I frankly wasn't going to write about the schmaltzy video released announcing Obama's 2012 re-election campaign until I heard the news that the administration plans to cave this afternoon on federal trials for the alleged 9/11 conspirators. But given the odd timing of Obama announcing his campaign just as he's kicking the least influential element of his base in the teeth, I figured I'd write something. Here's the video:
Dave Weigel flags "Ed from North Carolina" as the "obvious star" of the commercial:
The obvious star of this is "Ed from North Carolina," who delivers the classic endorsement of a things-are-still-not-great re-election bid: "I don't agree with Obama on everything, but I respect him and I trust him." One of the key lines in George W. Bush's re-election speech was "You may not always agree with me, but you know where I stand." These are similar arguments with a key difference.
I'm not sure that Ed is so much the obvious star as the obvious template for the type of voter some analysts have argued the 2012 election will hinge on, but there's plenty of things to be disappointed with. There was a huge rise in deportations but no similarly strong push for comprehensive immigration reform, and the administration couldn't even keep its own party members in line for a vote on the DREAM Act. The post-2006 Bush national-security state is virtually untouched, with the exception of a delicate and reversible executive ban on torture. Obama's major domestic-policy achievement, the Affordable Care Act, hangs on the whims of one or two of the conservative justices on the Supreme Court. DADT is gone, and DOMA is on the ropes, but with an anemic economic recovery, the Obama asking for your vote in 2012 is your average cosmopolitan corporate-friendly Democrat, a guy who probably won't help Republicans privatize the entire American welfare state. It's easy to personalize this, of course, because people vote for candidates even though in practice, as my colleague Jamelle Bouie is constantly reminding us, voters actually vote for parties. It's probably easier to hate Obama than to hate the Democrats, but this is what the party is today.
Point is, though, if you voted for Obama in 2008 expecting a restoration of the rule of law, a rejection of the Bush national-security paradigm or even a candidate who wouldn't rush headlong into wars in Muslim countries expecting to turn back the current of history through mere force of will, then you don't have a candidate for 2012. You probably don't have a party either.
