West Virginia Vote Shows Why Barry Can’t Be Bubba
“28 Percent”
-- President Obama’s job-approval rating in West Virginia according to the most recent survey by Democratic firm Public Policy Polling.
Democrats increasingly lament that the current president isn’t more like Bill Clinton – a skillful campaigner who overcame electoral anger and Washington division to easily win a second term.
As President Obama turns gloomier and more
combative (see below for a take on why a sitting president would say
Americans aren’t better off after his tenure), Clinton nostalgia, much
of it stoked by Bubba himself, has come to permeate the Democratic Party.
At last weekend’s festivities in Little
Rock, Ark. celebrating the 20th anniversary of the start of Clinton’s
1992 campaign, reporters saw a nostalgia trip that bordered on a rebuke
for the sitting president and his lesser political gifts. The Washington
Post spotted one button on a former Clinton staffer that read “It’s
Still About the [Expletive] Economy, Stupid.” Another wore a T-shirt
that read plainly: “I Miss Bill.”
While Democrats hold that Obama is in
trouble because he lacks the political chops to face down House
Republicans and connect with anxious American voters, Republicans mostly
believe that Obama can’t replicate Clinton’s success because he is so ideologically rigid.
Obama could have easily put Republicans on
the defensive if he had, as Clinton did, swiped their most popular
policies in a move to the middle. Had Obama opted to embrace a
stimulative tax overhaul – fewer loopholes and lower rates – or even
some level of entitlement reform, it would have put Republicans on the
spot. Instead, Obama came up with a third stimulus package at a cost of
$450 billion and a proposal for a $2 trillion tax increase on top
earners.
Republicans assume that the reason Obama has
doubled down on his existing policies of elevated public works
spending, job subsidies for state and local government
workers and a tax code aimed at reducing the advantages of the wealthy
is that he is really such a committed liberal that he can’t bring
himself to do anything else. Why else would someone put themselves in
this pickle?
While Democrats have a point about the lack
of political gifts and Republicans are surely right that Obama tends
toward the doctrinaire, Power Play offers another reason for Obama’s
ossification: the electoral map.
West Virginia voters head to the polls today in a special election
that should have been no trouble for Democrats. While West Virginia has
gone Republican in every presidential election since 2000, the state is
deeply Democratic on the local level.
The quasi incumbent, Acting Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin, took office in January on the heels of Joe Manchin’s Senate victory. Tomblin might be best described as a Clinton Democrat,
and probably is farther right than the Big Dog. He is the scion of an
influential southern West Virginia political family and had been a
powerful force in the state legislature for more than three decades.
His opponent is a political novice – a
businessman from the North-Central part of the state who was given
approximately zero chance by political pundits and insiders around the
state. Even some prominent Republicans lined up behind what was going to
be a sure bet for Tomblin, dismissing Bill Maloney as a sacrificial
lamb.
But the race has ended up in a dead heat and
Maloney seems to have the momentum going into today’s special election.
With low turnout expected and conservative voters fired up, Democrats
are now seriously worried.
Now it’s not that anyone thought that Obama
was going to win West Virginia next year. Given his administration’s
efforts to hobble the coal industry, it seems that the Obama team had
taken the Mountain State off the table from the very start.
But what Maloney’s viability shows is first,
that the president’s unpopularity is doing serious damage to his fellow
Democrats. After the losses last month in Nevada and New York
congressional elections, seeing a moderate Democrat who has actively
distanced himself Obama still slipping beneath the waves of electoral
outrage will be worrisome for other red-state Democrats. If you thought
Senate Democrats were hostile to the president before, wait until after
this election.
But most interesting to Power Play, it shows
why Obama has embarked on an unprecedented kind of re-election bid.
Obama is playing narrow, base politics with the promise of brutal
attacks on his eventual opponent. Obama is also talking down the state
of the nation in a bid to lower expectations for his performance. Call
it the Anti-Bubba.
But Obama can’t do what Clinton did and
that’s because of West Virginia and other like-minded states. There are
at least six states that Clinton won in 1996 where Obama will not be
competitive in 2012: Arizona, Louisiana, Arkansas, Tennessee, Kentucky
and West Virginia.
While the Obama team believes it can put
Virginia, North Carolina and Colorado in the win column for Democrats
this cycle, the six states out of reach represent 49 electoral votes, as
many as New York and Pennsylvania combined.
Arizona and Louisiana have their own local
political and demographic reasons for rejecting Obama, but the Arkansas,
Tennessee, Kentucky and West Virginia cluster is part of what Michael
Barone calls the “Jacksonian Belt.” But Power Play, a political note of
Appalachian origins, feels free to call the Hillbilly Firewall.
Populated by cultural conservatives with a
strong libertarian ornery streak, voters there have broken hard against
Obamism and Maloney’s improbable success is evidence of just how much
they mean it.
With the Hillbilly Firewall, Arizona and
Louisiana out of reach, Obama has far less room for error. A small map
means base politics are more important. Obama has to keep union members
marching in Cuyahoga County, Ohio and Hispanic voters inflamed against
Republicans in Washoe County, Nev.
Clintonistas may wish that Obama was more
like Bill, but as southern governor who ran as a moderate alternative
who would break the Democratic march into unconditional liberalism,
Clinton had re-election options that Obama, a Hawaiian transplanted to
South Chicago who ran on a promise of ideological purity for Democrats,
will never have.
Senate Dems Still Running From Obama
"Only a limited number of these $1,000
tickets are available for $250, so I hope you will click this link now
and grab them before they're gone."
-- Email from Missouri Democratic
consultant David Woodruff quoted by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch offering
“reduced tix” to one of President Obama’s fundraisers there tonight.
When President Obama makes a fundraising swing through St. Louis tonight, he will not be joined by Sen. Claire McCaskill, one of Obama’s earliest and most enthusiastic backers and campaign surrogates in 2008.
The Hill reports today that Senate Democrats
are increasingly cross with Obama, who they believe left them out of
his current strategy of pushing hard for a third stimulus package and
big tax hikes on top earners.
“I think one of the problems with the White House is that it’s been too set apart. It’s been too Chicago-centric, and it needs to get out,” Sen. Dianne Feinstein,
D-Calif., told the paper. “Clinton didn’t just talk to four leaders, he
picked up the phone and he kind of said, ‘I really need your vote on
this.’ ”
This is a repeat of what we saw play out on
the president’s national health law, bank regulations and in the string
of fiscal bargains with House Republicans. Obama stands aloof from the
process and Senate Democrats feel snubbed.
The Hill also reports that Senate leaders
were miffed when kept on hold for an economic briefing conference call
with National Economic Council Director Gene Sperling who had “a seemingly vague notion of what the call was supposed to be about” when he eventually came on the line.
Senators are the ultimate Washington VIPs
and don’t take even small effrontery lightly. A White House led by a
former senator that still doesn’t know that after three years is cause
for concern for every Democrat.
This week, House Republicans and Senate
Democrats will continue picking their way through the minefields of debt
reduction, government funding and economic recovery.
With relations strained and confidence lacking between Senate Democrats and the White House, it will be easier for House Republican leaders to convince Majority Leader Harry Reid to keep a low profile and not join Obama on the attack.
What that makes the president’s stimulus and
tax increase proposal a dead letter now, it also makes it increasingly
unlikely that Obama can muster support for a larger deal from the debt-ceiling supercommittee.
With a weakening incumbent in the White House, Senate Democrats will hedge their bets.
Obama Answers the Carter Question
“I don't think they're better off than they
were four years ago. They're not better off than they were before
Lehman's collapse, before the financial crisis, before this
extraordinary recession that we're going through. I think that what
we've seen is that we've been able to make steady progress to stabilize
the economy, but the unemployment rate is still way too high.”
-- President Obama in an interview with ABC
News when asked how he would convince Americans that they are better off
than they were four years ago.
Remember this moment – this is the first
time that a sitting U.S. president made the explicit argument that the
country is not better off after his term in office.
It’s a pretty astonishing moment looked at
alone, but less surprising as part of a new declinist narrative that the
president and his campaign have adopted. The argument for 2012 is that
the country faces such huge problems that not only is it no shock that
America is still in a slough but that Obama’s leadership has prevented
the problem from being much worse. The second phase of the campaign will
be in telling an anxious nation that no Republican is up to the huge
task.
It’s a tough loop-de-loop for Obama to fly
with voters as he looks to be a declinist who isn’t a downer. It will be
easier once there is a Republican nominee to attack directly as unfit
for office, but the current moment in which Obama has embraced the idea
of American malaise, may prove unrecoverable.
If Americans believe Obama that the country
is in trouble, they may still decide that he’s not equipped –
practically or ideologically – to turn things around. For a president to
embrace such a risky gambit for re-election, you know that things must
look even worse from the inside.
And Now, A Word From Charles
“It's ironic for a president who attacked
Bush as being divider. He is running his campaign on dividing labor
against non-labor, gays and straights, and trying to energize people in
terms of their ethnicity or groups.
Look, you can do that. It's legitimate.
It's not unconstitutional. But it isn't what Obama promised. And I think
it's a reason that people are so disaffected with him. He was going to
be transcender, and now he is a guy who appeals on the basis of very
small identity politics.”
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