Some Democratic candidates distance themselves from Obama

(The rats desert the sinking ship?--jef)

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By Chris Cillizza
Washington Post Staff Writer 
Monday, August 16, 2010

Fight or flight?

That is the question Democratic incumbents and challengers in this fall's elections are asking themselves when it comes to dealing with President Obama. Is the best course to distance oneself from a president whose job-approval rating has sunk below 50 percent and whose appeal to independents has gone missing? Or to embrace him and his policies -- the majority of which remain quite popular with the Democratic base that will be essential to any victories that the party claims this fall?

Powerful forces are lining up on both sides of that strategic divide.

Democratic National Committee Chairman Tim Kaine made clear in an interview with "Fox & Friends" last week that he thinks candidates distancing themselves from the president -- and from high-profile congressional leaders such as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi -- are making the wrong move. "I can tell you Democrats who kind of are afraid to be who they are, or pushing back on their leaders, I think they're crazy," Kaine said.

And yet, in campaigns across the country, many Democrats are doing just that.

In Indiana, Rep. Joe Donnelly is running a television ad in which he details his generally conservative stance on immigration while images of Obama and Pelosi are shown on screen. "That may not be what the Washington crowd wants, but I don't work for them," Donnelly says in the ad. "I work for you."

Rep. Travis Childers, who represents a district in northern Mississippi where Obama won just 38 percent of the vote in 2008, takes a similar approach in his TV advertising -- promoting the fact that he has "voted against every big budget" since winning a special election two years ago.

Even some Democratic candidates who are being heavily touted by the White House appear determined to keep the president at arm's length. Shortly after Obama played a lead role in helping Sen. Michael Bennet defeat former state House speaker Andrew Romanoff in a Democratic primary fight last Tuesday, Bennet was asked whether he would want the president to campaign with him this fall. "We'll have to see," Bennet told ABC's George Stephanopoulos -- a response well short of a ringing endorsement of Obama's political standing.

One senior Democratic consultant suggested that the distance candidates are seeking to put between themselves and Obama is reflective of the ascendance of economic issues in voters' minds. "Barack Obama's economic policy of spending our way out of recession is seen as a failure at best and harmful at worst," the source said. "That should tell candidates in competitive jurisdictions all they need to know about running with the president."

Polling on the issue is slightly less stark. In a recent Washington Post-ABC News survey, 51 percent said it was more important to have Republicans in charge of Congress "to act as a check on Obama" while 43 percent said they would rather have Democrats in charge to "help support Obama's policies."

Although it appears as though most candidates won't be following Kaine's advice in the final three months of the midterm campaign, it's far less clear whether any Democrat -- particularly those who have spent the past two years in Congress -- can succeed in gaining separation from the president.

"Even if it made strategic sense, it is hard for Democratic incumbents with a voting record to literally distance themselves from the president," said Democratic pollster Fred Yang.

Obama himself has long argued behind closed doors that Democratic incumbents are stuck with him in good times and in bad; that is, voters simply will not differentiate between the Democratic president and their Democratic member of Congress in the vast majority of districts across the country.

By embracing the president and his policies, the argument goes, the Democratic base will be fired up. And, in midterm elections, base intensity isn't everything -- it's the only thing.

But Tom Davis, a former congressman from Virginia and one of the Republican Party's leading strategists, noted that although Democrats need the "Obama turnout model in urban and minority areas," the president is "radioactive" in the "South, border and mountain states." That push and pull creates a "dilemma" for Democrats on the ballot this fall, Davis said.

Martin Frost, a longtime Texas Democratic congressman who, like Davis, spent much of his time in Washington focused on campaigns, said that while "candidates in the South and Midwest will need to put some distance between themselves and Obama," the president can still help his party avoid disaster this fall.

"Obama's best contribution to the campaign will be to raise money for the party committees, as he did in Texas" recently, Frost said. "He can raise big money even in red states, and he shouldn't be offended when Democrats like Bill White and Chet Edwards don't show up for a photo," he said, referring to the party's candidate for Texas governor and a congressman from the state, respectively.

What Ever Happened to Candidate Obama?

This article appeared in the March 8, 2010 edition of The Nation

by KATHA POLLITT
February 18, 2010

How disappointed are the Obama warriors of 2008? "May your love for me not fade as quickly as your love for Obama," read one pale pink e-card making the rounds on Valentine's Day. Obama himself addressed the topic of a one-term presidency in a recent interview with Diane Sawyer, albeit in a noble, idealistic, theoretical way ("I'd rather be a really good one-term president than a mediocre two-term president"). Well, OK, who wouldn't rather be really good for four years than mediocre for eight; but how many really good one-term presidents have there been? (Only one--James K. Polk--according to a New York Times op-ed by Robert W. Merry, publisher of Stratfor and author of a biography of, well, James K. Polk.)

I'm still glad I supported Obama over Hillary Clinton. If Hillary had won the election, every single day would be a festival of misogyny. We would hear constantly about her voice, her laugh, her wrinkles, her marriage and what a heartless, evil bitch she is for doing something--whatever!--men have done since the Stone Age. Each week would bring its quotient of pieces by fancy women writers explaining why they were right not to have liked her in the first place. Liberal pundits would blame her for discouraging the armies of hope and change, for bringing back the same-old same-old cronies and advisers, for letting healthcare reform get bogged down in inside deals, for failing to get out of Iraq and Afghanistan--which would be attributed to her being a woman and needing to show toughness--for cozying up to Wall Street, deferring to the Republicans and ignoring the cries of the people. In other words, for doing pretty much what Obama is doing. This way I get to think, Whew, at least you can't blame this on a woman.

I'm not even sure how much of it you can blame on Obama. We've had ample evidence of how little power he has over the Democratic barons of the Senate--so little that he had to bribe Ben Nelson and Mary Landrieu with great big haunches of pork to get their votes on a healthcare bill that would benefit millions of their constituents. He is trying to bring some of the Guantánamo prisoners to trial on the US mainland, and Democrats like Jim Webb have sold him out. The Republicans have made clear their intention to obstruct his every move, and thanks to antidemocratic customs like the filibuster and the Senate hold, they've done a pretty good job so far. These are basic features of the landscape.

But let's not go overboard. The real-world constraints on what Obama can do are considerable. (Thank you, founding fathers, for setting up the Senate so that white, rural, conservative states with the population of Staten Island get the same two senators each as multiethnic urban powerhouses like California and New York. That little gift to the slave states of 1788 continues its antidemocratic work today.) But he is, after all, the president. He can propose, he can set forth an agenda, he can demand. He can ask for more than he knows he can get, he can push the boundaries. He doesn't have to do the Republicans' work for them--by asking for a smaller stimulus than necessary, by having the bulk of healthcare reform not kick in until 2014 to keep costs down, by praising obscenely rich bankers as "very savvy businessmen" to a nation with a 9.7 percent official unemployment rate. It's as if the Blue Dogs have gotten into his head, and instead of thinking how to push the possibilities to the max, he's thinking how he can placate his opponents in advance. Right now, the story of healthcare reform suggests that this is not possible--it simply enables a fresh set of even more egregious demands.

It's true that Obama was elected with the votes of many independents and some Republicans, and he has to respect that or end up building houses with Jimmy Carter. Lots of people were inspired by his promise to transcend party differences and take what was best from both Democrats and Republicans--I never understood it, because from my perspective Republicans have nothing to offer; but he did say it, and people took it seriously. A year later, though, those independents are leaving his side in droves, and with the possible exception of ordinary people of color, the base--prochoice women, labor, civil rights activists, opponents of war, progressives, leftists, civil libertarians--is demoralized. His poll numbers may be above 50 percent (although as I write a CNN poll shows a majority opposing a second term). But passable polls don't measure enthusiasm, and enthusiasm is what gets people to write checks they can't really afford, give up their vacations to knock on doors, spend their evenings phone-banking and push their friends to vote. It's easy to dismiss progressives as insignificant and dreamy or, as Rahm Emanuel put it, "fucking retarded." But Obama won't get re-elected without them. They are the troops.

During the campaign Obama was often attacked as being all airy speeches and noble rhetoric. Maybe he took that criticism too much to heart and made the mistake of trying to rack up accomplishments quickly through wonkery and compromise and deal-making, the normal things politicians do--only unfortunately the Republicans aren't interested in governing, and the Blue Dogs are mostly interested in themselves. We'll never know what would have happened if he'd continued to call on the better angels of our nature--if, for example, he'd presented healthcare reform as social solidarity, if he'd made people really feel the suffering of others and called upon them to right this terrible wrong. Maybe people--including progressives--wouldn't have been so easily discouraged and disillusioned by the inevitable complications and imperfections of the plan itself.

What is the point of Obama being conciliatory and careful if his opponents are reckless and don't want to conciliate? Why not use this awful moment when so many are losing their jobs and houses, and states are cutting services to the bone, to remind people why they voted for him?