Clive Crook wanks:
As always Bill Galston and John Cassidy are well worth reading. In interesting new commentaries on the election, both think Obama has the edge, while emphasizing that it might be a close thing and warning Democrats against complacency. I hesitate to put my instincts up against their careful analyses, but if the election were tomorrow and I was forced to put money on one of the candidates, I’d say Romney.
Okay, first of all, the title of this column is Why I Think Obama is Losing. And he says that if the election were held tomorrow Romney would win. That’s just objectively false. While there are a smattering of national polls that show Romney basically even or narrowly ahead, the aggregate of polls show him behind. But national polls don’t matter. The president is ahead in all the states that matter, and if the election were held tomorrow he would win easily. Of course, the election will not be held tomorrow, but Crook is off to an inauspicious start. If your premise is ludicrous what hope is there for what follows?
He goes on to list all the things that are not hurting Obama. People still like him and want him to succeed. The opposition is weak. The economy is strong enough for him to win reelection. So, what’s the problem?
Obama’s big problem, I think, is that he is no longer the president he said he would be. Above all, he’s stopped trying to be that president.
The astonishing enthusiasm for Obama in 2008 rested heavily on his promise to change Washington and unify the country. You can argue about whose fault it is that Washington is even more paralyzed by tribal fighting than before–in my view, it’s mostly (though not entirely) the GOP’s fault. For whatever reason, Obama failed to bring the change he promised. That would be forgivable, so long as he was determined to keep trying. But he isn’t determined to keep trying. His campaign message so far boils down to this: You just can’t work with these people. I tried, they’re not interested, so it’s war. If they want bitter partisan politics, they can have it.
My instinct tells me this is a losing strategy.
To me it seems so obviously the wrong strategy, in fact, that I struggle to understand what Obama’s people can be thinking. The fact that Republicans refuse to compromise is not, tactically speaking, a problem for the Democrats, but a wonderful opportunity. Offer centrist compromise proposals on the issues that confront the country–Bowles-Simpson on fiscal policy, to cite the most obvious instance–and let the Republicans reject them. Keep offering, keep being rejected. Don’t stop coming back with appeals for moderation and common sense, and let the GOP respond with promises to eliminate the federal government. See where that gets them.
In the end, remember, Bill Clinton defeated Newt Gingrich. He had to stare down the base of his own party to do it–but he won.
Obama did pursue this policy for the first two and a half years of his presidency. We can argue about to what degree he did this cynically and tactically and to what degree he suffered from some naïveté. But it stopped being an option right around the time the Republicans threatened to default on our debt and caused Standard & Poor to downgrade our credit rating. At that point, Obama could no longer pretend he had a good faith partner to negotiate with.
And that’s what makes this analysis so very dumb:
The middle of the country doesn’t want grinding paralysis, and it also doesn’t want a pre-Clinton Democratic program. The middle of America is center-right, not center-left. How many times do Democrats need to be told this? Swing voters want Obama to keep trying to do what he said he would do–not reluctantly, but with limitless patience and because he believes it’s the principled approach leading to the right policies. Then if compromise fails, there’d be no doubt whatever who was to blame.
If people are confused about who to blame, columnists like Mr. Crook need to take some responsibility for that. He might be right that the “middle of the country” is center-right. I’m willing to acknowledge that the Republicans are fully capable of marshaling a massive backlash against any Democratic president, regardless of the policies they advance. That’s a separate issue from what constitutes good policy. And it’s also a major problem. Regardless of what people might want, the Republican Party’s limitless obstruction doesn’t allow the president to govern like a pre-Clinton Democrat. It doesn’t really allow him to govern at all. That’s the point of their strategy. They want to prevent him from passing laws and they want him to look weak and ineffectual. They have the power to do that, so they’re doing it. The question ought to be whether they should be rewarded for it. Should they be given power because they refuse to be a partner in the minority?
I don’t think a fair-minded person would answer that question in the affirmative. If people want a center-right government, that pretty well describes the Obama coalition. And, since the GOP obstructs everything, it also describes his policies. He’s offering what Mr. Crook says people want. But any Republican who works with him is either forced to switch parties, retire, or face the near-certainty of electoral defeat in a primary. He tried it Crook’s way, and discovered that “you just can’t work with these people.”
The one thing that worries me is that Romney will succeed in making the case that Washington is hopelessly stalemated under Obama and only he can shake things loose. Obama must not walk into that trap. So, there is some daylight of agreement here, but overall this is a totally disingenuous argument.
The members of the Bowles-Simpson debt committee couldn’t even pass their own proposal. The Supercommittee couldn’t even make a proposal. And it wasn’t because the Democrats were unwilling to make concessions.
The story here is that the Republicans have become a completely radical party and, given power, they will govern that way. Call it Cheney on Steroids. You want that? Keep writing columns like this, Mr. Crook.
