When Hacks Attack

You pretty much know that a political operative has outlived his or her usefulness when he or she starts appearing on television regularly. Just look at Karl Rove. He's on Fox News all the time, and virtually no one in the Republican party will talk to him anymore. Granted, Rove was largely responsible for the Marxist reign of George W. Bush, but that wasn't stopping anyone from being his buddy when he was winning elections. The only problem is that Rove stopped winning in 2006.

The sagas of Douglas E. Schoen and Patrick H. Caddell are even sadder. They're not even washed out strategists, they're tired pollsters.

Schoen worked with the two worst people in professional politics, Mark Penn and Dick Morris; managed to talk Bill Clinton into being more of a Republican than he already was, and incomprehensibly talked Hillary Clinton into continuing to be Hillary Clinton. Caddell somehow managed to work for both George McGovern and Jimmy Carter without getting kicked out of politics.

Both have a long history of going on Fox News and shit-talking Democrats that they don't personally work for. That being the case, I'm shocked that anyone has any interest in anything either has to say, but I'm constantly amazed by the craven ignorance of people generally and journalists in particular. I guess that it doesn't come that far out left field for the Washington Post to publish the "thoughts" of these two old hacks.

I am, however, shocked at just how much wrong they managed to stuff into a mere 1,287 words. Schoen and Caddell pile flawed premise atop flawed premise and somehow think that this makes a case for anything other than how friggin' dumb they are.

This is a critical moment for the country. From the faltering economy to the burdensome deficit to our foreign policy struggles, America is suffering a widespread sense of crisis and anxiety about the future. Under these circumstances, Obama has the opportunity to seize the high ground and the imagination of the nation once again, and to galvanize the public for the hard decisions that must be made. The only way he can do so, though, is by putting national interests ahead of personal or political ones.

To that end, we believe Obama should announce immediately that he will not be a candidate for reelection in 2012.

If the president goes down the reelection road, we are guaranteed two years of political gridlock at a time when we can ill afford it. But by explicitly saying he will be a one-term president, Obama can deliver on his central campaign promise of 2008, draining the poison from our culture of polarization and ending the resentment and division that have eroded our national identity and common purpose.

We do not come to this conclusion lightly. But it is clear, we believe, that the president has largely lost the consent of the governed. The midterm elections were effectively a referendum on the Obama presidency. And even if it was not an endorsement of a Republican vision for America, the drubbing the Democrats took was certainly a vote of no confidence in Obama and his party. The president has almost no credibility left with Republicans and little with independents.

The best way for him to address both our national challenges and the serious threats to his credibility and stature is to make clear that, for the next two years, he will focus exclusively on the problems we face as Americans, rather than the politics of the moment - or of the 2012 campaign.

If, as Schoen and Caddell suggest, President Obama has "lost the consent of the governed" and that this month's elections were "certainly a vote of no confidence in Obama and his party", wouldn't the proper course for him be to resign instead of simply declaring that he's not running for reelection?

These idiots seem to think that this would end the gridlock that is almost certain to envelop Washington over the next two years, but they cite no evidence to support it. As a matter of fact, their entire article is just a long series of assertions without evidence, which is pretty much the nicest thing that I can say about it.

Far be it from me to defend Obama, but the entire premise of Schoen and Caddell's op-ed is wall-to-wall silly. Throughout their article, they ignore both political calender and good, old-fashioned common sense.

The GOP just won the House (and would have won the Senate, but for a slew of retarded Tea Party candidates who didn't even belong on the fucking school board) by trying to obstruct everything the White House and the Democrats proposed. It's been said that nothing succeeds quite like success, so why would the Republicans abandon that strategy once Obama announces his premature retirement?

I'm not sure how many of you know this, but the race for the Republican presidential nomination started two weeks ago. What do you think makes for a better primary strategy; cooperation with the departing administration, or running even harder against its "failed agenda"?

More importantly, if Obama withdraws from the 2012 campaign now, all he does is start the jockeying for position for the Democratic nomination as well. Do you think that potential Democratic nominees are going to run toward Obama or away from him? By taking itself out of the game, the Obama White House would make itself irrelevant and Congress would abandon government entirely in favor of a two-year long presidential campaign. And you'd wind up with exactly the same problem you have now, except maybe worse.

I also don't remember any political professionals going on the record to suggest retirement to either Ronald Reagan or Bill Clinton, both of whom had lower approval ratings at this point in their terms than Obama does now. Both Reagan and Clinton won substantial reelection victories.
What Schoen and Caddell propose isn't even all that original. When Harry Truman lost both houses of Congress in 1946, several prominent Democrats suggested that he nominate Michigan Republican Senator Arthur Vandenberg to the vice presidency and then resign, giving the GOP the White House. Truman, as the more historically-minded of you know, not only won reelection in '48, he took back Congress, too.

If Obama has any brains at all - which, I'll admit, is an open question - he'll sit back, let the GOP overplay its hand, and run against that. Essentially, that was the Clinton '96 - Truman '48 playbook and it worked like a charm. You never saw Bob Dole in Clinton's reelection ads. He was always paired with the unpopular Newt Gingrich. Truman almost never mentioned Thomas Dewey by name. He ran against the "do-nothing 80th Congress", instead. Let's just say that you'll be seeing a lot of John Boehner in the summer and fall of 2012.

The Republicans didn't win because of the Tea Party, they won in spite of it. They won because independents swung so heavily to them. But if the GOP just plays to the Tea Party base, they'll alienate independents just as surely as Obama, Pelosi and Reid did, and independents will swing back. What's going to happen over the next two years is the most predictable thing on earth.

Defeating an incumbent president is one of the hardest tricks to pull off in Big Time Politics, which is why it's done so rarely. In the last hundred years, only four (not counting Ford, who wasn't elected president or vice president) presidents - Taft, Hoover, Carter and Bush 41 - were defeated at the polls. Truman, Eisenhower, Nixon, Reagan and Clinton were all at low points after their first mid-terms, and all five won reelection by commanding margins.

Presidents historically have been at their least effective after their second set of mid-terms because of the "lame duck syndrome" that was created by the Twenty-Second Amendment. It is at that point that a president can no longer do anything of consequence for or to a given member of Congress, and he loses all of his influence. Instead of addressing the fact that Obama would become a lame duck the second that he announces that he isn't running for reelection, they simply try to dream it away.

They present absolutely no evidence that the atmosphere of partisan intransigence would melt away once Obama does, and they offer no plausible reason that it would because there isn't one.

Doug Schoen and Pat Caddell don't like Barack Obama, which is fine. Neither do I. The difference is that I'm not prognosticating from the pages of one of America's proudest newspapers with my head up my ass.