Posted by
Bill Crawford on Sunday, July 25, 2010 7:52:45 PM
In 1994, Newt Gingrich and the close ring aroud him that would eventually become his GOPAC stable had a national plan for local elections. They were looking to turn Tip O'Neill's "all politics is local" saying on it's ear. In mid-October of that year, one of Newt's advisors reeled off a list of poll numbers in almost all of the contested CD's and told him he was going to pick up over 50 seats and should prepare to be Speaker of the House.
In 2006, Rahm Emanuel and his DCCC came up with a national plan for augmenting their herculean fund raising efforts with a series of Dem candidates for swing districts whose positions on many issues were indistingishable from their Republican opponents. By late October, they pretty much knew they were going to end up with a 25 seat majority.
This year, nobody seems to have a plan. Nobody. The Republicans are still looking for a way to unify their efforts to take advantage of the disastrous situation their opponents are in. The Democrats are in a bad way. They are not only reeling and punch drunk, the White House and Congress seem to both be hoping for a solution from the other side of the hill.
The Republican's fallback position is that their opponents have dug such a hole for themselves that polling is telling them that retaking the House is a good bet, and the Senate looks more competitive every week, This is folly, but there is no better answer out there...yet.
The Democrats are in hell. They got elected in such numbers in 2008 that their base, frustrated as anything after years of struggle, decided (correctly) that they never would have a better shot at passing the big items on their agenda.
And then last year happened. Health care, probably their most ambitious agenda item, took up the whole year, tore up many of the swing Congressmen the DCCC took the time to recruit, alienated them with Seniors and swing voters and almost didn't pass, save for the efforts of some openly craven last minute deals.
The alienation turned out to be deeper than first thought. There were those who thought the health care bill was a mistake, there were more that were annoyed that all that time and effort went into it while the unemployment rate was stuck on double what it was in 2007.
The White House is centered right now on a series of moves to whip up the enthusiasm in their base- this is at the heart of their open opposition to Arizona's immigration law, and their dropping of the Justice Department investigation of voter intimidation in Philadelphia in 2008. This was never meant to be a stand alone strategy. Obama's people are smart enough to know that the last national example of just whipping up the base was the magnificent showing of Barry Goldwater in 1964.
There is a movement afoot in the Democrat party to raise the stakes in the negative campaign game, and this will be a dismal enough year where that will probably come to pass. They are smart enough to know that opposition research doesn't work on it's own, either.
So there is where it becomes obvious. They don't know what else to do. Neither does Congress, or the DCCC, but they are doubly annoyed at the White House. First, they can't fathom how smart Rahm was four years ago, and now he is playing the village idiot. Second, they feel that the White House may be hedging it's bets, knowing full well that if the Republicans take back the Hill, Obama will be the only player left taking credit for what has been voted on already, and will be able to run to the center against them in 2012, hoping for the same sort of game plan that got Clinton his second term in 1996.
This is all piled on to the thinking in Congress that Obama pushed them to suffer unpopular votes on health care, financial reform and stimulus funding, and left them hanging out to dry to face town hall meetings and the worst campaigns of their careers.
The end result of all this is that Obama, already getting a rep in his own party as a man looking out for himself first, will be someone with no friends in Congress at all next year. Then what?