Although the first votes in the Republican primary will not be cast for nearly two months, President Barack Obamas campaign left little doubt Wednesday where the Democrats are aiming their fire: Mitt Romney.
In a conference call with Colorado media, Obama campaign manager Jim Messina and press secretary Ben LaBolt blasted Romney and didnt mention other GOP candidates until prompted by reporters.
Colorado will remain a crucial battleground state for the Obama campaign, Messina said. In 2008, Obama put a massive effort into winning a handful of states that traditionally are not friendly to Democrats, including Colorado, Nevada, Virginia and North Carolina. Obama has visited Denver twice since late September.
It appears that Obama is building his Colorado campaign on two pillars: attacks on Romney and a large effort to contact potential supporters in person.
Romney has stayed near the top of polls of Republican voters, while other candidates Rick Perry, Herman Cain and Newt Gingrich have risen briefly to challenge him.
Messina and LaBolt gave a preview of the attacks Obamas campaign is readying for Romney.
They noted Romneys authorship of a New York Times opinion piece titled Let Detroit Go Bankrupt, his support of a personhood constitutional amendment that would define life as beginning at conception, and his opposition to Wall Street regulations the Democratic Congress enacted in 2010.
Mitt Romney has no core. He will say and stand for anything to get elected, LaBolt said.
Romney spokesman Ryan Williams issued a statement in response to the conference call.
In Colorado, unemployment has increased from 6.8 percent to 8.3 percent since President Obama took office. Americans wont be fooled by false and negative attacks they know that President Obama has failed, and they are eager to replace him with a leader like Mitt Romney who can turn around our struggling economy, Williams wrote.
In 2008, Obamas campaign built a huge ground game in Colorado to register voters and turn them out on Election Day.
I can guarantee you, what we had on the ground in October of 2008 will be the floor and not the ceiling of what were going to have in 2012, Messina said. We will register more voters and turn out more voters than we did last time.
The large voter-registration effort led to Democrats briefly eclipsing the number of registered Republicans in Colorado during the 2008 election.
Reach Joe Hanel at joeh@cortezjournal.com.
