Politically speaking, things have stopped getting worse and might be marginally better for the Democrats. Voters are starting to see what's in it for them in the health-care reform bill, and the Republicans lost their unified front against wildly popular Wall Street reform, teeing up another big win for President Obama and the Democrats.
Now all Obama has to do is convince the voters that this is, in fact, the change they clamored for when they went to the polls in November 2008, and if they don't want to regress, they can show their support by voting Democratic in the upcoming midterm elections. Fifteen million first-time voters gave Obama his margin of victory in '08, and a lot of them won't show up in November. They still support him, but they're disappointed that change didn't unfold as they envisioned, and off-year elections lack the energy and enthusiasm of a historic candidate in a presidential year.
Motivating these new voters is the only way Obama and the Democrats can stave off disaster in November. They are predominantly young, and they're minorities, African-American and Hispanic. When DNC chairman Tim Kaine announced that the party was revving up presidential-level money, $50 million, to get these voters to turn out and for "voter protection" to ensure they could exercise their right to vote unimpeded, Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele accused him of playing the race card—which would be a new reading of politics—and of suggesting that the GOP engages in voter suppression.
Devoting this much money to the midterms is unprecedented, but then so are the times we live in, with one party making a political decision, even before Obama was inaugurated, to block his agenda and to break him. Over lunch with reporters Wednesday, Kaine recited a litany of GOP opposition, arguing that 90 percent of Republicans voted against equal pay for women with the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act and health care for children with the State Children's Health Insurance Program, and that 75 percent of Republican senators voted against confirming Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court. When a reporter asked how blaming Republicans squares with Obama's message of bringing people together, Kaine squirmed a bit; said, "Good question"; and then went on to repeat the party's message that Obama is delivering the change he promised, and that results matter.
Boosting the average off-year turnout by just 10 percent would mitigate damage to the Democrats and Obama's agenda. The average loss for the party in power going into a new president's first midterm election is 28 House seats and four Senate seats. But with ongoing high unemployment and a widespread backlash against government spending, these are not average times, and a pickup of 40 House seats would give the GOP control of the chamber. The Senate majority is more secure, but Republicans are crowing about their prospects to pick up "trophy seats" formerly held by Obama in Illinois, Joe Biden in Delaware, and of course the beleaguered current Senate leader, Harry Reid, in Nevada.
Republican Scott Brown's winning Ted Kennedy's Massachusetts seat warned Democrats of trouble ahead, so the GOP won't be able to pull off the kind of sneak attack that worked in 1994, when even a week before the election, most Democrats were unsuspecting about the massacre that lay ahead. Kaine called Brown's election "the ghost of Christmas future" and credited it with giving Democrats a 10-month advance on what November would look like if they didn't get their act together. The first thing Democrats did was to end their intraparty squabbling and get health care done. And now, after an extended period of being sequestered in the White House, Obama is traveling the country to tout Democratic successes.
Whether Obama can transfer his popularity to the Democratic Congress is questionable. Ronald Reagan couldn't do it in 1986 and lost the Senate after traveling the country on behalf of Republican candidates. Obama has spent much of his presidency inside the Beltway, overseeing legislative dealmaking, with time out for foreign travel. William Galston with the Brookings Institution says that he suspects Obama has spent more time traveling outside the country than traveling domestically outside the Beltway: "The point I'm making is he has just begun to show up in the country," and hence his impact on individual races and on the psychology of the midterms cannot yet be measured.
Democrats have gotten a gift with the financial-reform debate and the furor over immigration, which isolate the GOP on the side of Wall Street and against the fastest-growing group of minority voters, Hispanics. But Obama still has an uphill climb. He's polling below 50 percent for the fifth straight month, according to Pew, and the public is evenly split on which party does a better job in dealing with financial institutions. Even so, Kaine seemed unusually chipper, feigning surprise that the other side would question Democratic outreach to minorities. "It's not a race war or a race card," he said. "Why would the other guys be against getting more people to vote? Who could be against that?"
Uncommon Knowledge
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
