While the media has been digging through Mitt Romney’s record for some time, President Obama is just catching up now. David Axelrod, Obama’s chief campaign strategist, tells Reuters that the president has been cramming for next month’s debates during flights and in the evening when he’s at the White House. “He’s spent a lot of time reading material and most of it is familiarizing himself with what Governor Romney said in this campaign,” Axelrod explains. “I mean, he’s pretty conversant with his own record but he wasn’t very conversant with Romney’s.” However, Obama knows the American people don’t want to sit through an essay when he goes head-to-head with Romney, so he’s practicing giving concise answers. “He’s got to speak shorter, that’s all,” Axelrod says. “He just hasn’t had to do that for the last four years so that’s a part of the discipline of preparing for these debates.”
