Visual source: Newseum
Chris Cillizza and Aaron Blake run down the numbers on the empathy gap:
Overall, 55 percent of registered voters said that Obama understands “the problems of average Americans” either “very well” (30 percent) or “fairly well” (24 percent). Forty-one percent said Obama doesn’t understand those problems well.
Those numbers compare very favorably for the president with the empathy scores for Romney, about whom 39 percent of voters said he understands the problems of average Americans and 48 percent said he doesn’t.
When a Republican presidential candidate makes more in a single day than many make in a whole year, relating to voters on a personal level is a daunting task. Keli Goff thinks that Mitt Romney's empathy problem may be insurmountable:
Every presidential race has a few key moments and phrases that define it years after the race has come to an end. The 1980 campaign had the question, "Are you better off than you were four years ago?" The 1988 campaign had the Willie Horton ad. 1992 had "It's the economy stupid" and "I didn't inhale." Amidst the temporary distraction of words like "Tiffany's account" and "open marriage" there will likely be three words that we will all remember after the 2012 presidential campaign is long over: "I didn't inherit."
Farah Stockman, meanwhile, points out that yes, Romney should be proud that he made a vast fortune on his own, but he shouldn't pretend that he didn't have a huge head start in life:
Romney he should also acknowledge that - while he reached the finish line of financial success on his own - he had a pretty substantial head start.
In 1963, the year my father’s father earned $4,400 as the curator of a small museum, Romney’s dad, a former automotive CEO beginning his first term as governor of Michigan, grossed $567,000. Romney went to an elite prep school and then to Stanford. He didn’t have to hold down a job alongside his classes or take on burdensome college loans. After graduation, his parents helped him buy a home for his young family in a safe, upscale suburb. Romney’s father ran for president - which could not have escaped notice when Romney applied to Harvard Business School or for his first job at a consulting firm.
Each one of these steps represents a crucial piece of social capital that successful parents pass on to their kids, quite apart from monetary inheritance. These benefits are real. College debt makes young people delay home purchases, marriage, and even medical procedures for years. Forty-two percent of all students who graduate with debt live paycheck to paycheck, compared to 24 percent who graduated debt-free. Parents who help their children buy homes or start businesses enable them to accumulate wealth far faster than those who have to borrow from a bank.
So Romney’s financial future was bright even before he was born.
Amie Parnes pens what I can only call an odd piece that seems time-capsuled in from 2008:
President Obama is finding ways to get his message to the public without going through the White House press corps.
Obama on Monday held his “first completely virtual interview” as part of an event hosted by Google+, the social network the president called “a newfangled thing.” [...]
The virtual interview is part of a larger effort by the White House to connect directly to Americans without going through the news media.
In recent months, Obama has hand-picked social media networks like Facebook and Twitter to relay his message on a variety of issues, holding town-hall meetings on both and even doing a third on LinkedIn.
The Obama campaign's efforts to drive a narrative outside of the framework of the traditional media has been a cornerstone of their strategy since President Obama began running for his first term. The tools may be a bit more novel this time around, but the strategy certainly isn't.
Speaking of strategy, Frank James looks at how Romney will have to alter his to deal with a president whose temperament is decidedly different than that of Newt Gingrich :
One of Gingrich's greatest weaknesses was his well-known tendency to be undisciplined. Romney's effort was geared to exploit that.
But the challenge for Romney if he gets past Gingrich and becomes his party's nominee is that he would be facing a well-disciplined candidate in President Obama with a reputation for being slow to anger and for having an equanimity about him and desire for orderliness that earned him the nickname "No-drama Obama."