Checked Out – Obama's Fading Reelection Effort
Daniel Berman looks at the President's rather lacklustre reelection campaign.
27 Oct 2011, 19:47
Obama: Will he be reelected?
This was not a unique experience for the President on his most recent national trip, undertaken to build up political support for his new jobs plan. His visit to Virginia elicited far less coverage of his presence than it did of the convenient of absence of Democrats running for State Senate in this November’s elections. “Democrats run from Obama to….. McDonnell?” opined the Washington Post on October 24th, noting the refusal of Toddy Puller and Janet Howell, representing districts where Obama won nearly 65% of the vote in 2008, to appear with him.
For all the talk of Obama’s millions(less than Bush had raised in 2004 in a very different legal environment) , his supposedly impressive campaign apparatus, and the President’s formidable campaigning skills, not to mention the travails of the Republican field, the President’s reelection effort is off to a remarkably slow start. No one seems the least bit enthusiastic about the effort, not local democrats, not activists, and perhaps most surprisingly, not the President himself.
Barack Obama has been remarkably subdued since the debt limit debate this summer. He emerged briefly to announce a job plan in September which went nowhere, but he has seemed to content to leave major foreign policy issues to surrogates. Hillary Clinton has dominated coverage of international issues, announcing the US drawdown from Iraq, and announcing the death of Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddaffi. Obama at most, briefly commented on a supposed plot by Iranian agents against the Saudi Embassy in Washington, an event that rapidly vanished from the news.
In a lot of ways it’s a balance that almost everyone would prefer. Obama was elected to bring Americans together, and seemed to look forward to a Jeb Bartletish tenure in the White House. When met with opposition his response has been to withdraw rather than meet confrontation, surrendering on the extension of the Bush tax cuts without a fight, and even the battle over the debt limit ended with postponing the issues to a committee whose power is now being undermined.
Obama’s behaviour led the Atlantic on to publicly question whether he was suffering from depression. This was mixed with speculation, fueled by wishful thinking among many democratic candidates, that the President might be rethinking seeking reelection altogether.
It is easy to see why some Democrats might have wanted to believe this was a possibility. Polling shows that Hillary Clinton, who would presumably run for the office in such a circumstance, would easily dispatch the hapless Joe Biden before crushing the various Republican candidates by double-digit margins. But wishful thinking is exactly what the Hillary fantasies are. For one thing such a circumstance would lead to reduced black turnout which would doom any Democrat in 2012. More importantly, significant power players in the Democratic party would prefer to lose with Obama than win with Hillary.
While elected Democrats would prefer a winning nominee, a host of democratic staffers are linked to the present White House. Some worked with the Clintons before 2008, others quit university to work for Obama and then followed him to Washington. Some might find it challenging to find employment in the event of an Obama defeat, but all would face retaliation from a Clinton White House. Not only would a Clinton White House expel them from the executive branch; it would also likely place pressure on Congressional Democrats not to employ ex-Obama staffers, and might even indicate to lobbying firms and pressure groups like Planned Parenthood and the Human Rights Campaign that they would be unwise to employ anyone associated with Obama. Even a Republican Administration appears preferable, as it would both have less of a motive to pursue them beyond the Executive Branch, and far less of an ability to do so.
As a consequence, Obama has a vested motive to run; to protect those who worked for him, and if he ever begins to forget that, there are plenty of invested individuals surrounding him to remind him. The result is the current national tour, designed ostensibly to sell the President’s still-born jobs plan, a tour local Democrats would like to forget even exists.
As a preview of a reelection campaign it looks largely inauspicious. George Bush was far from universally popular in the fall of 2003, with Iraq descending into chaos and the economy suffering from the after-effects of September 11th, but he was always able to meet cheering crowds and energetic Republicans. A trip to Maine could always count on Olympia Snowe’s presence, even if she might be apt to grumble about administration priorities in private. Virginia’s Democratic Senator James Webb, once Obama’s top choice for VP neither feels the need to show up or to keep his feelings private. The same day Obama arrived he told a reporter that Obama’s job plan was “terrible”. The only politician willing to meet Obama was the Republican Governor Bob McDonnell who expressed sympathy for his plight.
Kentucky, where local Democrats were also campaigning for next weeks’ elections faired little better, while Nevada, which Obama won by 12 points in 2008 and must win again should be a particular disappointment. And that the major coverage of the final leg of his trip, to Los Angeles, focused extensively on the traffic disruptions created by the President’s motorcade and comparing them to the “Occupy” movement, cannot have pleased the President’s advisers.
In fact the whole thing looks just, so, umm, off that it bears more than a passing resemblance to another reelection campaign, that of George Bush’s father in 1992. That year another President who disdained campaigning, who had managed to hide it while facing an equally inept Democrat in 1988, proved unable to do so four years later. The campaign as a consequence was dominated with painful stories of the President’s unawareness of the price of gasoline, his constant focus on his watch during the debates, and the awkward answer to a question about what he would do if he lost. At the time the President talked so longingly of fishing with the grandchildren that one could almost imagine that as a preference, reelection seen as a burden. Its easy to imagine Obama thinking that the Presidency of the University of Chicago or Harvard would not be such a bad occupation, and when combined with free travel, perhaps so much more appealing this whole Presidency nonsense.
This is not, hallmark of a winning campaign. An unpopular President can win reelection or come close against mediocre opposition if they are determined, if they truly want to win, and if they are willing to run the sort of slash and burn campaign necessary to win. Obama shows no sign of any of these traits. And that, rather than poll ratings, should be what genuinely terrifies Democrats. For if the President and Democratic candidates seem to have no confidence in the Obama reelection campaign, why should anyone else?
Comments (0)
Subscribe to this posts's comments feed