Democrats, desperate to find their footing and their message, are relying on a number of flimsy assumptions in their quest to maintain control of the White House and Senate.
Left without the option of promoting, or even defending, their own record over the last four years, this president and his fellow travelers on the left have believed that scaring voters – that’s a new strategy – would work not just with their usual Mediscare tactics, which have so far been counterproductive because of the GOP’s masterful strategy of hammering away at the Democrats’ own raid of Medicare (popular) to fund Obamacare (unpopular). Notice that there was only passing mention of Medicare on the opening night of the Democratic Convention.
No, despite the failure of Mediscare so far, the Democrats will hardly limit their scare tactics to one defined issue. In fact, they are essentially hanging their entire campaign on this fundamental argument: remember, it was Republicans who got us into the mess we’re in with their reckless spending, unfunded wars, unfunded initiatives like Medicare Part D – leftists, with a straight face, complaining about unfunded mandates – and an assortment of other disastrous policies. In fact, they argue, turning power back to this radical bunch of heartless conservatives will result in a dangerously polarized society, and oh yes, also economic disaster. Again.
Uh, excuse me, but have you forgotten a little thing called the 2010 elections? Forget trying to figure out whether voters will still blame Bush and Republicans enough for the meltdown of 2008 to reject them out of hand four years after Bush left office. They didn’t even give Obama a pass two years into his presidency. The overwhelming repudiation of Obama’s policies less than 22 months after his inauguation is well-documented, with the GOP picking up 63 seats in the House and seven in the Senate.
There is also the little detail that President Obama was for two years operating in rarefied air for leftists, who through the perfect storm of 2008 – financial crisis, unpopular incumbent, weak opponent, charismatic orator offering hope and change – gained not only the presidency, but super-majorities in both chambers of Congress, and thus a virtually blank policy canvas.
They chose to paint the canvas with a huge stimulus that stimulated little, the Affordable Health Care Act that has made health care less affordable, and a strategy to deal with unemployment – if you can call continuously extending unemployment benefits a strategy – that has increased unemployment. The blank canvas became a blank check, with more than $5,000,000,000,000 added to our national debt, and some 23,000,000 people out of work, underemployed or no longer even looking for work.
Voters delivered an unambiguous mandate of rejection in 2010, and what the left is essentially asking voters to do is reverse their own verdict. Good luck with that.
And that brings us to another false assumption: rolling out Bill Clinton as keynote speaker tonight will make everything OK. Hey, just remind us of the salad days of the 1990’s, and all Obama has actually done in his own presidency will be forgotten if not forgiven. People will remember how Clinton balanced the budget and presided over a high employment, high growth economy. And how he was able to overcome a stinging defeat in his own first term, mid-term elections (the Republican revolution of 1994) to easily win re-election. Clinton’s popularity, still a head-shaking reality, will be imputed to Obama
The problem (in addition to using Forward as their slogan while showcasing a president first elected 20 years ago – uh, that’s behind us) is that Obama has employed a strategy entirely opposite from Clinton since the 2010 elections. While Clinton cleverly tacked to the center after 1994, Obama has doubled down on his leftist policies and rhetoric. And despite those consistent bows to the hard left in his own party, the president is still attempting to shore up support among his core constituencies (think gay marriage, suspension of immigration laws, declining the Keystone pipeline) while Romney/Ryan have turned to working over independents and undecided voters.
How ironic that Obama, who inspired near-messianic enthusiasm in 2008, is still needing to reassure his base, while Romney, always viewed with suspicion by his base, now represents a united party. Go figure.
Yet another assumption many are making about this election is that Barack Obama, despite his scant experience and poor record, is such a great speech-maker that he can somehow orate his way out of any trouble. After all, who could forget his soaring rhetoric four years ago that inspired people to see in him the embodiment of all they wished to be true.
But the real test for an orator is not so much his ability to inspire people to vote for him, but whether his oratorical skills are effective enough to persuade people to support his most significant initiatives (think FDR, Kennedy, Reagan). Whether he can apply the poetry of campaigning to the prose of governing.
As Paul Ryan pointed out in his speech at the Republican Convention, there has been no shortage of words out of this White House, and in the pivotal first two years of his presidency, Obama delivered more speeches on his most cherished initiative – health care reform – than any president on any subject in recent memory. Well beyond saturation level. And yet the popularity of what came to be known as Obamacare actually diminished with each passing week, and the bill passed only through parliamentary maneuvering without a single Republican vote.
Since his promise has now been replaced by his record, Obama’s challenge in 2012 is far more like the grind of selling Obamacare than pitching hope and change in the heady days of 2008.
Though history has demonstrated three times in the last century – 1932, 1980 and 1992 – that presidents don’t win second terms in the type of economic situation we find ourselves, it is certainly possible that the president will be re-elected. But it won’t be because of what the Republicans did more than four years ago. It won’t be because Bill Clinton provides his seal of approval. And it won’t be because he can deliver a mesmerizing stemwinder.
