President Barack Obama’s top advisers are quietly laying the groundwork for the 2012 reelection campaign, which is likely to be run out of Chicago and managed by White House deputy chief of staff Jim Messina, according to Democrats familiar with the discussions.
The planning for now consists entirely of private conversations, with Obama aides at all levels indulging occasionally in closed-door 2012 discussions while focusing ferociously on the midterm elections and health care reform, the Democratic sources said. “The gathering storm is the 2010 elections,†one top official said.
Even though the planning is still very preliminary, the campaign is likely to launch in just over a year. President Bill Clinton opened his second presidential campaign in the March after his first midterm congressional elections, and President George W. Bush opened Bush-Cheney '04 a month later in the political cycle.
Aides expect Obama to hew to a similar schedule. A president’s reelection campaign — “the reelect,†as Obama intimates are already calling it — is a massive, lavishly funded machine that hires hundreds of people and spends hundreds of millions of dollars to carry out the mechanics of a national campaign, while the candidate and many of his top aides continue their day jobs of running the free world.
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0210/33411.html
