Day One

Greg Sargent is in my head, reading my mind. I've also been thinking Team Obama should co-opt Romney's Day One ad:

By the way, there’s a frame already in place to start amplifying this message more effectively. It’s a frame Romney himself uses regularly. His ads frequently ask: “What would a Mitt Romney presidency look like?” and talk about what he’ll do on “day one” of his presidency. The Obama campaign might consider pivoting off of these very phrases to paint a vivid picture of its own of what a Romney presidency would really look like — cutting taxes deeply on the rich, restarting policies that could make the crisis worse, taking away Obamacare protections the pubic supports, quasi-voucherizing Medicare — and contrast it sharply with what you should expect from Obama’s second term. As many others have already pointed out, the latter has not been spelled out clearly enough.

I've been seeing both Romney's ad and Obama's Romney Economics "didn't work then, won't work now" thing. Romney's ad is actually effective and will work on the simple minded of the GOP base. The Obama ad is kind of awful. By the third viewing, it even bores me and I care about this stuff. My inclination is to click out.

But I would actually suggest an even simpler format than Greg puts forward here. For instance, a kind of call and response thing. Repeat the Romney thing about "standing up to China." Then show some symbolic image that suggests an international incident. Not sure what exactly, but something like Chinese bureaucrats looking angry that fades into a line of Chinese army tanks. And so forth. Pretty sure that would resonate better with the "independents" here in the fever swamps of the south.

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