Recognize her? Probably not, but you will. Stephanie Cutter, the Obama campaign's deputy campaign manager, is at the center of the Obama campaign's strategy.
Cutter was the communications director for the 2004 Kerry campaign when the Bush campaign employed the "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth." An organization reminiscent of the super PACs dominating today's campaigns, the Swift Boat group ran a series of misleading and nasty ads accusing Kerry of fabricating his war record (despite the fact that Bush had never served in Vietnam).
Many political strategists, and a scathing Newsweek article, blamed the Kerry campaign's tepid response, led by Ms. Cutter, for the unraveling of the campaign. After Bush's win, Kerry's campaign staff, as political staffs will often do, turned on each other. In particular, they turned on Stephanie Cutter, blaming her for not responding quickly and forcefully enough.
Yet, Cutter has returned, at a higher rank than ever. In an article profiling Cutter for the Atlantic, Molly Ball quotes an Obama advisor who relates how after "she apologized to people for her behavior and rebuilt her reputation from the ground up...After the 2004 election, nobody would have ever thought Stephanie Cutter would be the most prominent campaign surrogate for a sitting president of the United States."
The Obama campaign and Cutter have taken the swift boating message to heart. The 2012 election will be dirty, vicious and characterized by an unprecedented amount of money spent on negative ads. In response to one such one of the GOP's attacks, Cutter released a video which went viral. 600,000 people watched Cutter stand in campaign headquarters and forcefully argue her candidate's case.
And the Obama people noticed. Instead of getting riled up about each misleading fact or statistic, the Obama campaign has been employing Cutter to cleanly and simply rebut their opponents. Carter Eskew of the Washington Posthits in the nail on the head when asking, in the face of the disappointing jobs report, "What can Obama do now that a major argument of his campaign—a slowly improving economy—seems contradicted? One path is to do what Stephanie Cutter did so gamely on a Sunday talk show: Argue the facts, point out that the economy is improving in areas where the president’s programs were enacted and lagging in others where they were not."
The video above is a prime example. Today, the media is debating whether it's unfair for the Romney camp to criticize Obama for job losses during his first year when Romney himself excludes those losses from his job creation record. Yes, it's unfair. Apart from all the other inaccuracies embedded in Romney's criticism, particularly that Massachusetts did much worse than other states, it's just hypocritical. Obama and his allies have the facts on their side and they're finally exploiting that effectively.
It's about time the Democrats learned from their mistakes and grew some balls. There's a reason Cutter's gone viral: she was there in 2004 and learned what happens when Democrats let their opposition frame the debate. They lose. Cutter doesn't want to lose again.
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