No Time for Complacency

Jim Messina, the manager of President Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign, has released a video that explains various paths the president can take to claiming the 270 electoral college votes he’ll need to achieve an important second term win. As PoliticusUSA points out, there’s a message here beyond that of mere strategizing:

The Obama campaign is trying to guard against complacency. They saw what happened in 2010 when Democrats didn’t bother to show up. They see what is happening right now with the president’s improving poll numbers and the improving economic outlook. Most importantly, they see how weak the Republican field is.

So far the race for the Republican nomination has been such a farce that it would [be] easy for an Obama supporter to look at the GOP field and think that none of those candidates could possibly defeat Obama, but the truth is that a repeat of the 2010 election is possible if the Obama Democrats don’t come out to vote in 2012. Messina was trying to debunk the stories about Obama potentially having a billion-dollar war chest, because he knows that grassroots organization, not fundraising, is why Obama won in 2008.

“The fact that the Obama campaign released this type of video right before the year-end fundraising deadline,” writes PoliticusUSA’s Jason Easley, “indicates that they are not only trying to finish the year strong on the fundraising front, but they are concerned about complacency.” The last thing the United States needs is a flip-flopping, Big Business suck-up like Willard Mitt Romney winning the White House because Democrats weren’t attentive or active enough to ensure that Obama wins in November 2012.

The futures of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, a woman’s right to choose what she does with her own body, and abortion rights, as well as preventing a war against Iran all depend on keeping Republicans out of the White House and defeating their efforts to increase their control over Congress.

Now is definitely not the right time for American liberals and progressives to sit on the sidelines and hope that other people will make the smart decisions for us.