The Obama team is testing lines of attack:
David Axelrod held a midday conference call with reporters on Wednesday that was mostly focused on coming up with new ways of calling Mitt Romney a rudderless panderer without any fixed principles. He even went so far as to quote George Burns: “All you need to succeed in show business is sincerity. If you can fake that, you’ve got it made.”
John Sides expects Obama's 2012 run "to be hard-nosed and aggressively critical of the opponent." Not that this is new for Obama:
What percentage of Obama’s television advertising during the 2008 campaign included an attack on John McCain? Well above 50%, according to research by the Wisconsin Advertising Project (pdf). And what percentage of statements by Obama or Obama spokespeople that were reported in the New York Times contained attacks on McCain? About 40%, according to the the book Attack Politics by Emmett Buell and my former colleague and Monkey Cage contributor Lee Sigelman. (The comparable figure for McCain was 50%.) Now, according to Buell and Sigelman’s data, Obama’s campaign was less negative than many other past presidential campaigns, but it was hardly just hopey-changey.
Some commentators seem to assume or imply that Obama’s 2008 message of unity and bipartisanship meant that he didn’t “go negative” in the heat of that campaign. He did. And he will.
The Dish 