第十三周阅读材料.doc

Obama launches campaign against Romney, but his real opponent is the economy COLUMBUS, OHIO — President Obama formally launched his reelection campaign here Saturday with some old favorites, from “fired up, ready to go” to a closing bow to “hope and change.” But almost everything else about the day spoke to the differences between his first and second runs for the president. The president used his rallies to try to begin to disqualify Mitt Romney. Yet the coming election is still more about him than his probable Republican rival. Obama’s biggest opponent may be an economy that is still struggling to gain the kind of momentum that will convince voters that the recession is truly over. It was perhaps a coincidence in timing that the president’s opening events came just a day after a tepid employment report that showed only modest private-sector job creation. The unemployment rate ticked down a tenth of a percentage point, but only because the labor force shrank as discouraged Americans gave up looking for work. The general election gets underway against that backdrop, neither so gloomy as to make it all but certain that the president will be defeated nor good enough to give Democrats real confidence that the president’s reelection is all but assured. For the next six months, Obama and Romney are both hostages to the economic statistics even as they slug it out on the campaign trail. Obama showed he is ready for the fight. His campaign skills have lost little in the four years since iconic rallies became the trademark of his candidacy. Introduced by first lady Michelle Obama, he walked onto a runway in the Schottenstein Center on the campus of Ohio State University, paused, smiled, waved and smiled again. After a few more strides, he hugged and kissed his wife, stepped to the microphone — and then proceeded to try to shred Romney and the Republicans. His rival, Obama said, is a patriotic American with a fine family and experience in the private sector and with running