"There go the people. I must follow them for I am their leader."
Alexandre Auguste Ledru–Rollin
(1807–1874)
In the aftermath of what Barack Obama generously called a "shellacking" in the midterm elections, there has been no shortage of advice for Democrats who are understandably staggered by the greatest loss of House seats by one party in one election in decades.
In this corner ...
- E.J. Dionne writes in The New Republic that Democrats need to stick to their guns (so to speak), just like the Republicans did after their rejection in 2008.
They should not listen, he says, to those who advise them to move more to the center.
"Why should Democrats take Republican advice that Republicans themselves would never be foolish enough to follow?" he asks.
Food for thought. - From the "What? Me Worry?/Collateral Damage" Department:
Bob Shrum concedes, in The Week, that Obama made some mistakes in his first two years as president.
But unless you've been mainlining the Kool–Aid as Shrum seems to have been doing, you won't so easily shrug off the lessons that are there to be learned from this experience.
Shrum insists that, not only has Obama been doing the right things, it will be clear to all by 2012 that they were the right things to do, that it wasn't a case of overreaching or ignoring the jobs issue. No apology is necessary.
What's more, Obama's much–criticized trip to India right after the election will be vindicated as the right course of action instead of remaining in the U.S. to pick up the pieces. Remaining here, Shrum suggests, would have been a sign of weakness. The blood would have been in the water.
And Obama, he says, will be re–elected in 2012. No problem.
Oh, and if any of the folks who voted for him in 2008 go under because they lost their jobs and couldn't get new ones while Obama obsessed over health care, well, they're just collateral damage (see Timothy McVeigh).
(By the way, it was Shrum who, only a month before the just–concluded midterm elections, confidently asserted that "the Democrats will hold the Congress — yes, the House as well as the Senate."
(More than 82 million Americans voted in the election. If fewer than 60,000 people — 8,000 in Colorado, 21,000 in Nevada, and 27,000 in West Virginia — had voted for Republicans instead of Democrats, the Senate would have been a 50/50 split, and all the talk today would have been about whether independent Joe Lieberman could be persuaded by the Republicans to caucus with them, giving them the majority.) - Ezra Klein at Newsweek metaphorically shrugs his shoulders. Sure, the Democrats lost the election, he writes, but they accomplished such great things.
Great things that are likely to be overturned — if not in the newly elected Congress, almost certainly in the one that looks likely to be elected two years from now.
But I'll get to that in a minute. - At the New York Daily News, Steve Benen says Obama should call the Republicans' bluff.
Benen recommends turning the tables on the Republicans, proposing things their own people have proposed in the past. For example, he could take a page from the McCain–Palin playbook from 2008 and advocate "establish[ing] 'a cap–and–trade system that would reduce greenhouse gas emissions' and pursue 'alternatives to carbon–based fuels.' "
What's more, Benen writes, "if the president were feeling particularly mischievous, he could endorse the tax rates adopted by Ronald Reagan, who oversaw rates considerably higher than the ones in place today. Would Republicans really condemn Ronaldus Magnus' tax policy?"
And in this corner ...
- There's something vaguely unsettling (not to mention unseemly) about Karl Rove using the lyrics from a popular singer who is about half his age to make his point about Obama.
But that's what he did — and fairly effectively, too — in the Wall Street Journal when he asserted that the president has a tin ear.
Personally, I think Rove is right about that, but you have to consider the source. Rove clearly has an axe to grind. - So, too, does Peggy Noonan, a writer whose work I have admired since she wrote Ronald Reagan's memorable speech following the Challenger disaster nearly 25 years ago.
Noonan observes the volatility of the electorate and reminds Republicans, flush with victory, that "things could turn on a dime," as they did with Obama.
Obama's problem, she suggests, is that he did not hold the political center that played a vital role in his election in 2008, and that's a hard argument to deny following an election in which independents so visibly abandoned the Democrats and voted for Republicans. "To hold the center you have to respect your own case enough to argue for it," she writes, "and respect the people enough to explain it."
Noonan's had some experience with the fluidity of the electorate, and she remembers the days in the mid–1990s when the Republicans took control of Congress. She tells Republicans that the right wing's favorite whipping boy, the media, "had a storyline" it was eager to sell — "[t]hese wild and crazy righties who just got elected are ... wild and crazy," and the media will try to sell it in 2011 as well.
There is an impression among many voters — one that is a half–truth at best — that all the Republicans who have just been elected are extremist Tea Partiers. The media will seek to exploit that, Noonan warns. The media, Noonan says, will try to portray all newly elected Republicans as extremists so she urges incoming Republicans "to keep in mind the advice of the 19th century actress Mrs. Patrick Campbell, who once said ... that she didn't really care what people did as long as they didn't do it in the street and frighten the horses."
And that is what Noonan tells new Republican lawmakers: "Stand tall, speak clear, and don't frighten the horses."
I seldom agree with her, just as I seldom agreed with her boss, but, as a writer, I give her credit for the things she can do with words.
I've never really bought into this media bias stuff that she and the other right–wingers like to peddle. Oh, sure, I'll concede that there is some bias in the media, most of it in broadcasting. Perhaps that is at the heart of my problem. My experience in journalism has been confined to print — well, except for a couple of years that I spent appearing on a weekly cable access sports program as a representative for the newspaper for which I was working at the time.
But mostly I get the sense, from reading what I have read lately, that most people are looking at raw numbers and simply trying to reconcile those numbers with what they see on the ground. Obama insisted, in his post–election press conference, that the fault was not with the agenda but with communication.
That has a nice "shoot the messenger" sound to it, but the ultimate responsibility rests with the president — except that this president, like his predecessor, won't take responsibility for his errors in judgment.
So who does Obama suggest we blame?
- If there isn't an answer to that by November 2012, the messengers who seem likely to get blamed, along with Obama, are the Senate Democrats who must face the voters in that election.
Jack Kelly of the Pittsburgh Post–Gazette — who, incidentally, disagrees with Shrum about Obama's trip to India — is one of those to write recently about those senators.
"Democrats who didn't drown in the Republican wave had to be dismayed by the news conference President Barack Obama held Wednesday before jetting off to India," Kelly wrote. "Particularly unhappy, I suspect, are the 12 Democrats in the Senate from states that voted Republican Tuesday who are up for re–election in 2012.
"In essence, what the president said (in many, many more words) is that he heard what the voters were saying, but would ignore it."
Those 12 Democrats — Bill Nelson of Florida, Debbie Stabenow of Michigan, Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, Claire McCaskill of Missouri, Jon Tester of Montana, Ben Nelson of Nebraska, Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico, Kent Conrad of North Dakota, Sherrod Brown of Ohio, Robert Casey of Pennsylvania, Jim Webb of Virginia and Herb Kohl of Wisconsin — are clearly at risk in 2012.
Now, the Class of 2006 was always going to be at risk, simply because of the numbers. Only about one–third of the Senate's seats is on the ballot in any election year. There are more in some years because senators die or resign, and special elections must be held to choose their successors.
Because 2006 was such a good year for Democrats, that means more Democrats will be defending their seats in 2012. The same, actually, will be true of 2014, when the Democrats who were swept in on the Obama wave are up for re–election.
These politicians — the president and these 12 senators — are going to have to unite behind a message. They need to be laying the foundation for that message now and building their cases, as individuals and as a group, for another term.
Since he was elected two years ago, pundits have compared Obama to the most successful presidents in American history — and some of the least successful as well.
Where Bill Clinton stands on that scale is, of course, a matter of opinion, but the fact remains that he survived a disastrous midterm in 1994 to win re–election two years later — and eventually turned over a budget surplus to his successor. He just might have some useful insights for the current occupant of the White House.
In his memoir "My Life," Clinton recalled that the Democrats "got the living daylights beat out of us."
Clinton's recollections sound eerily familiar to what Obama and other Democrats said both before and after the election: "The Republicans were rewarded for two years of constant attacks on me," he wrote. "The Democrats were punished for too much good government and too little good politics.
"... Moreover, the public mood was still anxious; people didn't feel their lives were improving and they were sick of all the fighting in Washington."
Has a familiar sound to it, doesn't it?
But the setback of 1994 reminded Clinton of 14 years earlier, when he was defeated for re–election as governor of Arkansas. "I felt much as I did [then]," Clinton wrote. "I had done a lot of good, but no one knew it. ... I had forgotten the searing lesson of my 1980 loss: You can have good policy without good politics, but you can't give the people good government without both."
And Clinton went about adapting himself to the new political landscape.
It is something other presidents needed to do midway through their terms in office, but not all have.
Will Obama have the wisdom to see what he must do?
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