In the White House last week, when the polls were already forecasting a midterm drubbing, they were comforting themselves with a simple, if basic thought.
No matter how meaty a punch the US electorate was about to aim at the Democratic solar plexus, one senior administration official told me: “We’re still here on Nov. 3.”
Sure, that was setting the bar low, drawing consolation from the constitutional fact that, no matter how calamitous the results for the Democrats in Congress, US President Barack Obama would still have two more years to run on his White House lease.
However, the remark meant more.
It was part pep talk — as that official put it, the Obama team will now just have “to take a deep breath and go forward” — and part recognition that the president is a fixed point in a political landscape about to change radically.
What are his options now? What can he do to avoid defeat this year serving as a mere overture to termination in 2012? How, in short, can Obama save his presidency?
The glummest scenario predicts gridlock, with the House thwarting every Obama initiative. A hobbled president, unable to get anything done, is forced to watch as the US economy stagnates further. He may want to jolt it with an extra stimulus, but he’s powerless. House Republicans, elected partly by slamming the first stimulus as excessive and ineffective, will block it.
The result will be an economy stuck in the ditch all the way until 2012, when voters will — fairly or unfairly — blame the man at the top and turf Obama out of office. It will be a rerun of the mid-recession campaign that ejected former US president George Bush in 1992.
As for the next two years, they will be a living hell of congression-al “investigations” as Republican committee chairmen abuse their positions to hold spurious hearings and issue subpoenas designed to shroud Obama in the murky gloom of “ethics” issues. It will be 24 months of agonized paralysis that ends in electoral defeat.
The more hopeful scenario — and some Democrats cherish this one so fervently they actively hoped their party would lose — is that a Republican victory gives Obama what he has so far lacked: a lightning rod. With Democrats in control of the White House and both chambers of Congress, there has been nobody to blame for the country’s woes but the Democrats (memories are too short to recall the Bush era that ended centuries ago in 2008).
With Republicans now partly at the helm, the blame can be spread around. What’s more, the electorate will have got anti-incumbent fervor out of their system. If they hadn’t punished the Democrats comprehensively this time around, but had instead allowed the party to cling to power, then a greater wave of retribution would surely have broken in 2012 — one that could well have drowned Obama.
The cherry on top of this vision of the future sees the economy brighten, so that Obama cruises to re-election just as surely as Ronald Reagan did in 1984, two years after his own midterm rebuff.
Which of these two scenarios materializes is not in the lap of the gods, with Obama a passive onlooker. Much of his fate is in his own hands — with the rest in the grasp of the newly empowered Republicans.
If he wants to make the latter vision come true, he’ll have to borrow from the playbook written by former US president Bill Clinton after the Republican landslide of 1994. He would use the next two years to expose his opponents as dangerous extremists, threatening to destroy much that the voters hold dear — with himself as the valiant shield standing in their way.
It is what one senior Democrat calls the “counterpunch presidency,” allowing the Republicans to lash out just enough to damage themselves. In 1995, the Republicans followed the script perfectly, their anti-government fervor so intense they eventually shut down the entire federal bureaucracy, so denying Americans vital benefits and services. A year later, voters were eager to re-elect Clinton as the brake on a runaway Republican juggernaut.
Such a plan fits neatly with what some in the administration see as the natural work of the next two years, namely protecting the achievements of the first two. If they have their way, Obama will not focus on passing new legislation, but on protecting his landmark reform of healthcare and maintaining the flow of recovery money — rather than letting the Republicans undo either.
However, there are dangers.
For one thing, the Republicans might have learned their lesson and act more reasonably this time round (though some Tea Party fire-breathers laud the 1995 shutdown as an act of ideological heroism). For another, it requires the rarest political dexterity to preside over two years of stasis and have everyone blame the other side. Clinton had just such agility, but Obama is cut from different cloth.
Which is why he might look to the other chapters in the Clinton playbook.
The former president knew he needed to have a record to run on, so he forged compromises with the Republicans, chiefly by co-opting and adapting signature items from their program, including welfare and increased police numbers.
Obama could repeat the trick, chiefly on the economy, but also perhaps on education, immigration reform, arms control or trade agreements. Then in 2012, he could seek re-election as the president who got things done.
Such an approach would have the added benefit of making good on the promise that made Obama — the dream of a post-partisan politics in which there were no red states or blue states, “but just the United States of America.”
When Democrats were in sole charge, Obama lost sight of that message, even though it had been central to his appeal in 2008. Astonishingly, he barely met some of the key Republican leaders in Congress during his first two years in office.
This, then, is a possible strategy for the next two, “counterpunch and co-opt,” in the words of that senior Democrat. Of course, it does not depend entirely on Obama. He can’t dance unless the Republicans agree to be his partner, unless they themselves fear facing the electorate in 2012 with nothing to show for their spell in control.
Still, much now comes down to how the president handles his new situation. One close adviser marvels at the “deep equanimity” with which his boss faces adversity. Now he will need not just Zen calm, but nimble ingenuity, an improved economy and a big slab of luck.
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