Obama begins 2012 run with challenges, advantages

By Saul Loeb, AFP/Getty Images

President Obama is poised to launch his re-election bid for a second presidential term.

EnlargeCloseBy Saul Loeb, AFP/Getty Images

President Obama is poised to launch his re-election bid for a second presidential term.

Surprising no one, President Obama is poised to file papers with the Federal Election Commission as early as today, officially launching his bid for a second term.

He starts his re-election campaign in one of the stronger positions of sitting presidents over the past four decades. His job-approval rating at this point in his tenure is higher than that of Bill Clinton or Ronald Reagan, presidents who won second terms, and the nation's jobless rate, now 8.8%, has been slowly declining.

But as he turns 50 this year, Obama must traverse some perilous landscape. The economic recovery is fragile, and the U.S. military now is involved in three controversial military campaigns — in Afghanistan, Iraq and now Libya — that draw significant opposition from war-weary Americans. What's more, the big legislative achievement of his presidency, an overhaul of the health care system, fails to win majority support in national public opinion polls more than a year after he signed it.

"He'll have a lot of advantages as the incumbent — not challenged for his party's nomination and with an unlimited campaign fund," says Frank Donatelli, a former White House political director for Ronald Reagan and top aide to John McCain in the 2008 campaign. "On the other hand, we're still in very tough economic times, and his approval rating has been below 50% for a year now."

Donatelli puts the odds at Obama's re-election at "slightly better than 50-50," but adds, "The Republican nomination is clearly worth having."

Here's a look at the political landscape as Obama seeks to become the 17th president to win a second term.

Four big strengths History is on Obama's side. For more than a century, a political party that wins back the White House almost always holds it for at least eight years. The only exception was in 1980, when Jimmy Carter lost his re-election bid.

Among Obama's strengths:

•The jobless rate is down.

For most of his first two years in office, Obama looked vulnerable on the economy. No matter how much he blamed his predecessor, George W. Bush, for job losses, the economy was Obama's burden.

The stark facts remain negative: The nation has lost about 3 million jobs since Obama came into office. But in the last year, the trend has been reversed, with about 1.4 million jobs created — nearly 500,000 this year alone.

"To the extent that things are getting better, it's going to be difficult for (Republicans) to make a case," says Obama strategist David Axelrod.

Republicans acknowledge the economy is improving at the right time for Obama; a report Friday showed the unemployment rate ticking down. Still, they question whether that will be enough to counter slow growth.

Former Republican National Committee chairman Ed Gillespie notes that presidents who have run for re-election with jobless rates above 7.5% — including Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush — usually have lost.

Democrats are nervous. "Any president going into an election with 8.8% unemployment faces real challenges," says Robert Borosage, co-director of the liberal Campaign for America's Future.

•Fundraising will favor him.

Obama's reason for starting his re-election campaign this early speaks to one of his major advantages: raising money.

He spent nearly $750 million during his primary and general election campaigns in 2007-08, overwhelming his rivals. By starting nine months before the first GOP primary and with a base of 4 million people who contributed to him last time, Obama will have a huge head start.

"In 2012, the Republican candidates are going to be in the same position as they were in 2008: chasing Obama," says Anthony Corrado, an expert on political fundraising at Colby College in Maine. "He has the biggest base of donors at the beginning of a re-election campaign of any president in history."

Obama's campaign recently asked 450 of his top fundraisers to collect $350,000 each by year's end. That would pump more than $157 million into his re-election effort before 2012.

Republicans, however, will have more ability to compete than they did in 2008. Conservative groups such as American Crossroads showed muscular fundraising ability in the 2010 elections. And a Supreme Court ruling has given outside groups, including corporations, the ability to spend unlimited amounts of money up until Election Day.

•Demographics will boost his prospects.

Results from the 2010 Census released last month show a more racially and ethnically diverse nation — and with that a more Democratic electorate. Now, 36.3% of the population is minority, an increase of 5.4 percentage points in a decade.

The fastest-growing ethnic group, Hispanics, now represent about one in six Americans.

"The Census data confirm that the minoritization of America, the diversification of America, has proceeded not only fast but faster than we thought," says political scientist Ruy Teixeira, author of Red, Blue, and Purple America: The Future of Election Demographics. "On balance, that helps Obama." Four of five minority voters backed him in 2008.

The nation's changing complexion improves Obama's prospect in what Democratic analyst Simon Rosenberg calls "the Latin belt," including such battleground states as Florida and Arizona.

Still, Obama's standing among white voters has eroded from the 43% who voted for him in 2008. That could put at risk some manufacturing states with a large number of white blue-collar workers — among them Michigan, Pennsylvania and New Jersey — that Democrats have come to rely on. "The newfound weakness for Democrats in the Rust Belt is a strategic challenge," Rosenberg says.

•A significant primary challenge is unlikely.

Some liberal Democrats express disappointment about Obama for not fulfilling his promise to close the terrorist prison at Guantanamo Bay and for agreeing to a health care law that didn't include a public, government option. "There's been a general de-mobilization of the movement of hope and change," Borosage says, though he adds that Republicans' budget cuts and efforts against public-employee unions could help revive it.

Even so, there are no signs the president will face a significant challenge for the Democratic nomination. In the most recent USA TODAY/Gallup Poll, more than eight of 10 Democrats approved of the job he's doing as president. Among African Americans, the most reliable demographic group in the Democratic base, more than nine of 10 approve.

Democratic pollster Mark Mellman put the odds of a challenge "somewhere between zero and 1%."

That matters: The last three presidents who faced significant primary challenges — Gerald Ford in 1976, Carter in 1980 and the elder President Bush in 1992 — all won the nomination but then lost the election. The last four presidents who didn't have primary battles all won in November.

"There's no question it makes it easier" for presidents, says Mellman, a strategist for John Kerry in 2004. "You're not draining resources ... and it means you don't have a fractured, divided party."

Four big hurdles For all of Obama's advantages, he faces tough challenges on fiscal and foreign affairs, including some of his own making. He also faces what most incumbents face: an energized opposition.

Among the president's vulnerabilities:

•The health care victory carried a cost.

Obama's overhaul of the health care system remains a potentially dangerous issue for him. Recent polls show little change in support from when the law was passed a year ago. In Gallup's March poll, 46% said they were pleased with the law, while 44% disagreed — down from 49% and 40% a year earlier.

That's disturbing news for the administration, which has labored since September to tout those parts of the law viewed most favorably by the public. They include barring insurance companies from denying coverage based on pre-existing conditions, letting young people stay on their parents' insurance up to age 26, and giving some seniors $250 subsidies toward their prescription drug costs.

"There's this sense, particularly among independent voters, that this thing is flawed," says independent health care consultant Robert Laszewski. "But it's not so flawed in their minds that it can't be fixed."

There are wild cards in the debate. Beginning this week in the House of Representatives, Republicans are likely to propose major spending cuts in Medicare and Medicaid, creating their own controversy.

And the Supreme Court may rule in the summer of 2012 on the law's constitutionality following a split among lower courts on the question, a decision that could start the debate all over again.

•Wars, new and old, raise qualms.

It was his opposition to the war in Iraq that initially propelled Obama, a freshman senator from Illinois, against Democratic front-runner Hillary Rodham Clinton in 2008.

As president, Obama has continued Bush's plan to withdraw most U.S. combat troops from Iraq, but he also has expanded the deployment in Afghanistan and in recent weeks ordered the military into action in Libya. Some conservatives have criticized his leadership in not acting more decisively, and some liberals are outraged that he acted at all. On Thursday, Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, stood on the House floor for 40 minutes to denounce Obama's military action in Libya as unconstitutional.

Even if the military operations go as planned, they aren't likely to be a political plus, Teixeira says, at a time Americans are more concerned about jobs and the economy. "But certainly there are scenarios if things go south, it could hurt him," he says.

Republicans and presidential hopefuls from Sarah Palin to Mitt Romney have criticized Obama for acting multilaterally, following the lead of France and Great Britain.

"It's reinforced a perception among voters that he's weak and vacillating," Gillespie says. "They don't like that in a president."

•Big spending is a big issue.

One of the issues that dominated the 2010 mid-term elections — government spending — could come back to bite Obama.

That's because two numbers in the federal budget keep getting worse: The annual deficit, which hurt the first President Bush when it hit $290 billion in 1992, is now about $1.6 trillion. And the accumulated national debt is fast approaching $14.3 trillion.

"If deficits and spending remain an issue to the degree they were in the midterms, he's in trouble," says Doug Holtz-Eakin, former Congressional Budget Office director and McCain's top domestic policy adviser in the 2008 presidential campaign.

The White House says the Bush administration sent the deficit soaring with record tax cuts and wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. "Authorship of the deficits and debt is widely shared. They have a piece of that," Axelrod says.

Now, Obama and Republicans are negotiating spending cuts to resolve the 2011 budget. They'll battle over deficit reduction and the debt ceiling later this year.

On most of those issues, Obama has taken a back seat to Congress. "The lack of leadership is startling," says former senator Judd Gregg, R-N.H., whom Obama once nominated for Commerce secretary. "It appears he wants to be re-elected more than he wants to lead."

•The GOP is energized.

In 2008, Bush's approval ratings fell amid an unpopular war in Iraq and worsening economy, and with it the enthusiasm of the GOP in the presidential race.

Obama isn't likely to have such an advantage in 2012. Opposition to his policies has sparked the Tea Party movement and helped Republicans gain control of the House last fall in what Obama described as "a shellacking."

"The 2010 elections have energized the party, and the base Republican rank and file are very engaged and very active," says Donatelli, who oversaw operations at the Republican National Committee for McCain in 2008.

Axelrod cites the president's strength but expresses concern about what can't be forecast: an international financial calamity, say, or a catastrophic oil spill. "The things I worry about are the things we can't control," he says.

"The biggest risk is uncertainty," Mellman says. "Presidential elections are driven by reality, by real events, and nobody has any idea what those real events are going to be. That uncertainty is what makes it a ballgame."

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