50 Cent Accuses 'Empire' Creators of Copying His 'Power' Marketing Tactics

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Noam Galai, Getty Images

If you listen to 50 Cent‘s rhymes, he’s made it clear that he doesn’t tolerate snitches, but there’s also another thing the rapper-turned-mogul can’t stand: a copycat.

Fif, who is the executive producer behind the Starz original scripted drama ‘Power,’ took to Instagram to blast the creators of the Fox TV series ‘Empire’ for stealing his marketing tactics.

“POWER Season 2 is unbelievably good trust me,” 50 wrote in an Instragram post accompanied by video of a ‘Power’ spot. “I have the best writers and show runner. I like Terrence Howard and Taraji Henson. I don’t like that They would copy the Marketing.”

Both shows feature leading black male characters who struggle with balancing the street life and building their legacies the legit way via the entertainment industry. While Lucious Lyon, played by Howard, is handed a terminal death sentence and must decide which son to leave his record label to in ‘Empire,’ ‘Power’ focuses on the double life of a drug dealer-turned-nightclub owner who wants out of the drug game.

50 Cent could be on to something given the drug, music, money and sex aspects of both series, but he ultimately left it up to fans to judge.

Just minutes before calling out Howard and Henson, Fif posted a split image of Howard and Omari Hartwick of ‘Power,’ asking his female followers which show they preferred.

‘Power’ will return to Starz for season two in 2015, meanwhile ‘Empire’ will premiere on Fox on Jan. 7, 2015. Will you be #TeamPower or #TeamEmpire or tune into both? Watch the trailers for each below.

Watch the Trailer for ‘Empire’

Watch the Trailer for ‘Power’ Season 1

See 10 Rappers & Singers Promoting Unexpected Products

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Apple Negotiator Defends Tactics in E-Book Trial

The executive, Eddy Cue, Apple’s lead negotiator with the publishers, said he was determined to close deals that would allow them to sell their e-books on Apple’s iBookstore in time for the introduction of the iPad in early 2010.

“I wanted to be able to get that done in time for that because it was really important to him,” Mr. Cue said, referring to Mr. Jobs. He was testifying in Federal District Court in Manhattan in the civil antitrust trial brought against Apple by the Justice Department.

“I pride myself on being successful, but this had extra meaning to me,” Mr. Cue added.

Those sped-up negotiations attracted the attention of the government, which filed a lawsuit against Apple and five publishers in April 2012. Mr. Jobs, the co-founder of Apple, died of cancer in October 2011.

Mr. Cue, the highest-ranking Apple executive to take the stand so far in a trial that began almost two weeks ago, mounted a vigorous defense of Apple, which is accused of colluding with the publishers to fix e-book prices.

Through a nearly full day of testimony on Thursday, Mr. Cue denied that he had encouraged publishers to impose a new business model on other retailers, including Amazon.com. Shown a slide displaying what the government has repeatedly called a “spider web” of communications among the publishing executives, Mr. Cue said he did not know that the executives, from publishers including the Penguin Group USA and Simon & Schuster, were talking to one another during their negotiations with him.

“I struggled and fought with them,” he said. “If they were talking to each other, I believe I would have had a much easier time getting those deals done.”

But he also revealed details of an unusually long and close working relationship between him and Mr. Jobs.

Mr. Cue, Apple’s senior vice president for Internet software and services, said he spoke or e-mailed with Mr. Jobs at nearly every step of the negotiations, once calling him on his way to the airport as he left a round of talks with publishers in New York.

In one e-mail, Mr. Jobs questioned Mr. Cue about the fledgling iBookstore. “Are we going to let anyone self-publish? Does Amazon?” he wrote.

“Yes and yes,” Mr. Cue replied.

After publishers signed agreements with Apple, shocking the publishing industry, Mr. Jobs e-mailed Mr. Cue: “Wow, we have really lit the fuse on a powder keg.”

The focus of the government’s questioning turned to December 2009 and January 2010, when Mr. Cue repeatedly flew to New York, met with publishers and tried to reach deals to make their e-books available in the iBookstore on the soon-to-be-unveiled iPad.

For publishers, the appeal of Apple getting into the e-book market was enormous. Amazon, which had introduced its Kindle e-reader in 2007, commanded a 90 percent share of e-book sales at the time. But the default price for newly released and best-selling books on Amazon.com was $9.99, a paltry sum in the publishers’ eyes and one that undermined the value of the authors’ work and cannibalized hardcover sales.

Apple encouraged publishers to switch to a so-called agency model, in which the publishers set the price of a book and the retailer takes a commission. Previously, e-books had been sold on a wholesale model, where the retailer pays the publisher about half the list price, then is free to set another price. The agency model prevented Amazon from sharply discounting the books.

Five publishers — the Penguin Group USA, the Hachette Book Group, Simon & Schuster, HarperCollins and Macmillan — have already settled with the government. But Apple, intent on protecting Mr. Jobs’s legacy, is fighting the charges in a nonjury trial that was expected to last several weeks.

The defense was questioning Mr. Cue when the day ended and he will return to the stand when the trial continues on Monday.

Lawrence Buterman, a lawyer for the Justice Department, occasionally raised his voice while he questioned Mr. Cue for several hours before a packed courtroom presided over by Judge Denise L. Cote.

“Isn’t it true, sir, that throughout your negotiations with the publishers, that you constantly pitched the deal that you were proposing as a way for them to change the entire e-books market?” Mr. Buterman said.

“No, that is not true,” Mr. Cue said.

Mr. Buterman asked Mr. Cue about a previous statement by David Shanks, the chief executive of the Penguin Group USA, that Penguin would only sign a deal with Apple if three other major publishers had done so first.

“Did that strike you as a little bit like, ‘I’m only doing this deal if my competitors do it?’ “ Mr. Buterman said.

“It’s not unusual,” Mr. Cue said. “Nobody likes to be the first to sign. Everybody thinks that you get a better deal by signing last.”

According to Mr. Cue, Apple approached the negotiations with publishers the same way it did with record companies and other content providers in the iTunes store.

After Apple and other retailers started selling e-books on the agency model, prices on many best-selling and new books rose to the $12.99 to $14.99 range, infuriating many consumers.

“Who protected them?” Mr. Buterman said.

“I did,” Mr. Cue said.

“By charging them higher prices?” Mr. Buterman said.

Fwd.Us Raises Uproar With Advocacy Tactics

Fwd.Us, the new nonprofit advocacy group created by Mr. Zuckerberg and several technology executives and investors to push for an overhaul of immigration law, has bankrolled television ads endorsing the conservative stands taken by three lawmakers, prompting an outcry from liberal groups and a call to withhold advertisements from Facebook.

The uproar, some say, will be a lesson for Silicon Valley companies as they try to influence emotional political issues like immigration. But the group’s supporters brashly say they were ready for the reaction.

“Our advertising decisions are being made by a very smart team of political operatives who know that passing major reform will require some different and innovative tactics,” Jim Breyer, a venture capitalist with Accel Partners and a contributor to the cause, said in an e-mailed statement. “I’m proud to support Fwd.Us as they work to pass comprehensive immigration reform.”

The group has faced the most vocal criticism for television advertisements sponsored by its two subsidiaries, which are known as Americans for Conservative Action and Council for American Job Growth. One of those spots takes swipes at President Obama’s health policies. Another lauds the Keystone XL pipeline, fiercely opposed by many environmental groups.

Those TV spots, which ran in several states for a week, prompted strong reaction from a coalition of liberal organizations that includes the Sierra Club, the League of Conservation Voters and MoveOn.org. They announced earlier this week that they would suspend buying advertisements on Facebook, which they acknowledged was meant to send a message and would have little economic impact on the company.

Cathy Duvall, director of strategic partnerships at the Sierra Club, said her group was especially disappointed to see the technology industry adopt a strategy that was more typical of old-fashioned, brass-knuckled Washington lobbying.

“When the ads came out they were politics as usual and divisive and pitting one issue against another,” Ms. Duvall said. “We were really surprised that Silicon Valley would be moving into the political space by doing the worst of business-as-usual politics.”

Fwd.Us, like other industry-backed interest groups, has said very little about how much money it has raised and from whom, except to name contributors on its Web site. It would say only that it spent in the “seven figures” on the television spots.

The ads are particularly surprising considering some of the other backers. John Doerr, a venture capitalist, is known for his investments in clean technology companies, and his wife, Ann, has been a major donor to environmental causes.

Reid Hoffman has described himself as “progressive” in an essay posted recently on LinkedIn, a company that he founded.

Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft, in 2010 backed an effort not to roll back California’s global warming law. None of them returned calls and e-mails requesting comment for this article, referring instead to Fwd.Us operatives in Washington.

“We recognize that not everyone will always agree with or be pleased by our strategy,” said Kate Hansen, a spokeswoman for Fwd.Us. “Fwd.Us remains totally committed to support a bipartisan policy agenda that will boot the knowledge economy, including comprehensive immigration reform.”

For his part, Mr. Zuckerberg has covered his political bases. He recently held a fund-raiser for Chris Christie, the Republican governor of New Jersey, at his home in Palo Alto, Calif., and Facebook has hired several former White House and Congressional aides to work in its Washington office.

Mr. Zuckerberg has declined requests to be interviewed about Fwd.Us.

Jim Manley, a former chief spokesman for Senate majority leader Harry Reid, Democrat of Nevada, said that the ads may have achieved their goal, but that Mr. Zuckerberg should learn from the negative reaction.

“He is finding out it can be very, very problematic to get your company involved in hot-button social issues,” said Mr. Manley, who now directs the communications practice at the Washington lobbying and public relations firm Quinn Gillespie. “There is going to be blowback. You are going to pay a price for it.”

Fwd.Us has been openly criticized by others in Silicon Valley. Josh Miller, founder of a start-up called Branch, denounced what he called the group’s “questionable lobbying practices” and said he was disappointed that the group had not been transparent about its intentions.

“More discouragingly, the leaders of the technology industry (and of FWD.us) have built their careers on bringing meaningful change to the world,” he wrote in a BuzzFeed opinion piece. “They should be doing the same in Washington.”

Vinod Khosla, a venture capitalist who finances some of the same clean energy companies as Mr. Doerr’s firm and who was once a major partner at Mr. Doerr’s investment firm, said on Twitter over the weekend: “Will Fwd.us prostitute climate destruction & other values to get a few engineers hired & get immigration reform?”

One advocacy group called CredoAction, based in San Francisco, tried to use Facebook ads to draw attention to the Keystone XL pipeline TV spot sponsored by Fwd.Us. The ads were prohibited by Facebook officials, because the company’s terms of service prohibit using Mr. Zuckerberg’s image in another organization’s ad. A coalition of organizations has also created a Facebook group to agitate against Fwd.Us.

Still, others say the ads signal a calculated pragmatism. Fwd.Us is led by experienced political operatives, including Joe Lockhart, a former Clinton Administration official, and Rob Jesmer, a former Republican Senate political adviser. One executive involved in the effort said the advertisements were vetted with executives backing it — and that the executives realized before they were shown that they might alienate certain liberal audiences. But the group made a decision to back both Democrats and Republicans who support the immigration bill in order to get it passed.

“We did not just fall off the turnip truck,” the executive said. “There are a lot of people involved in these organizations that have been involved in politics for a really long time.”

The group e-mailed statements from prominent backers, including a former Facebook executive, Chamath Palihapitiya, who argued that Fwd.Us needs to be “disruptive” in politics, as in commerce.

“In order to push Washington to do something different and pass major legislation like comprehensive immigration reform, groups like Fwd.Us can’t just do the same thing and expect different results,” he said. “As part of our work, we’re using a wide variety of tactics, some of which may ruffle some feathers, but we believe the passage of the bill will be worth it.”

MechWarrior Tactics: Layers of Depth

Browser-based games have been awesome for a long time thanks to independent Flash developers, but there's still a general distaste for them amongst the gaming community due in part to the legion of generic, boring titles unleashed on Facebook users. If you still hear the word "browser" and immediately think about closing the story you're reading (please don't go!), MechWarrior Tactics could be the title that changes your mind. Using a Unity engine plugin, the team at Roadhouse Interactive has accomplished some strikingly pretty visuals. While Tactics won't be as complex as playing a classic round of tabletop MechWarrior, a surprisingly robust customization system and deep combat mechanics make this anything but a throwaway, casual version of the franchise.

While MechWarrior Tactic's turn-based nature makes it a bit more approachable than the intense in-cockpit combat of MechWarrior Online, Tactics doesn't shy away from layering on complex mechanics. To start, you have to decide which types of mechs to include in your four-member fighting group, or Lance, and then which armaments they take into battle. Things get a bit more intricate when you consider that every weapon you get, even if it's the same type of laser or missile, will have different stats associated with it based on the manufacturer. Adding to that, you assign your four mechs a pilot, each of whom has specific traits that affect how they play, and any would-be mech commander already has a host of things to consider before he ever drops into the field.

Not that you'll have a gigantic list of items and pilots to choose from the start. All items and pilots are acquired by either earning or purchasing randomly assorted packs of items called STACs. (Think of a booster pack for a collectible card game.) Using whatever items you get from your STAC, you then do your best to, as the team behind Tactics says, "create synergy" by mixing items, pilots and chassis that complement one another. For instance you might have a pilot who does additional damage to damaged targets, so you might equip him with a mech that can handle heavy weapons, and then put a super long-range laser or missile on him so he can really give it to a hurting enemy.

How you outfit this first mech and its pilot would then have a trickle-down effect to the rest of your Lance. You'd start equipping items and chassis that lend themselves to group tactics. That long range mech we just talked about? It could benefit from a tank-like, heavy chassis soaking up damage in the front, with a pilot that gives it greater survivability.

Once each mech is outfitted and you drop into battle, you and your opponent dive into the nitty gritty of each turn. Turns occur simultaneously, so during the movement and combat phase, each commander tells their mechs where to move and which enemies to target. You can keep it simple and just fire all weapons at a target, or you can get specific, splitting your fire between targets to take advantage of which weapon types will do the most damage to the types of chassis your facing. For instance you might fire your lasers at a mech that's close to you, while using long-range missiles to lash out at a mech that's in the distance. Since the battlefields you fight on aren't flat, you also have to consider terrain: how might enemies move into or between forests? Are we close to a water source I can use to dissipate heat?

Like pretty much every MechWarrior game ever, managing heat makes a world of difference in Tactics. However, unlike MechWarrior Online, where keeping your heat as low as possible always gives you an advantage, Tactics gives some benefits depending on maintaining heat in specific ranges. Some weapons might operate better as you risk overheating, thus shutting down your mech, while others might be best suited to maintaining a lower temperature.

Once you've lined up all your shots and decided how you want each mech to move, both players set their status to ready and then see how everything plays out. The battle sequences take all the hard choices you made during the movement and attack phases and distill it into a short action sequence that makes you forget you're playing a turn-based game for a few seconds. No system is currently in place to break down what exactly happened, but the plan is to have Tactics launch with a hit-by-hit readout that displays exactly what happened, allowing players to adjust strategies for the next turn appropriately.

MechWarrior Tactics has the potential to outdo its real-time combat sister game, MechWarrior Online, and could be just the sort of game that changes misconceptions about what's possible in a browser. As mores systems and mechanics get fleshed out, I'm excited to see what comes of this slower, yet far-from-casual take on the MechWarrior universe.

Reporter’s Notebook: At Times, Obama And His Cyberself Differ on Tactics

Speaking to 1,400 supporters at a high school here, President Obama voiced his familiar lament that “there is so much negativity and so much cynicism” in politics that he could understand if voters tuned out the election. Minutes earlier on Twitter, he had written, “Why Mitt Romney’s end date at his buyout firm matters,” linking to a blog post about the tempest over his Republican challenger’s departure from Bain Capital.

Mr. Obama’s Twitter account is maintained by his campaign staff, which makes clear that only posts signed with the initials B.O. are actually written by him. That’s fairly obvious, given that on Thursday, in between pounding Mr. Romney for perceived discrepancies in the Bain story, “Barack Obama” tweeted: “Stickers! Get them here.”

But it underscores the vivid contrast between what Mr. Obama says, and what is often said in his name. The president did not address the questions about Bain Capital in his stump speech. In his first stop of the day, he even left out a line he has used about how Mr. Romney’s buyout firm was celebrated as a “pioneer” of outsourcing.

As a busy day of campaigning unfolded, however, Mr. Obama shrugged off his reluctance to talk about Mr. Romney and Bain. The line about Bain being an outsourcing pioneer reappeared later in a speech in Hampton. And in an interview with a local TV station, WJLA, Mr. Obama said that Mr. Romney ought to answer questions about his relationship with the firm after he left in 1999 to run the Salt Lake City Olympics.

“Ultimately, Mr. Romney, I think, is going to have to answer those questions because if he aspires to being president, one of the things you learn is, you are ultimately responsible for the conduct of your operations,” he said.

The Romney campaign did not give Mr. Obama any quarter either. Mr. Romney welcomed the president to Virginia with an open letter in The Virginian-Pilot, in which he said, “Your insistence on slashing our military to pay the tab for your irresponsible spending could see over 200,000 troops forced from service.”

Virginia, a once reliably Republican state that Mr. Obama became the first Democrat to win since 1964, looms as one of the most hotly contested battlegrounds in 2012. The president acknowledged its potentially decisive role, telling an overflow crowd in Hampton before his speech, “If and when we get Virginia, we will win this election.”

“Virginia, the reason I ran and the reason you supported me wasn’t just to get back to where we were in 2007,” the president said. “The reason we came together was to restore that promise for middle-class families, and all who are striving to get into the middle class. That’s what we’re fighting for, and we’ve got a lot more work to do.”

Time to Talk Coaching

Mr. Obama’s advisers say he savors unscripted encounters with voters, and occasionally these moments can be revelatory.

Dropping in for a beer last week at Ziggy’s Pub and Restaurant in Amherst, Ohio, the president found himself explaining to a table of curious school administrators why the White House was waiving states’ compliance with the No Child Left Behind law. Moments earlier, he had an intense exchange with Art Davis, a veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan, who complained about delays in processing disability claims for veterans.

But then there are encounters like his kitchen-table conversation with a Cedar Rapids couple, Jason and Ali McLaughlin. Though avidly promoted by the campaign, it got off to a desultory start, with Mr. McLaughlin and the president comparing notes about how they coach girls’ sports teams (“Now, they run plays!” Mr. Obama marveled about his daughter Sasha’s team). Neither said a word about middle-class tax cuts — the ostensible subject of the meeting — until after the reporters had been ushered out.

Help for Veterans

Mr. Obama has assiduously cultivated military veterans, giving tax credits to employers that hire returning veterans and extracting pledges from companies like Procter & Gamble and Tyson Foods to hire 100,000 veterans and their spouses. He also brought home the last soldiers from Iraq and is winding down the war in Afghanistan.

The Romney campaign, however, is determined to sour any affection these voters have for Mr. Obama, warning that the automatic cuts in Pentagon spending that are part of the White House’s budget deal with Congress could undermine the military-dependent economy in Virginia, with its large bases and shipbuilding industry.

“Virginia is probably going to be more devastated than any state in the union by this,” said John F. Lehman Jr., a secretary of the Navy in the Reagan administration and foreign-policy adviser to Mr. Romney, on a call organized by the campaign. “The president just doesn’t understand defense. He just doesn’t understand how it works.”

On Friday, Mr. Obama stopped at a smoky Veterans of Foreign Wars hall here and had lunch at Rick’s Cafe with three wives of servicemen. “I love the fact that this administration is focusing more on military families,” said one, Jennifer Farlin. “Prior to this, we felt lost.”

While the president is likely to make inroads with veterans of Afghanistan and Iraq, the broader military vote seems destined to stay in the Republican column. According to a Gallup poll conducted in April and May, 58 percent of veterans said they favored Mitt Romney, while only 34 percent supported Mr. Obama.

Music to Suit the Crowd

As Mr. Obama’s campaign rallies settle into a routine, so, too, does his choice of music: a mix tape released by the campaign that runs the gamut from Arcade Fire to REO Speedwagon. The president usually takes the stage to U2’s hit “City of Blinding Lights,” as he did in 2008. The opportunities for creativity, such as they are, come at the end of his stump speech, when Mr. Obama shakes hands and poses for pictures.

Then, the campaign seems to tailor its music to local tastes. Mr. Obama greeted auto workers in Toledo, Ohio, and veterans in Virginia Beach to the thumping chords of Bruce Springsteen’s blue-collar anthem “We Take Care of Our Own.” In Cedar Rapids, the artsy city in Iowa where voters have known Mr. Obama from the earliest days of his first campaign in 2007, the soundtrack was U2’s “Even Better than the Real Thing.”

In Sandusky, Ohio, the local organizers chose a tune not on the playlist: “Only in America,” the politically androgynous country hit by Brooks & Dunn that has been a standard for years at Republican and Democratic rallies.

Reporter’s Notebook: At Times, Obama And His Cyberself Differ on Tactics

Speaking to 1,400 supporters at a high school here, President Obama voiced his familiar lament that “there is so much negativity and so much cynicism” in politics that he could understand if voters tuned out the election. Minutes earlier on Twitter, he had written, “Why Mitt Romney’s end date at his buyout firm matters,” linking to a blog post about the tempest over his Republican challenger’s departure from Bain Capital.

Mr. Obama’s Twitter account is maintained by his campaign staff, which makes clear that only posts signed with the initials B.O. are actually written by him. That’s fairly obvious, given that on Thursday, in between pounding Mr. Romney for perceived discrepancies in the Bain story, “Barack Obama” tweeted: “Stickers! Get them here.”

But it underscores the vivid contrast between what Mr. Obama says, and what is often said in his name. The president did not address the questions about Bain Capital in his stump speech. In his first stop of the day, he even left out a line he has used about how Mr. Romney’s buyout firm was celebrated as a “pioneer” of outsourcing.

As a busy day of campaigning unfolded, however, Mr. Obama shrugged off his reluctance to talk about Mr. Romney and Bain. The line about Bain being an outsourcing pioneer reappeared later in a speech in Hampton. And in an interview with a local TV station, WJLA, Mr. Obama said that Mr. Romney ought to answer questions about his relationship with the firm after he left in 1999 to run the Salt Lake City Olympics.

“Ultimately, Mr. Romney, I think, is going to have to answer those questions because if he aspires to being president, one of the things you learn is, you are ultimately responsible for the conduct of your operations,” he said.

The Romney campaign did not give Mr. Obama any quarter either. Mr. Romney welcomed the president to Virginia with an open letter in The Virginian-Pilot, in which he said, “Your insistence on slashing our military to pay the tab for your irresponsible spending could see over 200,000 troops forced from service.”

Virginia, a once reliably Republican state that Mr. Obama became the first Democrat to win since 1964, looms as one of the most hotly contested battlegrounds in 2012. The president acknowledged its potentially decisive role, telling an overflow crowd in Hampton before his speech, “If and when we get Virginia, we will win this election.”

“Virginia, the reason I ran and the reason you supported me wasn’t just to get back to where we were in 2007,” the president said. “The reason we came together was to restore that promise for middle-class families, and all who are striving to get into the middle class. That’s what we’re fighting for, and we’ve got a lot more work to do.”

Time to Talk Coaching

Mr. Obama’s advisers say he savors unscripted encounters with voters, and occasionally these moments can be revelatory.

Dropping in for a beer last week at Ziggy’s Pub and Restaurant in Amherst, Ohio, the president found himself explaining to a table of curious school administrators why the White House was waiving states’ compliance with the No Child Left Behind law. Moments earlier, he had an intense exchange with Art Davis, a veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan, who complained about delays in processing disability claims for veterans.

But then there are encounters like his kitchen-table conversation with a Cedar Rapids couple, Jason and Ali McLaughlin. Though avidly promoted by the campaign, it got off to a desultory start, with Mr. McLaughlin and the president comparing notes about how they coach girls’ sports teams (“Now, they run plays!” Mr. Obama marveled about his daughter Sasha’s team). Neither said a word about middle-class tax cuts — the ostensible subject of the meeting — until after the reporters had been ushered out.

Help for Veterans

Mr. Obama has assiduously cultivated military veterans, giving tax credits to employers that hire returning veterans and extracting pledges from companies like Procter & Gamble and Tyson Foods to hire 100,000 veterans and their spouses. He also brought home the last soldiers from Iraq and is winding down the war in Afghanistan.

The Romney campaign, however, is determined to sour any affection these voters have for Mr. Obama, warning that the automatic cuts in Pentagon spending that are part of the White House’s budget deal with Congress could undermine the military-dependent economy in Virginia, with its large bases and shipbuilding industry.

“Virginia is probably going to be more devastated than any state in the union by this,” said John F. Lehman Jr., a secretary of the Navy in the Reagan administration and foreign-policy adviser to Mr. Romney, on a call organized by the campaign. “The president just doesn’t understand defense. He just doesn’t understand how it works.”

On Friday, Mr. Obama stopped at a smoky Veterans of Foreign Wars hall here and had lunch at Rick’s Cafe with three wives of servicemen. “I love the fact that this administration is focusing more on military families,” said one, Jennifer Farlin. “Prior to this, we felt lost.”

While the president is likely to make inroads with veterans of Afghanistan and Iraq, the broader military vote seems destined to stay in the Republican column. According to a Gallup poll conducted in April and May, 58 percent of veterans said they favored Mitt Romney, while only 34 percent supported Mr. Obama.

Music to Suit the Crowd

As Mr. Obama’s campaign rallies settle into a routine, so, too, does his choice of music: a mix tape released by the campaign that runs the gamut from Arcade Fire to REO Speedwagon. The president usually takes the stage to U2’s hit “City of Blinding Lights,” as he did in 2008. The opportunities for creativity, such as they are, come at the end of his stump speech, when Mr. Obama shakes hands and poses for pictures.

Then, the campaign seems to tailor its music to local tastes. Mr. Obama greeted auto workers in Toledo, Ohio, and veterans in Virginia Beach to the thumping chords of Bruce Springsteen’s blue-collar anthem “We Take Care of Our Own.” In Cedar Rapids, the artsy city in Iowa where voters have known Mr. Obama from the earliest days of his first campaign in 2007, the soundtrack was U2’s “Even Better than the Real Thing.”

In Sandusky, Ohio, the local organizers chose a tune not on the playlist: “Only in America,” the politically androgynous country hit by Brooks & Dunn that has been a standard for years at Republican and Democratic rallies.