Some Democrats are kinda hoping to dump the President in 2012 – from the Washington Post:
…This is a critical moment for the country. From the faltering economy to the burdensome deficit to our foreign policy struggles, America is suffering a widespread sense of crisis and anxiety about the future. Under these circumstances, Obama has the opportunity to seize the high ground and the imagination of the nation once again, and to galvanize the public for the hard decisions that must be made. The only way he can do so, though, is by putting national interests ahead of personal or political ones.
To that end, we believe Obama should announce immediately that he will not be a candidate for reelection in 2012…
Which is a grand way of saying, “if the people know you won’t be around after 2012, we Democrats can salvage our party”.
The authors – Douglas Schoen and Pat Caddell – are smart guys and solid Democrats (Caddell was Carter’s pollster in 1980) and they can see utter disaster heading their way. Unless there is a massive turn around in the economy, Democrats face a brutal future in 2012. As the economy is expected, in the rosiest scenarios, to be only modestly better by 2012, Democrats face the prospects of losing the Senate, losing even more House seats, getting further clobbered at the State level and, as the final insult, losing the White House to anyone the GOP cares to nominate. If Obama is out, however, then the Democrats have a good shot at limiting their Congressional losses (though they’d probably still lose the Senate) and retaining the White House. Or, so goes the thinking here.
I’m not so sure that its going to matter – the people are on fire for a complete reform of government, and unless Democrats figure out that they’ve got to toss aside New Deal/Great Society paradigms, there isn’t much of a chance people will swing to them. There can be a liberal TEA Party, as it were, but it will have to be a party committed to personal freedom, balanced budgets and American exceptionalism. I doubt the current crop of Democrats – from Obama on down – can make the leap. It might be that the only way the Democrats can be rescued is to be so thoroughly trounced that new people and new ideas can rise.
We’ll see how this pans out, but it is clear that there are deep fissures in the Democrat party, and it will only take a bit more for the party to split before 2012.
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