Obama and the Election

President Obama must have finally taken a look at the polls and realized that joblessness and the economy are people's top priorities. It is probably a lost cause for several reasons. The biggest is that this realization is a year too late. The economy and jobs have been a top priority for Obama's entire administration but they fell off of his radar after the stimulus bill passed. Instead the Obama administration focused on health care reform. This goes beyond being tune-deaf. The Democrats were actively ignoring the polls in favor of advancing their own agenda. The President can talk about how joblessness keeps him up late at night but it did not affect his priorities when he was awake. I pointed this out several times in 2009.

A year and a half into his administration, Obama continues to blame President Bush for the nation's problems. In a recent interview he said,

This is going to be a choice between the policies that got us into this mess and my policies that are getting us out of this mess. And I think if you look at the vast majority of Americans, even those who are dissatisfied with the pace of progress, they'll say that the policies that got us into this mess we can't go back to… What I'm prepared is to be held accountable for the policies that I've put in place. But they Americans don't have selective memory. They're gonna remember the policies that got us into this mess as well. And they sure as heck don't wanna go back to those.

The Democrats have taken this line since the economy started collapsing at the end of 2007. It is an over-simplification and they know it. So do the voters. Obama failed to mention which specific policies caused the problems with reason. Some of them date back to the Clinton administration. Others were pushed by Democrats. The financial reform bill that is supposed to prevent future melt-downs has racial quotas which will inevitably lead to further problems.

At the same time, Obama failed to say what policies he changed prior to the financial reform bill. It is true that banks have clamped down on credit. People with good credit ratings are being turned down for loans. This will prevent future melt-downs but the Obama administration is not responsible for this. They have been trying to increase the flow of credit at the risk of future inflation.

This blame-Bush attitude hurts Obama and the Democrats in other ways. They promised to end the partisan bickering that has dominated DC politics for a generation. If anything, they made it worse. Ont he economy, Obama is not willing to say that mistakes were made and leave it at that. He has to point fingers.

Broken campaign promises continue to haunt Obama and the Democrats. Between 2004 and 2008 they told us that deficits were bad and that they would balance the budget once they were back in power. They took back Congress in 2006 but continued to blame Bush for increasing deficits. Now that they control both Congress and the White House they reversed themselves, committing the country to increasing deficits as far as the eye can see. Granted, Obama's original budget projection planned on halving the deficit but that was to only last for a year before it began increasing again.

Obama made many promises about foreign relations. He was going to engage our enemies while regaining the respect of our friends. Instead he has been ignored by our enemies and has alienated our friends. His major success has been Russia but the cost of this was abandoning several strong allies including Poland and Turkey.

He was going to have the troops out of Iraq by now out of a stabilized Afghanistan in the near future. Gitmo was to have been closed and rendition ended. The Patriot Act was supposed to have been repealed. The best that can be said of these goals is that some of them are in the works.

Mid-term elections are always a problem for the party in power. Everyone knew that this one would be especially brutal. Frustration with Bush hurt Republicans in 2006 and 2008. Obama's name at the top of the ticket brought in millions of new voters who are unlikely to vote in an off year. Democrats currently hold nearly every swing seat in the country. It would be hard to hold on to these in any circumstance. Add in high unemployment, the possibility of a double-dip recession, and a general disappointment with Obama and his policies and you have the makings of a disaster for the Democrats.

Obama had planned on spending the summer convincing people that we are in an economic recovery that he engineered. With bad news coming weekly, this plan has to be discarded. That leaves the Democrats with a two-pronged strategy. The first part is to blame Bush for everything bad that happened. The second part is to personalize every race by demonizing the Republican candidate. We will not hear a single issue from Democrats. Instead we will hear about any tenuous ties between the Republican challengers and Wall Street.

Which brings us back to the negative campaigning that the Democrats promised to end.