Campaign events drown out messages
Romney and Obama teams see their plans take a back seat to the reality on the ground.
FREMONT, Calif.— Politics often feels like a carnival sideshow. Thursday was one of those days.
Mitt Romney and aides to President Obama held competing news conferences on opposite sides of the nation, each aimed at establishing a damaging narrative illustrating why the opponent is incompetent to right the nation’s economy.
The events, a preview of a general election battle, showed how easy it can be for a campaign’s message to be subsumed.
By the end of the day, both campaigns’ planning had gone awry, even before the events were relegated to the news cycle’s undercard thanks to a deadlocked jury in the John Edwards trial.
Romney, on a California swing dedicated largely to fundraising, made a secretive visit to the shuttered headquarters of Solyndra, a solar energy firm that went bankrupt after receiving a $535-million loan guarantee approved by the Obama administration.
“It’s a symbol not of success but of failure. It’s also a symbol of a serious conflict of interest,” Romney told reporters gathered near the building, reiterating a Republican charge that the firm got the loan guarantee because one of its investors was a fundraiser for Obama.
“Free enterprise to the president means taking money from the taxpayers and giving it freely to his friends,” Romney said.
But much of the focus on Romney’s appearance had less to do with his message and more to do with the unusually secretive nature of the event, reminiscent of clandestine presidential trips to dangerous parts of the world. The campaign sought to closely guard knowledge of the event. Reporters, who typically receive advance details about campaign events, were told to gather Thursday morning in Redwood City for a bus trip.
The plan didn’t work — rumors had circulated Wednesday that Romney would head to Solyndra, and at least seven satellite trucks were awaiting his arrival. And it’s hard for a candidate to be subtle in a motorcade with Secret Service agents, California Highway Patrol officers and a large bus emblazoned with his name.
A person affiliated with the campaign, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said Romney’s operation didn’t want to give advance notice of the event because of fears that the Obama administration or people affiliated with Solyndra would try to stop it from taking place. Romney reiterated that charge when reporters asked about the cloak-and-dagger morning.
“This ought to be a big story, and I think there are a number of people among the president’s team who don’t want that story to get out,” he said. “We wanted to make sure it did.”
Some argued that Romney had a more strategic reason for keeping the event secret — avoiding throngs of protesters from nearby San Francisco. One needed only to look to Boston on Thursday to see what can happen when the other side gets wind of a rival’s plans.
The Obama campaign had called a news conference at the statehouse to pick apart Romney’s record on job creation and budgeting during his tenure as Massachusetts governor. The event marked the opening of a new front in Obama’s battle to define Romney, still relatively unknown to some voters.
“Mitt Romney never understood what government was all about,” said John Barrett, former mayor of North Adams, Mass. “Government is not about PowerPoint presentations; it’s about helping people — and not just some of the people.”
But he strained to speak above the chants of Romney supporters. Word of the event had leaked out early, giving the Romney campaign time to stage its own preemptive news conference and bring supporters to the scene.
As mayors and state officials blasted Romney’s record, Romney supporters could be heard loudly chanting “We want Mitt!” and “Where are the jobs?”
At times the chanters nearly drowned out the speakers, who included top Obama advisor David Axelrod.
Axelrod answered the hecklers with a pointed reminder of a Romney campaign aide’s recent statement that the positions he took in the primary would be erased in the coming general election: “You can shout down speakers, my friends, but it’s hard to Etch-ASketch away the truth.”
Across the country, Romney defended his raucous supporters.“If they’re going to be heckling us, why, we’re not going to sit back and play by very different rules,” he said.
Axelrod called the scene part of “the great pageant of democracy.”
To be sure, there is plenty of pageantry in presidential campaign, but it rarely involves such a raucous collision so early in the race. But Thursday may just have ushered in a summer of mudslinging.