Ed Morrissey
Hot Air Blog
While Barack Obama’s fundraising dropped 20% from March to April, Mitt Romney’s tripled — and then some, according to his campaign disclosure for April’s fundraising. Team Romney, partnered with the RNC, hauled in more than $40 million, just $3 million less than Obama:
Mitt Romney almost matched President Obama in fund-raising during April after securing his party’s presidential nomination and joining forces with the Republican National Committee, the campaign will announce on Thursday.
Mr. Romney and the R.N.C. raised $40.1 million in April, just shy of the $43.6 million that Mr. Obama and the Democratic National Committee raised for the month.
The contributions on behalf of Mr. Romney represent a huge jump over the $12.6 million that his campaign raised in March. The increase was made possible by donors coalescing around Mr. Romney as the nominee and the larger donations that can be directed to the party, campaign officials said.
The partnership did help, but it’s not an apples-to-apples comparison, either. Obama and the DNC have partnered for over a year. The RNC only partnered with Romney in the final week of April. Romney’s chief opponent Rick Santorum dropped out midway through the month. Had the RNC partnered with Romney throughout April with no primary opposition, the same situation Obama enjoyed, the fundraising comparison would have looked much different, and much worse for Obama.
Romney and the RNC have a full schedule of fundraisers in May, and the result is likely to embarrass the Democrats. That won’t be their only embarrassment, but they may all be related. Over the last several weeks, it’s become apparent that Obama and his allies on the Left have no idea how to talk to mainstream Americans. In my column for The Fiscal Times, I argue that Obama’s fundraising decline and his inability to leverage his incumbency for some polling distance may both spring from the same lead-tongued well:
Several factors play into this problem for Team Obama. In 2008, Obama was a blank screen with a very thin record, which meant that Obama had very little to defend. After more than three years in office, that no longer applies, and Obama has had such a difficult time defending his record on jobs and the economy that he rarely discusses it. Two bad jobs reports in a row — and even worse data on actual jobs — have tempered enthusiasm for Obama this year. Any incumbent President would find it difficult to maintain political momentum in a stagnating economy, and the winter saw another slowdown, the third in a row for Obama.
The problem for Obama and the Left this time is that they have to make an actual sales pitch — and judging from their efforts, they don’t know how to talk effectively enough to middle America to succeed at it. This problem starts at the top. Earlier this week, Obama appeared on ABC’s The View to discuss his candidacy, as well as his endorsement last week of legalization of same-sex marriage. When talk turned to the campaign, Obama told his hosts, “When your name is Barack Obama, it’s always tight,” and then added, “Barack Hussein Obama!”
For the record, Obama won the first majority victory for a Democrat in the popular vote in 2008 since Jimmy Carter, and won the Electoral College by nearly 200 votes. In his Senate election in 2004, the outcome was an oh-so-narrow victory over Alan Keyes of 70% to 27%. Not only was this patently false, but it unfairly accused American voters of racism and xenophobia almost four years after the same electorate put him into office.
The latest Obama campaign effort, “The Life of Julia,” also demonstrates an odd disconnect with American voters. Team Obama obviously wants to exploit the normal Democratic gender gap in the upcoming election by focusing on what it perceives as womens’ issues. Their Life of Julia depicts what they see as all of the benefits for women in an Obama-governed world — but to a great many other people, looks more like a cautionary tale. Julia takes seven years to get a degree, gets pregnant without ever getting married, the child disappears from her life after age 5, and she ends up alone at 67 — and every stage of her life, Julia is dependent on government programs. The artwork lends a creepy tone to the presentation, as Julia goes through life with no eyes or mouth. That doesn’t exactly look like empowerment.
As I write in my column, it’s not just Obama and his team, but also his allies in the media. The more they talk, the more people they alienate from Obama. And the more that happens, the fewer donations they get — and the more in both voters and contributors that Romney and the RNC can attract. This should be a very interesting summer in the fundraising race.
Read more: http://hotair.com/archives/2012/05/17/romney-dnc-haul-in-40-1-million-in-april/