Obama and Romney Stand Before a Bitter Battle

The election campaign has officially begun in the US. The duel, Obama vs. Romney, threatens to become dirty and brutal. Neither incumbent nor challenger will give up easily.

The match is on, and both camps have begun their reciprocal attacks. Does Barack Obama, the first black president of the United States, undermine equal rights laws because a photo of his campaign team, taken in their Chicago headquarters, shows only two African-Americans amongst the approximately 100 employees?

And is Mitt Romney an opportunist for firing a homosexual political adviser from his team, after criticism from the religious right?

The key slogan: “Forward”

“Forward” reads the key slogan under which the president officially opened his re-election campaign this weekend. The term replaces the slogan “Change,” the powerful promise of a new day that helped lead Obama to victory four years ago.

The Republican camp did not hesitate to point out that the “Forward” concept has a particular meaning in the vocabulary of Marxism and Communism, and that the newspaper of the German social-democrats was called “Forward,” back when Friedrich Engels and Leon Trotsky were publishing there.

With the “Forward” concept, Obama is attempting to make his politics of change sustainable. The 2008 electoral victory of the senator from Illinois was celebrated by his supporters as a revolution. Now the president promises the continuation of that upheaval: “keep it up,” rather than “back to the Bush years.”

Joe Biden, the vice president, summed up Obama’s success in two concise points, and these will keep popping up throughout the campaign: “It’s pretty simple: Osama bin Laden is dead, and General Motors is alive.” That hit lands squarely on the challenger, who is competing under the even more banal slogan, “Believe in America.”

Obama leads in organization

In 2009, Romney disapproved of a bailout with tax dollars of the Detroit auto industry, which had been brought to its knees by the economic crash. Furthermore, there are quotations from years previous, in which the Republican skeptic shows his opposition to the cost of the hunt for the head of al-Qaida.

The incumbent and the candidate appear neck-and-neck in U.S. nationwide polls, six months before the presidential election. However, from an organizational standpoint, Obama is leading. As Romney was still slogging his way through the primaries, the president was already building a powerful campaign team.

By the end of March, Team Obama already had over 530 paid staff members. At that time, Romney had just 100 employees. At that time, Obama had raised 197 million dollars for the campaign; Romney, only $87 million.

As in 2008, Obama has an impressive network of small donors, who give a maximum of $200 and as little as just five dollars to his campaign, but who readily pass on their enthusiasm to neighbors and colleagues.

The head start melts away

These small donations account for 53 percent of Obama’s total campaign spending; only 19 percent comes from supporters putting the maximum allowable amount of $2,500 into the campaign coffers. For Romney, the relationship between minimum and maximum donors is reversed.

In the foundation of regional and local campaign teams, spread far and wide across the U.S., Obama is again far ahead of the ex-governor of Massachusetts. And yet here there’s bad news for the president: in light of this arms race that clearly favors Obama, he should be commanding a comfortable head start.

And yet the president leads by a very narrow margin in nation-wide polling. In election-deciding “swing states,” such as Florida, Ohio or Virginia, Obama does come in ahead. But the head start is melting away. According to Internet portal Realclearpolitics.com, in an average of all relevant April polls in Florida, the president led by a mere 0.4 percentage points.

In 2008, Obama won that state with a lead of 2.8 percentage points. Experience shows that the candidate who wants to win the White House must win in the Sunshine State.

Chances are 50-50

Four years ago, an exceptional candidate surged into the spotlight — one who was different than all the rest: African-American, but not descended from slaves, which could have instilled the nation with a guilty conscience; left of the middle and yet pragmatic; intellectual and at the same time athletic and youthful.

Because of these factors, Obama was elected by an enthusiastic majority. In 2012, there’s little of that euphoria to be found. “Forward,” calls the President. But many voters are asking, “Where to?”

As Obama kicked off his campaign in Ohio and Virginia on Saturday, 4000 seats remained empty. And Romney elicits even less enthusiasm.

If Romney should win in November, it may be less thanks to his overall presidential appearance than to the possibility that voters, angered by depressed economic growth and a continually high unemployment rate, voted Obama out. The chances are 50-50.

The electoral fight begins with a dogfight

Up until the deciding vote, the mean-spirited reciprocal attacks will continue. Obama has shown that he can dish it out, as he did four years ago against his opponent in the primaries, Hillary Clinton. Romney has demonstrated his own talent for fighting tooth and nail, as he fought it out with his opponents in the primaries over the past three-quarters of a year.

Yet for the moment, narrow-minded obstinacy reigns: Romney has for some time seen himself heavily attacked by animal-lovers and Democrats, because of a family vacation in the ‘80s, when he drove, often for many hours, with his Irish setter Seamus in a box strapped to the roof of the car.

Now the Republican team is fighting back: In his memoir, “Dreams from My Father,” Obama made it known that during his childhood in Indonesia, he ate not only roasted locusts and snakes, but also dog meat. Wow — in America, the electoral fight has begun with a dogfight.