There’s no unified Democratic agenda due to the Big Tent nature of the party. I’d argue that the Democratic Party of Liz Warren would do much worse in an election than Bill Clinton’s version.
I don’t recall them running away from Clinton much.
Now John Manchin, he’s to the right of Clinton. If he was elected, sure, the GOP would try to demonize him, that’s what an opposition party does. But they’d have to find different angles. Even with Clinton himself they had a hard time hitting his actual policies, so they kept on focusing on the fact that he was a draft-dodging hippie.
But that’s not really the point. People throw around BS in every election. The issue is whether it will be believed. No one is going to believe Manchin is a liberal. So the attacks would bounce right off him. I guess we’ll know for sure if he runs for reelection. I doubt he’s going to have any issues if he does run.
That still doesn’t negate the scale of the gains. The Republican loss in 2012 was very disappointing, but far from a disaster. It was actually a vast improvement over 2006 and 2008, so it was only a minor step back. The only reason the Democrats look like they even belong in the big leagues right now is one man: Barack Obama.
Obama won fewer votes in 2012 than in 2008. I agree that ACA probably isn’t what cost him that support, but he did do worse, which is unusual for an incumbent President.
I think you’re mostly right. To the extent that you’re wrong, I think it’s that in order to successfully defend ACA you have to figure out exactly why voters aren’t liking it. The fact that a lot of people are getting health insurance might not be helping it because few expected ACA to NOT increase access to health insurance. I think that the real issue is that people who already had insurance are not better off, and the President promised they would be. That’s 80% of the public right there that have no particular personal incentive to like the law.
I think that’s right, but I also understand why they did it. It was the successful strategy in 2012. You keep on acting as if 2012 was a referendum on the Democrats’ policies, but they worked very hard to muddy the waters on what they believed and what they’d done in favor of a campaign to make the election about the top 1% as represented by Mitt Romney and the War on women as represented by Todd Akin. The reason that didn’t work in 2014 is because the Republicans learned from what went wrong in 2012. Arguably, if the Republicans had run better candidates in 2012 they would have taken the Senate and come a little closer in the Presidential race.
The midterms in 2010 and 2014 were not “disasters” either, by this measure. The Democrats lost one branch of the legislature in the first, and two in the second. In 2012 the Republicans lost the executive and one branch of the legislature.
His margin of victory in 2008 was unusually large. Few non-incumbents have won by such a massive margin. It’s not surprising at all that he went from an A+ victory to an A- victory.
Thank you, that’s exactly it. That’s why you can’t run away from a President of your own party when the other side is demonizing him.
Credit where credit is due: the GOP understands this. Did they run away from GWB, the Worst President Ever, in 2007-2008, after the shellacking of 2006? Hell, no! they rallied around him, and supported him pretty much across the board.
And a lot of states to boot. Plus in 2014 they got hamstrung in a big way if their goal was to recapture the Senate in 2016. It seemed likely when they only had to win 2 seats. Now they have to win 4. Not nearly as easy absent a wave year.
You must be going by the shortest time scale ever, because only GWB had such slight wins. Clinton and Reagan won massive reelection victories and Bush 41 did lose reelection but won by a bigger margin than Obama did in his first election. There was nothing unusual at all about his 2008 margin of victory. A good President would easily have outperformed 2008.
I think this is wrong. Demonization is tried on every President. Whether it works or not depends on whether there’s something to demonize. Clinton was demonized more than anyone and it sure didn’t hamper his success any. Reagan saw his fair share too.
I don’t think the GOP deserves credit for that at all. There’s nothing wrong with running away from the President of your own party. IF you have a record of disagreeing with him when it matters. John McCain and Lindsey Graham have earned a lot of hate on the right over the years for not toeing the party line. If they want to go home and say they don’t agree with a Republican President they can, and they can be credible doing it. Manchin stands alone in the Democratic Party these days as someone who can credibly run away from his President.
The problem with the Republican Party in 2006 is that not enough Republicans were listening to JOhn McCain and Lindsey Graham. They’d tied their fortunes to GWB instead. That was the mistake. It doesn’t pay to back a failure. But it is true that once you’ve backed that failure, you can’t run away from that backing. Those red state Democrats should have acted like red state Democrats from the start. If they had, they probably would have won reelection. But instead they played that “conservative back home, liberal in DC” game.
Again, can you give me a specific position that Warren takes that Clinton wouldn’t have - and that your average red state voter would have a problem with?
I do. Just like a lot of Dem candidates this year didn’t want Obama to come to their state and campaign with them, the same was true with Clinton in many states in the 1990s. It was embarrassing.
If he ran for and won the Democratic nomination for President, he would have the exact same problems as Obama and Clinton (and Gore, and Kerry). And it would be every bit as effective.
Whether he can hold onto a Senate seat in West Virginia is a different story. The GOP has less invested in tearing him down, where he’s just one guy out of 100. The GOP doesn’t care if other Dems are running away from him, because why would he be campaigning with them anyway?
In popular vote, Obama won with a larger majority than anyone since Bush I. I’ll concede that his large electoral victory was not quite as unusual, but he still won very big in 2008. This is just one of those weird stats due to the small number of examples – it doesn’t mean anything if a very large margin is followed by a smaller but still large victory. A black president had never won re-election; a President with a VP named “Biden” had never won re-election; a President born in Hawaii had never won re-election; etc.
A bad president might have easily done so as well. From what I can tell, the quality of president doesn’t seem to have much to do with whether or not they’re re-elected, and by how much.
For starters, gun control. Public funding for abortion. Doesn’t even think churches should be exempt from the birth control mandate. Opposed the Secure Communities program.
All of her positions are pretty hot button and place her well to the left of Barack Obama, who I’d argue is the most liberal President possible to elect. You may say he’s not all that liberal, to which I say, “tough cookies, he’s still the most liberal electable President”.
I’m sure there was some of that. A lot of Republicans also didn’t want Bush campaigning with them in 2006. But I’ve never seen the kind of consistent weaseling we saw in 2014 and I think by now everyone should realize that kind of thing doesn’t work. Usually. It did work in 2012 because the Republican candidates were often so unelectable that all the Democrat had to do was not be noticed too much. That probably led them to believe they could make that strategy work a second time. I’m sure in 2016 they’ll come up with a new one, because 2012’s playbook is played out.
Or not, as was the case with Clinton. One advantage Democrats have is that they can nominate a centrist and stand by him. I was always surprised at how well Democrats seemed to like Clinton. Republicans would never have stood for someone that far from the party’s center as their leader. Nominating Clinton would like Republican nominating Olympia Snowe.
I do think there’s some merit to the OP in terms of who they should nominate for President. If Obama is millstone around the next nominee’s neck, then the only way to fix that is to nominate a true outsider. Brian Schweitzer and Jim Webb fill that bill, as does Howard Dean. All three have been vocally critical of the President at times and have a reputation for independence.
Hillary Clinton on the other hand may be the biggest name, but she worked in his administration and is arguably too safe and conventional as a candidate to overcome even the smallest headwinds. And she’ll be facing some ferocious ones unless Obama can turn his administration around quickly.
Plus why do Democrats need a big name? It’s not like the Republicans will be nominating someone with massive name recognition such that the Democrat will start out behind, unless Jeb Bush is the nominee, and he comes with serious baggage of his own. The governor of Montana vs. the governor of Ohio is a pretty fair fight, especially if unlike Hillary Clinton, the governor of Montana doesn’t come with so much baggage or connections to the old regime.
I was there too, I assure you. I remember quite well the guy with the 60%+ approval ratings despite a massive campaign of demonization that dwarfs what’s been tried on Obama.
I think liberals feel Obama is more demonized because it’s working, but that’s Obama’s fault. he’s just an easier target. Republicans are just telling voters what they already feel about him.
First of all, that’s some wingnut site. Their cite for Warren’s alleged support for public funding for abortion goes to the Christian Coalition. (It’s a dead link that kicked me out to the CC’s front page, so there’s nothing there to support their claim.)
At any rate, people can run on the same things Warren runs on in Omaha, because you’re pulling up issues that are incidental to Elizabeth Warren’s appeal. She’s not about gun control or abortion. She’s about a better deal for working Americans, and keeping Wall Street and the big banks from ripping them off. Stuff like that is every bit as popular in Wichita as it is in Boston. Democrats can be loud and proud about things like that anywhere in the U.S.
I doubt it. That strikes me as exactly the campaign Walter Mondale tried to run. I do think there’s plenty of room for economic populism in our political culture, but what liberals often don’t understand is that the Lou Dobbs/Pat Buchanan version of economic populism has just as much appeal among the working class as the liberal version. The problem with Warren’s extreme liberalism on other issues is that it paints her as a liberal, which means “not one of us” to a lot of working class voters. Jim Webb on the other hand brings an economic populism that encompasses both the right and left wing versions. He’s a little bit Warren, a little bit Buchanan.
Which reminds me that it would be nice if Democrats didn’t respond to 60 years of failure to fix a particular issue by demanding more of the same action that failed to work before.
So how many equal pay bills have they passed now? I’m guessing they’ll be demanding another one soon, I mean it’s been a whole four years since they passed the last one! But the next one, that’ll be sure to close the gender pay gap!
Honest question for some of the staunch Obama defenders here:
If the Republicans win it all in 2016, will you finally admit that at least politically, his administration was a total failure? Sure, even I appreciate some of his accomplishments. But in the wider context, the voters seem to be moving against him in a big way. I can’t imagine how starting out with such Democratic dominance in 2008 and ending with complete Republican dominance in 2016 can be regarded as a hallmark of a successful President.
Democrats are pointing to turnout as evidence that 2014 isn’t really that significant, but other polls that actually encompass all Americans are showing troubling trends. A majority of Americans is glad the Republicans took the Senate, which means that those who stayed home didn’t vote simply due to lack of motivation. They actually didn’t like the Democrats. Which means they may not come out in 2016 either. In another poll, a large majority prefers Congress to set the agenda over the next two years rather than the President.
Republicans are being given an opportunity to reach a public that’s willing to give them a chance right now. If they don’t blow that chance, 2016 could go very well for them. and the only reason they got this chance is because the Democrats blew their historic chance.
“Technocratic”? Whence comes that? As far as I can tell, Warren’s main focus has been on restraining the financial industry and curbing its abuses. Not sure how that qualifies as “technocratic” or “nanny-ish”.
Technocratic as in everything should be subject to government regulation except the abortion industry.
Besides, there’s no way Republicans can lose from a Warren candidacy. Either they’ll beat her, which is good, or she’ll win and be even more incompetent than Obama. She has zero experience at managing anything and she’s even more driven by ideology. Obama at least has a pragmatic streak. Warren would just plow ahead with all kinds of bright liberal ideas that would fail because the government she’s supposed to be managing can’t do anything right. Two straight Democratic administrations where incompetence was a daily headline? The Republicans would have 350 House seats and 75 Senate seats by the time she was done. They wouldn’t even need the Presidency at that point.