POLITICS APRIL 13, 2012
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With the general election now underway, it’s tempting to assume that President Obama has a built-in advantage by having at his disposal a campaign operation that earned universal plaudits in 2008. But as Team Obama itself already knows—or, if not, will soon come to realize—the 2012 contest will be very different from the president’s triumphant march to the White House four years ago. The key question will be how the old campaign staff responds to the new electoral landscape. Here are seven realities that Team Obama will have to adjust to.
2012 will be a referendum, not a choice. One of the best established findings of contemporary political science is that in presidential contests involving an incumbent, the incumbent’s record is central to the public’s judgment. A race for an open Oval Office is about promises and personalities; a campaign for reelection is about the record and performance of the person currently occupying the White House. To be sure, Obama can offer his vision for the future and new proposals to flesh it out. But if the people don’t approve of his record, that won’t matter much.
No more promises of bipartisanship. Obama will have to abandon—or at least radically modify—the promise to heal a polarized political system that was at the heart of his rise to national prominence, starting with his dramatic address at the 2004 Democratic convention. And because his inability to foster this reconciliation has disappointed many people who voted for him in 2008, he’ll have to explain why he couldn’t do it in a way that redirects that disappointment toward the Republican Party and its nominee.
No more “Yes, we can.” The atmospherics of the current race will be completely different than they were four years ago. Because the national reaction to the administration’s agenda has been shaped by the partisan polarization in Congress (the pervasiveness of which appeared to surprise Obama when he took office), the hope for rapid transformation has yielded to the reality of incremental progress against tough odds and entrenched opposition. Thus, the exuberant poetry of 2008 will have to give way to sober prose.
No more youth movement. There is no way that the Obama campaign can expect to recreate the excitement that moved so many young and first-time voters not only to turn out to vote but also to work their hearts out for their hero. While it’s unlikely that Romney will get a larger share of the youth vote than McCain did, it’s equally unlikely that Obama will get as many votes from this pool as he did four years ago.
Blue-state big business has moved on. Team Obama will not be able to raise the kind of money from Wall Street and Silicon Valley that it did in 2008. For complex reasons, relations between the president and substantial portions of the private sector have soured. Although the President’s criticisms are mild by New Deal standards, members of the New York financial sector reportedly resent being called “fat cats,” and some are responding by closing their checkbooks. Worse yet, some may soon be opening them to Mitt Romney, who speaks their language and is willing to stroke their egos.
Selecting a campaign message will be a zero-sum choice. Unlike in 2008, Obama will have to make some hard choices about the thematics of his campaign. His current populist rhetoric, which got its start four months ago with a major speech in Kansas, is more likely to arouse the Democratic base than to rekindle the affections of skeptical suburban and independent voters. A return to the “winning the future” focus of the President’s 2011 State of the Union address would do just the reverse. After a 2008 election in which a single message could tap both the anger of the Democratic base and the Bush fatigue of the broader electorate, Obama now faces a balancing act that previous Democratic candidates had to face—and, if they hoped to win, had to master.
Obama is no longer the master of his fate. During the 2008 campaign, Obama could and did seize the initiative in the face of unexpected events. His agile response to the mid-September financial meltdown propelled him into a lead that he never surrendered. In 2012, by contrast, he will be at the mercy of events that he cannot control. The Supreme Court will decide the fate of the Affordable Care Act. A military confrontation between Israel and Iran would put the administration in the no-win situation it has struggled to avoid, with incalculable consequences for our national security as well as our politics. If job creation returns to the strong pace of the late winter and remains there through the fall, he will be reelected with room to spare. But if the middling March employment report is a harbinger of things to come, the electorate’s evaluation of his performance will be harsh, and the road to reelection very steep indeed.
William Galston is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a contributing editor for The New Republic.
13 comments
For the most part, I agree. But it seems to me that the limited available evidence suggests that Team Obama already understands most of what you've outlined here. And as for your dismissal of Obama's popular turn as being designed to energize the base and unlikely to sway undecideds, as Ruy Teixeira noted in his recent column, true undecideds are scarce and dialing up the intensity of support from those who already nominally support you is at least as important as pulling voters from the (I) to the (D) column. Liberal populism may answer one of your other negatives as well: the youth vote. Yes, if young voters turn out in 2012 the way they did in 2008 it will be for different reasons and with different emotions and, yes, it is by no means a given that they will turn out like they did four years ago, but nobody has gotten screwed by the Great Recession like young people, and yet these same young people are not especially likely to blame Obama for their economic hardship so it is possible that if Obama can leaven his populism with a little of his trademark hope--a Pew survey suggests that though young adults have been hit disproportionately hard by unemployment and underemployment they remain surprisingly optimistic--he might still be able to get twenty-somethings to the polls in high numbers.
- AaronW
April 13, 2012 at 12:25am
that should have read "populist turn"--damn autocorrect
- AaronW
April 13, 2012 at 12:26am
An article with observations both accurate and useful. Thankyou, Mr. Galston.
- Curran1
April 13, 2012 at 1:17am
Aaron's leavening corrections are also well-taken.
- Curran1
April 13, 2012 at 1:20am
It would be nice, and even realistic, if one or two positive things that are different for Obama than they were in 2008 were listed. How about an opponent who has to mumble, because he's always got his foot in his mouth? Or more women voting for Obama in 2012? Or that Obama kept us from a Great Depression that was almost brought about by the economic principles of his opponent? The article's title doesn't say that all 7 ways listed are negative. There are positives for Romney in November, but also for Obama. Be balanced.
- magboy47.
April 13, 2012 at 2:23am
"Yes we can" and "Do you really want change?" sounded pretty stupid in 2008. Barack Obama was never anything more than an empty-headed megaphone. What's absolutely stupefying is why anyone, after observing his pathetic performance as president during the past four years, would want to re-elect this man. I don't care at all for the Tea Party or the Ryan plan, but Mitt Romney strikes me as a sensible, intellligent man with significant real world experience in business and government. I will take my chances with Mitt in 2012.
- Spengler47
April 13, 2012 at 8:42am
um...how about mentioning the main reason this time will be different: that he is a war time President and Presidents enjoy enormous advantages in modern times. Things have to be really bad to be turned out, (with the exception of Ford who was never elected in the first place). When you look at the misery index Obama is in much better shape than was Carter and Papa Bush ran for re-election when the misery index was rising, not falling, and also after he alienated the base by raising taxes, Clinton also had a big assist from Buchanan and Perot. So it becomes a referendum only if things suck. The trick for Republicans is to try to convince Americans that things suck. And 4 years ago many people doubted whether a black man could be elected, that doubt is gone. Republicans know the demographics are against them, hence they have to do the most they can to disenfranchise minorities.
- blackton
April 13, 2012 at 9:28am
The first point, "a referendum, not a choice", is very much open to dispute, both intellectually and in the public arena. Presidents running for a second term are always evaluated on their performance, but also in comparison to their opponent, and the proportion of each depends on both their actions and those of the challenger. While Mr. Obama certainly can't run on the theme "Things are great, why change?", Mr. Galston seriously underestimates the effect of the ever-increasing extremism of the Republican party. This is starting to be noticed by the public, even by those who don't pay much attention to politics. Recent events have only made this worse - I mean, really, birth control? In 2012?? The more-conservative-than-thou feedback loop in which the right is caught will be a great asset for Mr. Obama. Mr. Romney has to convince swing voters he's neither an extremist culture warrior nor a plutocrat, after doing his best to impersonate one during the primaries, and providing an almost infinite supply of video clips for Democratic ads. Making the election a choice rather than a referendum is far easier when one's opponent is waving a axe, foaming at the mouth, and ranting about how Genghis Khan was too moderate, even if he's only pretending.
- K_Wilson
April 13, 2012 at 10:04am
'T would be nice if Bill Galston's next piece contrasted Barack Obama running for re-election in 2012 against Mitt Romney versus George W. Bush running for re-election in 2004 against John Kerry. I would assume that Galston will show how Bush had all sorts of inherent advantages against Kerry that Obama clearly lacks against Romney, but I am ready to be surprised.
- wildboy
April 13, 2012 at 11:54am
Mr. Spengler, I read your comment carefully. Barack Obama was never anything more than an empty-headed megaphone....I will take my chances with Mitt in 2012. I have little doubt that Mr. Romney is an intelligent person. The United States is full of intelligent people who are NOT by temperament, empathic capability, and focus appropriate to be leader of the US.
- skahn
April 13, 2012 at 5:54pm
Bipartisanship is an impossible dream today. Obama can only try to occupy a broad Center-Left, which shouldn't be too hard when the Republican Party has gone nuts. Obama can't stop a war between Iran and Israel. It's already happening. Iran's proxies surround Israel and are already firing rockets at Israeli towns. If Israel delivers a real punch to the current Iranian regime, that will not be WW3. Maybe that's what it takes to stop a bully. When Israel bombed the Syrian and Iraqi nuclear reactors, that didn't end the world.
- amidut
April 13, 2012 at 7:45pm
Amidut, you have a good point. Perhaps we can get North Korea to help out, perhaps using their skill in delivering rocket payloads to provide an extra boost to Israel's efforts against Iran.
- skahn
April 14, 2012 at 12:09am
Wildboy's got a point. In 2004 Bush was clearly and widely recognized to be responsible for some of the most egregious errors in modern American history--a complete muffing of the initial successes in Afghanistan and Iraq with grave results, fiscal irresponsibility on a scale that even by 2004 predicted the epic crash of 2008, and an almost single-handed squandering of the international good will accumulated under GHW Bush and Clinton. Still, he got my vote and that of several million more Americans than voted for him against Gore. Why? Speaking for myself, I figured that Bush had already made all the available errors, and was in a second term likely to demonstrate that he had learned at least something from having done so. Turned out, he fired Rumsfeld, changed strategy in Iraq, and made the initial decisions to address the economic catastrophe he had a role in creating. Kerry, on the other hand, was likely to have gone back to square one, made a lot of his own mistakes, and most importantly lost the war we were already deeply engaged in. I don't regret my vote. Ties go to the incumbent.
- Robert Powell
April 16, 2012 at 6:24am