More Campaign Surrogate Blunders
Jules Witcover

Laments that President Obama has been beastly to Bain Capital in his effort to cast Mitt Romney as a blood-sucking private-equity vampire have lately been coming from Democrats as well as Republicans.

Such minor voices in Obama's own party as Mayor Cory Booker of Newark and former White House aide Steve Rattner have joined the chorus. They have essentially cautioned the president against biting the hands of Wall Street heavyweights who have contributed major money to his campaign and to the Party of the People in general.

For reasons only clear to Booker himself, last Sunday on television he administered a verbal wrist-slapping to the man he wants re-elected in November, for characterizing Bain Capital under Romney as more focused on boosting corporate and stockholder profits than on job creation.

Booker equated Obama's charge with the plan submitted to the Romney campaign, but flatly rejected, to resurrect the 2008 ties of Obama with his former pastor, Jeremiah Wright. He called both negative attacks "nauseating." You could argue with the relative severity of the two assaults, but in terms of political tactics the Booker gambit was a colossal blunder.

In making it, Booker as an Obama surrogate broke a cardinal rule, which is that you never step on your candidate's message. Proof that the lesson was soon if tardily learned was a subsequent retreat by Booker.

Similar to a lesser extent were the remarks of Rattner, who oversaw for Obama the federal auto bailouts that helped General Motors and Chrysler survive the recession inherited by the new Democratic president.

While saying Romney had made a mistake in claiming he had created 100,000 jobs at Bain, Rattner offered that the firm had acted "within the rules" and "very responsibly." He didn't think, he said, there was "anything Bain Capital did that they need to be embarrassed about."

That, of course, is beside the point that Obama has been making -- that Romney's mission at Bain was to boost profits, not to create jobs, and that's where his success lay, not in job creation. But Rattner in his comments also stepped the president's message, giving the Republican Party and the Romney campaign to pounce on the gaffe, which both promptly did.

Once again, here's an example of the peril of having people speaking or acting on their own, instead of leaving the message to the candidate and to the campaign aides whose job is to help craft it to maximum political advantage.

The shoe was on the other foot recently when an outside Republican consultant drafted the elaborate advertising plan to smear Obama again with his former connection with his bombastic old Chicago pastor. When word of the plan leaked, the Democrats jumped all over it despite the fact the Romney campaign disavowed the plan and it was never implemented.

The latest gaffes reflect poorly not only on Booker and Rattner but also on the formal Obama campaign for not driving home within its own ranks sufficient discipline among its official or self-appointed surrogates. The subsequent retreats from these tactical goofs look suspiciously campaign-directed.

Only last month, the Obama campaign was plagued by the unsolicited rap by a Democratic consultant, Hilary Rosen, at Romney's wife, Ann, saying the mother of four sons had "never worked a day in her life." As wide condemnation fell on Rosen, she apologized, and Obama insiders groaned. Saving the candidate from his or her own friends seems to be an endless campaign task.

In this election season in which allegations of "class warfare" have been traded back and forth, it's certainly legitimate for the president to question whether Romney's work at Bain Capital was profit-driven or inspired by efforts to create jobs, and what the results in each case may have been.

However, in casting himself as the defender of the middle class against the onslaughts of big corporate money, Obama's task would be less complicated if he didn't at the same time have his hand out so conspicuously to Wall Street for filthy lucre to fuel his own campaign.

 

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