Voters likely to lose hope with Obama's message of fairness

Hope and change were the two key messages of Barack Obama's 2008 election campaign but, after nearly four years in office, they are gone.

In their place, the president is focusing his re-election campaign on another apparently appealing theme, fairness.
In America, the top 1 per cent pay nearly 40% of federal income taxes. But in recent campaign speeches delivered, ironically, between $10,000-a-plate fund-raising dinners, the president has cited fairness as the reason for his new Buffett tax.

The measure, promoted by the billionaire Warren Buffett - who is publicly pleading to pay more in taxes while one of his companies, Berkshire Hathaway, is suing to avoid paying what the Internal Revenue Service says it already owes - would increase the capital gains tax rate to 30% for those receiving more than pounds 1million a year in investment income.

The likely Republican presidential nominee, Mitt Romney, criticised the proposed tax, saying the rise from between 10 and 24% in most cases would do little to help the economy or reduce the deficit. He noted that the additional revenue would pay for only 11 hours of the federal government's annual running expenses. In any event, the Buffett Rule legislation failed to pass in a party-line vote in the Democrat-controlled Senate last week; it had no chance of passage in the Republican-majority House.

But in seeking to shift the focus of the election from a referendum on the president's performance to a war between the classes, putting the spotlight on the wealth of multi-millionaire Romney, Team Obama is making a mistake. Fairness is not a winning message.

Independent voters, those not registered as supporting any party, represent the largest potential voting bloc - a record high of 40% of Americans, according to Gallup. And, in 12 battleground states that could vote either Republican or Democrat, as many as 40% are swing independents, according to analysis by the moderate think-tank, Third Way.

Wooing this group will be critical to victory in 2012. But the fairness argument does not work with them, judging by five key findings from the Third Way report.

Swing independents "like" the president more than Romney, but they see themselves as closer to Romney ideologically. Income inequality ranks near the bottom of their concerns; they regard reducing the nation's debt as the bigger issue.

Swing independents believe that America is already basically fair. While they are open to the idea of raising taxes on the wealthy, pressing them on what would be most fair pushes them in the opposite direction.

And, when asked what is most important for a stronger economy, a significant majority says: "Provide more economic opportunity for Americans to succeed through hard work." That may explain why a similar attempt to enact a "soak the rich" tax in Washington state was defeated by voters in 2010, despite early polls showing overwhelming support.

They feared that a higher tax might start just with the wealthy, but would eventually work its way through the income levels to hit them too.

With the economy still recovering and with protests against the top 1 per cent of earners by the so-called 99 per cent, the Obama campaign is gambling that a message about fairness and income equity will resonate with voters.

But when asked what makes them angry, the swing independents in the study said that their frustration was with Congress, with 85% saying that they were angry over the inability of legislators to agree on many measures.

On the campaign trail last week in Pennsylvania, a swing state in the 2008 election where registered Democrats outnumber Republicans by about one million, Romney spoke about "restoring opportunity and freedom" and rejecting what he called Obama's "government-centred society".

That's a message that will resonate with the swing independents. When asked which candidate they would be more likely to support, 80% favoured a candidate "focusing on economic growth and opportunity".

The latest polling showing the challenger neck-and-neck with the president may be an early sign that Romney's talk of opportunity, not Obama's mantra of fairness, will be the winning message.

Mark McKinnon is a former Republican strategist who worked on the campaigns of George W Bush and John McCain