After many stressful months of typing up breaking stories on his phone to beat the competition and drinking with senior political operatives on the campaign trail, Jim Rutenberg of The New York Times knows the ins and outs of the 2012 presidential election.
Rutenberg, a political reporter, worked 17 to 18-hour days while he covered the two campaigns, often spending extensive time with the candidates and their staffs.
“On some level, you get to know each other really well, and you spend a lot of time with each other at the bar after work,” Rutenberg said. “It’s weird, because we’re not friends at the end of the day; we’re a source and a reporter.”
According to Rutenberg, President Obama was not an indestructible candidate in his second bid for office. Obama’s 2008 campaign benefited from the overwhelming enthusiasm of the Democratic party that was not as strong and persuasive in 2012.
“The Obama guys knew that they were not going to be able to ride the wave like they did the first time around,” Rutenberg said. “Obama was definitely beatable.”
Rutenberg compared voters’ lackluster opinion of Obama in his first term to a bad marriage: Voters were initially enthusiastic and hopeful, but ended up disappointed and trying to “save” the relationship.
“The only voters that anyone cared about were Obama’s voters that were ready to switch. Romney needed them, and they were gettable,” Rutenberg said. “Voters ran out of patience, they could have won this thing.”
However, the Romney campaign faced the problem of trying to attract the voters who elected Obama in 2008 without offending them. According to Rutenberg, the independent swing voters in 2012 still remembered voting for Obama in 2008, and too much negativity from the Republicans would make voters feel as if they had made a mistake.
“Blaming Obama meant blaming voters,” Rutenberg said.
Numerous problems befell the Romney campaign from the beginning, and Rutenberg said that perhaps the biggest misstep was out-of-date outreach methods and inefficient use of technology to court voters. In Rutenberg’s opinion, Romney’s use of social media technology in 2012 was less advanced even than Bush’s had been in 2004.
The Republican National Convention also proved to be a missed opportunity for Romney’s campaign.
“One of the initial stumbles was the famous Clint Eastwood speech,” Rutenberg said. “It was ridiculous.”
Rutenberg said the convention was supposed to soften up Romney’s image and make him seem more human and likeable, yet the speeches that actually accomplished this were not in prime time, and voters never got to see the more personable side of Romney that his campaign wanted to convey. Image problems were endemic to the Romney campaign. According to Rutenberg, the Obama campaign attacked Romney by framing him as a businessman, which he in turn embraced, touting his financial and economic success.
“In retrospect, this was a fatal mistake,” Rutenberg said. “By going after his business acumen, it gave Obama a single pillar to attack.”
The Obama campaign was not without it’s flaws however. Obama’s first debate was a landmark point in the campaign. Rutenberg attributed Obama’s less-than-stellar performance to a lack of preparation, noting that Romney had more time to prepare because he was free from the burdens of being the sitting president.
Rutenberg also pointed out that the campaign became less about policy and more about personal attacks, which ended up being to Obama’s advantage.
“Obama was happy to talk about bullshit,” Rutenberg said. “The more it was about substance, the more the perception was that Obama was going to lose. The more it was about Romney being a businessman, the more he would win.”
See Pipe Dream’s sit-down interview with Jim Rutenberg