure as the head of Bain Capital and pounded the multi-millionaire executive for refusing to release several years of his personal tax returns.
The Romney campaign's slow response to that onslaught and failure to neutralize the criticism over his tax returns baffled Obama's Chicago team.
Originally posted here:
Anatomy of a White House win: how Obama outmaneuvered Romney
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