The November 6, 2012 presidential election is less than two weeks away, but some liberals aren't waiting for the actual election to start preemptively spinning an Obama loss, with one casting blame elsewhere because of course, it can't be "The One's" fault.
Matt Bai, over at NYT's The Caucus is casting blame on
But there is one crucial way in which the 42nd president may not have served the 44th quite as well. In these final weeks before the election, Mr. Clinton’s expert advice about how to beat Mitt Romney is starting to look suspect.
You may recall that last spring, just after Mr. Romney locked up the Republican nomination, Mr. Obama’s team abruptly switched its strategy for how to define him. Up to then, the White House had been portraying Mr. Romney much as George W. Bush had gone after John Kerry in 2004 – as inauthentic and inconstant, a soulless climber who would say anything to get the job.
But it was Mr. Clinton who forcefully argued to Mr. Obama’s aides that the campaign had it wrong. The best way to go after Mr. Romney, the former president said, was to publicly grant that he was the “severe conservative” he claimed to be, and then hang that unpopular ideology around his neck.
In other words, Mr. Clinton counseled that independent voters might forgive Mr. Romney for having said whatever he had to say to win his party’s nomination, but they would be far more reluctant to vote for him if they thought they were getting the third term of George W. Bush. Ever since, the Obama campaign has been hammering Mr. Romney as too conservative, while essentially giving him a pass for having traveled a tortured path on issues like health care reform, abortion and gay rights.
Of course, Team Obama had no choice but to do exactly what Bill Cinton said!
It’s not hard to understand why Mr. Obama and his advisers took Mr. Clinton’s advice to heart; to disregard it would be like telling Derek Jeter, “Hey man, appreciate the input, but I think I know how to make that flip play from the hole just fine on my own.”As Power Line puts it, Clinton went from savior to scapegoat in two months.
Moving right along to Clive Crook who isn't blaming Clinton, but is still spinning, not by admitting Obama's second term agenda is the same as the first which resulted in the slowest recovery since the Great Depression, but instead says it is because "Obama's Blunder Was in Ceding Political Center to Romney."
Obama could have been a strong centrist, which would have aroused even louder complaints from the Democratic left. Or he could have been a weak progressive, constantly on the retreat. He chose to be the latter. Policy-wise, the result might have been much the same: a stimulus with more tax cuts and less public investment than Democrats wanted and a health-care reform resting much more heavily on the existing private-insurance model than progressives would have liked. The crucial difference is that Obama the muscular centrist could have taken credit for these achievements -- which is what they are -- in a way that Obama the battered progressive has been unable to.Neither piece admits that Americans watched Obama with a Senate and House fully controlled by Democrats in the first two years of Obama's term in office, focus on Obamacare (which a majority of the public opposed) and "taxing the rich," while unemployment continued to rise to 10 percent.
He would have been able to campaign on them, rather than leaving them unloved and unsold. He would have looked in charge rather than at the mercy of intransigent Republicans. He would have seemed his own man rather than an instrument of Nancy Pelosi and the House Democrats. He would have been the president who never stopped trying to fix Washington. Above all, he would have been ideologically aligned with the swing voters who decide elections.
Neither piece admits that Obama has spent the last year campaign without offering a second term agenda, one which acknowledges the public wasn't pleased with his first term results, and when he does offer a little pamphlet showing an agenda there is nothing new in it and is being panned and torn to shreds by CNN and others.
Neither piece actually states that they think Obama is going to lose or that Romney is going to win the presidential election, but both have the tone of "omg, what went wrong."
Perhaps liberals should wait until the election is over and the votes are counted before assuming that Obama has lost because their tone and implications will do nothing but encourage Democratic voters to just sit it out instead of heading to the polls on November 6, 2012.
[Update] Maybe "Obama’s Aura of Defeat,"is contagious?
