Obama’s Midterm Strategy: Blame the GOP
The only people more unpopular than Democrats are congressional Republicans, so President Obama is reminding us of what Republican rule was like.
When he ran for president, Barack Obama’s effervescent campaign was about hope, optimism, national unity, and, above all, the future. He offered a vision of a new world cooperatively shaped by a new generation. The message was mostly positive and upbeat, in part because it was obvious that outgoing Republican President George W. Bush had made a hash of the economy and led the country into two controversial wars. Americans, Obama strategists felt, wanted the uplift of looking forward.
Two years later the president is tentatively unveiling the strategy he and fellow Democrats will pursue in this fall’s election season, and it has a heavy dose of ... looking backward. It’s going to be as much about history as hope, and more about attacking Republicans than promoting his own vision. The goal is to give pause to independent voters eager to punish Obama for their economic insecurity by voting for GOP candidates. The message: we can’t return power to the very people who gave us the catastrophic Great Recession to begin with.
At a fundraiser in New York last week, Obama previewed the two lines of anti-Republican attack. One is historical. “After they drove the car into the ditch, made it as difficult as possible for us to pull it back, now they want the keys back,” Obama said of the GOP. “No! You can’t drive. We don’t want to have to go back into the ditch. We just got the car out.” The other is that Republicans are causing gridlock and, to the extent voters are upset with Congress, it’s the GOP’s fault. “We got our mops and our brooms out here and were cleaning stuff out and they’re sitting there saying, ‘Hold the broom better, that’s not how you mop.’ Don’t tell me how to mop,” Obama said. “Pick up a mop! Do some work on behalf of the American people to solve some of these problems.”
Elections are always a game of comparison, but attack politics are not supposed to be part of the Obama brand, and they could be undercut by what Americans like best about him: his steady, genial calm. So why is the White House adopting this strategy? The reasons are in the poll numbers. For one, the economy remains iffy and most Americans (76 percent in the latest NBC/Wall Street Journal poll) still think we are in a recession. Unemployment remains in double digits in many states—12.5 percent in California, with many inland counties in the 20s—and state budgets will soon have to be slashed again. Public employment, which has grown in the recession, is about to shrink.
There are signs of recovery, to be sure, and most fair-minded analysts would say that Obama’s calm leadership, even before he took office, helped save the U.S. and the world from a more widespread and immediate meltdown. But it’s hard to quantify that, and most of the immediate, sweeping measures that he and the Democrats took—the $800 billion stimulus bill; the auto bailouts; the continuing bank, AIG, and Fannie Mae bailouts; the health-care bill—are simply not popular. More important, people are dubious about whether they have worked, or will work in the long run. In the NBC poll, only 18 percent of those polled thought that the stimulus had “already helped improve the economy” and only another 20 percent thought it ever would.
This much is clear: the president can’t lead the Democrats in the midterm elections by bragging about the stimulus. But what he can do is remind everyone of the global meltdown that clobbered us all on Bush’s watch in 2008—the consequence, in good measure of Bush policies and those of former Fed chairman Alan Greenspan. And he can attack what polls show to be the least popular political entity on the American landscape: the congressional Republican Party. According to the NBC poll, only 8 percent of voters have a very positive view of the GOP.
That’s the key number—and the core of Obama’s new strategy.
Howard Fineman is also the author of The Thirteen American Arguments: Enduring Debates That Define and Inspire Our Country.
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Howard Fineman is Newsweek's Senior Washington Correspondent and Columnist, senior editor and deputy Washington bureau chief. He is the author of "Living Politics," a column that began on MSNBC.COM and Newsweek.com and that now also appears in the print magazine. An award-winning reporter and writer, Fineman also is an analyst for NBC News and MSNBC, appearing regularly on "Countdown with Keith Olbermann," "Hardball with Chris Matthews" and "TODAY." The author of scores of Newsweek cover stories, Fineman's work has appeared as well in The New York Times, The Washington Post and The New Republic. His 2008 national best-selling book, "The Thirteen American Arguments," was released in paperback by Random House in the spring of 2009.
One of the nation's leading political reporters, Fineman has interviewed every major presidential candidate from (then-vice president) George H.W. Bush in 1985 to (then senator) Barack Obama early and often in the 2008 campaign cycle. His current work focuses on the Obama Administration and its top officials, as well as on Congress and politics throughout the country. Although based in Washington, Fineman travels widely in the U.S. and has covered politics and other events in 49 of the 50 states.
Fineman's work has produced many milestones and awards. A cover story in November 2001 featured President George W. Bush's first extensive interview after 9/11. Another cover, "Bush and God," was part of a series of articles that won the 2003 National Magazine Award for General Excellence. His reporting has helped Newsweek win many honors from the Magazine Publishers Association and the American Journalism Review. Other awards include a "Page One" from the Headliners Club of New York, a "Silver Gavel" from the American Bar Association and a "Deadline Club" from the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ). In 2006 he received the Alumni Award from Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism.
As a reporter and writer, Fineman ranges widely. Besides campaign-year covers, other projects have included: race and politics, the impact of digital technology on society, the influence of Hollywood on politics, the rise of the religious right and of conservative talk radio. He has interviewed business leaders such as George Soros, Bill Gates, Steve Case and Robert Rubin and entertainment figures such as Warren Beatty, Jane Fonda and Jay Leno.
Although now under exclusive television contract to NBC, Fineman over the years has appeared on major public affairs shows, such as Nightline, Face the Nation, Fox News Sunday, Larry King Live, Charlie Rose and the NewsHour. He was a regular panelist on Washington Week in Review on PBS (1983-95) and on CNN's Capital Gang Sunday (1995-98). He worked with Ted Koppel on Nightline specials, and has been a guest on Comedy Central's "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart" and "The Colbert Report."
A native of Pittsburgh, Fineman began his career at The Courier-Journal in Louisville, covering the environment, the coal industry and state politics before joining the newspaper's Washington bureau in 1978. He moved to Newsweek in 1980, was named chief political correspondent in 1984, deputy Washington bureau chief in 1993, senior editor in 1995 and senior Washington correspondent and columnist in 2008.
Fineman holds an A.B., Phi Beta Kappa, from Colgate, an M.S. in journalism from Columbia and a J.D. from the Brandeis School of Law at the University of Louisville. His legal education included a year as a visiting student at the Georgetown University Law Center. He received Watson and Pultizer Traveling Fellowships for study in Europe, Russia and the Middle East, and has traveled to more than 40 countries, among them China, Vietnam, Japan, Ukraine, Israel, Turkey and the West Bank Palestinian Territories.
Fineman is married to Amy L. Nathan, a senior counsel at the Federal Communications Commission. They live in Washington with their two children, Meredith and Nicholas.
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