It’s pretty safe to say that Mitt Romney enjoyed his weekend. While he still hasn’t wrapped up the Republican party’s presidential nomination (and still has a ways to go), his thorough trouncing of Newt Gingrich in Nevada on Saturday will probably allow him to breathe a bit easier for a day or two. But it’s not just Romney’s camp that’s okay with this weekend’s developments. The other? Team Obama, of course.
While we’ve all had the joy and horror of following the ups and downs of a frequently incomprehensible GOP race, things are starting to shake out just as some in Obama’s reelection campaign were expecting them to. “When you guys were all out there writing your Herman Cain stories, we were not following you into that sideshow,” an anonymous Obama aide told the Times. “We are keeping our eyes on the prize.” Yeah, Gingrich, Cain, and Ron Paul have all had their little moments in the spotlight, but Team Obama has always been focused on Romney. Him and all his little and not-so-little slipups
While Obama’s camp is prepared for and expecting a tough campaign trail, going up against Romney would have one major benefit: all of the robotic former Massachusetts governor’s flubs, of which there have been so many that some in the Obama campaign have taken to calling him “the gift that keeps on giving.” Take the whole “I’m not concerned with the very poor” fiasco from last week. As the Times’ Helene Cooper reports, within hours of the verbal slipup, the Democratic National Committee had put together a web ad highlighting (and jumping up and pointing at) the mistake that was quickly passed around the Internet. And it’s not just this one mistake that the Obama campaign has been all to happy to point out, but countless others, which they’ve spread through tweets and mass e-mails. We’re used to seeing politicians’ mistakes rubbed in their faces, but rarely has a campaign been so adept at using the Internet to spread and intensify the process. If Romney finds his mistakes cringe worthy now, imagine how tough nine more months of this is going to be.
