Several weeks before the 1994 midterms, President Clinton took to the campaign trail to sound a rallying cry that he hoped would rescue the alarming number of Democratic candidates who were sinking in the polls. Clinton warned that the election of Republican candidates would return the country to the bad old days, the 1980s, when, he argued, the rich got richer and everybody else got the shaft.
About a month before Election Day, Clinton trekked to a Ford plant in Michigan and lit into the excesses of the ’80s. Before a crowd of card-carrying union members, he portrayed the Reagan-Bush economy as “stuck in reverse” — an economy all about “tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans, higher taxes on the middle class, a quadrupled deficit, [and] jobs going overseas. [The] most manufacturing jobs that were ever lost in this country were lost in that period.”
Shortly afterward, in a nationally televised news conference, Clinton said that pulling the Republican lever “would take us back to the trickle-down economics of the ’80s.”
Despite his considerable skills as a campaigner, the president failed to stem the Republican tide. Democrats lost control of both chambers of Congress for the first time in 40 years. The overwhelming setback must be pinned largely on Clinton, according to a National Journal analysis at the time. It pointed to “a massive anti-Clinton coalition” reflected in his lousy job-approval numbers in exit polls — 44 percent versus 51 percent disapproval. (See NJ, 11/12/94, p. 2630.)
President Obama confronts a similarly harsh political landscape as he contemplates how best to help Democrats on the ballot. A CNN/Opinion Research survey released in May found anti-incumbent feelings comparable to those in 1994, with challengers holding a whopping 17-percentage-point advantage — 2 points greater than the early-1994 number.
Disaffection centers on persistently high unemployment that hovers around 10 percent, as well as widespread anger at bailouts for giant Wall Street firms whose recklessness drove the country into the ditch. Despite spending a year pushing a historic health care reform measure, the president has failed to sell the legislation; a CBS News poll in May found that 47 percent disapprove of the law while 43 percent favor it. At the same time, worries mount over the country’s deficits.
The CBS News poll also found that seven in 10 respondents are dissatisfied with Washington, including 22 percent who are “angry.” Obama’s job-approval rating stood at 47 percent; 43 percent gave him an unfavorable grade.
So what can Obama do in this poisonous environment less than six months before Election Day? Clearly, he recognizes the importance of keeping Congress in Democratic hands. After a slow start, he has found that success builds on success — enacting three landmark pieces of legislation with virtually no Republican support. He is on the brink of winning passage of a major financial overhaul measure to rein in Wall Street excesses after having signed a $787 billion economic stimulus package and the most sweeping health care reform legislation since Lyndon Johnson was president. In addition, his first Supreme Court nominee, Sonia Sotomayor, easily won confirmation last year, and opposition to his second nominee for the Court, Elena Kagan, is weak.
At a recent fundraiser in California for Sen. Barbara Boxer, who faces a tough re-election fight, Obama tipped his cap to his allies in Congress as indispensable in advancing his priorities. After ticking off his legislative accomplishments, the president said, “I couldn’t have done that by myself,” and argued for keeping Democrats such as Boxer in control of Congress.
Party strategists, commentators, and academics agree that the stakes in November are sky-high for the president. Although Democrats enjoy comfortable margins in both chambers — 59-41 in the Senate and 255-177 in the House — political prognosticators foresee large gains by the Republicans in keeping with the historical pattern of midterm election losses for the party that controls the White House.
“The importance [of these contests] is indisputable,” said Patrick Griffin, who served as Clinton’s top lobbyist during the disastrous 1994 election cycle. Obama “will want to preserve as many seats as possible. I don’t see how it is not a resounding defeat to the president if you lose both houses of Congress.”
And what about losing one chamber? “It’s all a defeat,” Griffin responded. “What he is doing now is managing expectations.”
Steven Smith, a political science professor at Washington University in St. Louis, added, “Most estimates now put the House in serious danger of switching party control, which would do serious, serious harm to the administration’s legislative agenda and the kind of record the president would then have to run on by 2012. It really is a difficult situation for [Democrats]. The question is, what can the president do to help?
“We know historically that the president’s standing in the polls is one of the two or three most important determinants of the outcome of the midterm elections,” Smith said. “The most important thing he could do is improve his approval rating 5-to-10 points. That could make a difference of 10-to-15 seats.”
Interviews with Democratic and Republican lawmakers as well as election strategists outlined several other areas where Obama could help his allies on Election Day; he also must avoid missteps. A review of some of these do’s and don’ts follows.
The Narrative: Blaming Bush Is Not Enough
In recent months, Obama has been developing a stump speech that makes the case for keeping Democrats in control of Congress. The message follows an outline that longtime Democratic strategist Robert Shrum argues is the best pitch to make in difficult economic times. The veteran speechwriter notes that blaming economic woes on President George W. Bush, who remains unpopular, is fine as a first step, but the president then needs to pivot to the positive.
“A narrative is a story, not just an assertion or an argument,” Shrum said in an interview. “The narrative begins with, ‘We had a problem, or things were bad, or things were terrible, and here is what we did. Now things are getting better, but we are not there yet.’ You can’t be triumphal, and you can’t just blame the past.”
Obama’s typical speech at fundraisers and rallies for core supporters never fails to talk about the economic mess that he inherited. “These problems that we confronted didn’t come out of nowhere. They didn’t just happen,” Obama told Democratic donors on May 25 at the fundraiser for Boxer. “They were a consequence of policies that had been in place for years.” Obama blamed “the other party” for them. “We had to act quickly. We had to act fast,” the president said. Otherwise, he contended, the economic doldrums would have worsened. He stressed a similar theme to a second group of donors for Boxer, saying that the economy was “on the brink” of collapse when he entered office. “I had, wrapped like a gift, a welcoming gift for me, a $1.3 trillion deficit,” he said.
After painting that dire picture, Obama ticked off the steps that Democrats took to avert the collapse: passing the economic stimulus, extending unemployment coverage, and enacting health care reform. “Let’s face it, this has been the toughest year and a half since any year and a half since the 1930s,” he said. “It wasn’t enough to go back to the status quo.”
Republicans see an opening in Obama’s pitch. It’s all about finger-pointing and evading responsibility, they say, and voters will see through it. “At some point, these guys need to take responsibility for something,” said Rob Jesmer, executive director of the National Republican Senatorial Committee. “Let’s not forget, in 2006 they took control of both chambers of Congress — they had control of one lever of government. So, by election time, we will be 20 months in or 22 months in [during which Democrats have run Congress], and are they still going to be blaming Bush?
“So,” Jesmer continued, “everything that went bad is President Bush’s fault, but everything that is going well [Democrats] will take responsibility for. You have to believe the American people are stupid to fall for that.”
“It’s pretty clear that Democrats will try to make the elections this fall a referendum on George Bush, and if they do, it will be a pretty significant tactical mistake,” said Phil Musser, a GOP political consultant and former executive director of the Republican Governors Association. “If the election is a referendum on the first year and a half of the Obama administration, Republicans stand to do pretty well because the reality is that he has taken the country significantly to the left of where he promised them he would, and that has left broad swaths of the populace uneasy — and, in a lot of cases, downright angry.”
On The Stump: Pick Your Fights Carefully
Obama has had a string of disappointments on the campaign trail. He backed Sen. Arlen Specter, D-Pa., but the veteran lawmaker, who dumped his Republican Party allegiance in 2009, lost to Rep. Joe Sestak in a recent primary. Obama stumped early this year in Massachusetts for Martha Coakley, the Democrat running to fill the late Sen. Edward Kennedy’s seat, but she lost in a major upset to Republican Scott Brown. Last year, Obama made pitches in New Jersey for Democratic Gov. Jon Corzine and in Virginia for Democratic gubernatorial candidate Creigh Deeds. Both lost.
The lesson? “You pick your fights,” said David Rudd, a veteran Democratic strategist and former executive director of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. “There are districts where he will be a huge plus and districts where he won’t be. So far, he had to play where the game was. Things were thrust upon him — open seats and things like that.”
On that point, Obama’s appearance for Democrats in certain areas of the country might backfire, GOP strategist Musser said. “If you are a Democratic incumbent in a swing district, the last thing you need to be doing is to show up with clasped hands with Barack Obama, so that Republicans can ding you with the face-morph ad at the 11th hour.”
Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill., the majority whip, said in an interview that the onus is on the candidates to make their own cases. “The president will have a role to play, but I think it is naive for us to believe that he can ride to the rescue of candidates,” he said. “We need to get our campaigns together, work with the White House; and if he continues to do a good job as president, it will help us in November.”
In the last days of the Pennsylvania contest, with polls showing momentum toward Sestak, the White House ignored pleas for a last-minute appearance to help the embattled Sen. Specter. Instead, on Election Day, Obama went just across the Pennsylvania border to Ohio, where he made a pitch for his economic program.
That decision to stump for his own policies less than 50 miles from Pittsburgh rankles some Democrats, on and off Capitol Hill. “The notion that they were too busy with the press of national business is ludicrous,” said a Democratic operative, clearly disappointed that the White House would not spend political capital beyond joining Specter at a September campaign event and appearing in a TV spot for him.
But the episode underscores White House nervousness about sending the president out in the ninth inning for candidates who seem to be on the way to defeat — particularly after Obama made fruitless trips to Massachusetts and New Jersey on the weekend before primary balloting.
Behind The Scenes: Fundraiser-In-Chief
It’s a pretty safe bet — though the White House won’t say so — that Obama, who has already held numerous fundraisers, will step up the pace, especially given the news that Republican campaign committees out-raised their Democratic counterparts in April.
The Sunlight Foundation, a nonprofit, nonpartisan group that endeavors to make government transparent, counts 27 fundraising appearances by Obama. As the most popular figure in the party, Obama will be under pressure to allot even more time to raising money. “Money will matter in a lot of campaigns — there will be a lot of close outcomes,” Washington University’s Smith noted.
Although the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has more than double the cash-on-hand for House races than its GOP counterpart has ($27.3 million versus $11.4 million), it lagged behind GOP efforts in the last reporting period in April by $2.1 million. Most alarming for Democrats, the Senate committees have almost identical treasuries of about $17 million. And in April the NRSC brought in $1.3 million more than the DSCC did.
Scott Reed, who managed Bob Dole’s 1996 presidential campaign, sees momentum building for Republican fundraising — spurred on by donors who are alarmed by left-tilting policies.
Reed recalled his experience in 1994 as executive director of the Republican National Committee, when the money started pouring in from donors who wanted to punish Clinton. “Every right-of-center group’s fundraising [today] is going through the roof. It was May of ’94 when we first started to feel there was a wave out there. It started with low-dollar [contributions]. We’d get boxes of mail, stacks of boxes.”
Reed sees similarities today. “These [April] fundraising figures are very promising,” he said.
Still, Republican operatives are bracing for plenty of presidential fundraisers in the coming months. “You can’t deny the strategic asset that the president is as fundraiser-in-chief,” Musser noted.
But the more money Obama raises, the more the Republicans will paint him as hypocritical. “The last thing that I have seen is that for his first year in office, Obama hosted more fundraisers than George W. Bush,” Paul Blumenthal, Sunlight Foundation senior writer, said. “It goes against the criticisms that Bush faced for doing the same thing that Obama is doing now.”
“The president said a hundred times [that] we ought to get money out of politics,” added Don Stewart, communications director for Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky. “The point is, if it is dirty and corrupting, then it is dirty and corrupting. You can’t say that only Republican fundraising is corrupt.”
Other GOP operatives simply acknowledge the reality that controlling the White House gives the Democrats a financial edge. “The power of incumbency gives you the power of fundraising,” said Sam Geduldig, a Republican strategist and former aide to House Minority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio. “In 2006, my hunch is that we outspent Democrats in competitive races by 4-to-1 or 5-to-1… but it didn’t matter. At the end of the day, money is important until it is not.
“So they are going to have an advantage,” Geduldig conceded. “He will be out there raising money for their candidates, and that is what he should do.”
