The Amateur

by Edward Klein

  When the economy did not respond to Obama’s neo-Keynesian stimulus, and the “recovery summer” of 2010 failed to make an appearance, a desperate president looked around for someone to blame. He focused first on Republicans, whom he referred to as “obstructionists” and “enemies.” David Plouffe, who served as Obama’s 2008 campaign manager before he became his in-house political strategist, claimed that the president was fighting for the middle class, while the Republicans were bent on preserving tax breaks for millionaires, hedge fund operators, and corporations.

  “The American people will have a choice [in 2012] about the direction they want to take the economy,” Plouffe said. “Do they want, basically, a Gordon Gekko economy? Or do they want a president who says, ‘Every decision I make is focused on the middle class?’”

  When such populist poppycock didn’t work, Obama looked elsewhere to cast blame. The economy wasn’t responding because of the Japanese tsunami ... or the Greek budget crisis ... or the oil shock caused by the Arab spring... or anything but his administration’s own misguided policies.

  Obama’s own views about what he has—and has not—learned during his four years in the White House say a lot about why he has been such a failure as president.

  “The area in my presidency where I think my management and understanding of the presidency evolved most,” Obama has said, “and where I think we made the most mistakes, was less on the policy front and more on the communications front.”

  The communications front!

  How could that be?

  Didn’t liberals hail Obama as the greatest communicator since Ronald Reagan?

  And didn’t Obama have an exalted opinion of his own oratorical skills? For instance, when Robert Marion Berry, a former Democratic congressman from Arkansas, warned Obama in 2010 that his leftwing policies could cause the Democrats to lose seats in the midterm election, just as such policies had under Clinton in 1994, the cocksure Obama replied, “Well, the big difference here and in ’94 was you’ve got me.”

  Was it possible, then, that Obama was now falling back on the lame excuse: “What we have here is a failure to communicate”?

  That was exactly what he was doing—and so were his cheerleaders on the Left. Take Frank Rich, the former columnist of the New York Times: “While perhaps no politician can ever duplicate Reagan’s brand of sunny and homespun (if Hollywood-honed) geniality,” Rich wrote, “Obama has his own radiance when he wants to turn it on.... But Obama is less adept at keeping his messages simple, consistent, and crystal-clear.... The pitch-perfect showmanship, timing and salesmanship ... were in Reagan’s résumé and bones. Obama doesn’t have that training, but he was a great communicator when it came to selling his own story in the campaign, heaven knows. He has rarely rekindled that touch in the White House.”

  It was true that Obama, who had campaigned so effectively against Hillary Clinton and John McCain in 2008, had fumbled badly once he was in the White House. But the reason he lost his personal connection with the American people had little to do with his communication skills. It was not how he communicated, but what he communicated that lost him the affection of the country. The American people didn’t care a fig about the style of Obama’s message; they didn’t like the substance of his message. He was just too liberal for America.

  I once asked Ronald Reagan, after he had left the White House, whether he resented the people who charged that much of his public success was due to his skills as “the Great Communicator” rather than to the appeal of his political programs.

  “I think there were other reasons for my effectiveness,” Reagan told me. “I believe very deeply in the things I advocated in office. When I came into the White House, the previous administration was telling the people about how they were suffering from a malaise. I had the feeling that the American people were hungering for spiritual revival.”

  What’s more, unlike Obama, Reagan enjoyed being president—and his joy was contagious. In fact, Reagan told me that he would have considered running for reelection in 1988, when he was nearly seventy-eight years old, if it hadn’t been for the Twenty-second Amendment to the Constitution, limiting presidents to two terms in office.

  “It was my own party, the Republican Party, that passed that amendment out of revenge for Roosevelt’s four terms,” he said. “But what that amendment is is an infringement on the democratic right of the people. The people have a right to vote for whomever they want and for as many times as they want.”

  The people also have a right to vote against a president who has failed them. The question is: Will they vote against Barack Obama in 2012?

  CHAPTER 22

  THE LOW ROAD

  I’m troubled by rhetoric that pits people against each other.... We have never been a nation of haves and have-nots. We are a nation of haves and soon-to-haves, of people who have made it and people who will make it. And that’s who we need to remain.

  —United States Senator Marco Rubio

  To hear the candidates who run for president tell it, you’d think every election was an historic watershed. “This is the most important election in which you will ever have a chance to cast your vote,” they tell us every four years. “This election will decide the course of politics for decades.”

  But most presidential elections are not watershed events. In point of fact, there have been only six such political realignments in American history, marking the end of one period and the beginning of another:• The election of 1800, in which Vice President Thomas Jefferson defeated President John Adams, who represented northern Federalist interests, and ushered in a generation of southern, agrarian-dominated Democratic-Republican Party rule

  • The election of 1828, in which Andrew Jackson, the first president not born of privilege, defeated John Quincy Adams and solidified Democratic Party control

  • The election of 1860, which brought Abraham Lincoln and the Republicans to the White House and unleashed the forces of the Civil War

  • The election of 1896, in which Republican William McKinley defeated the populist Democrat William Jennings Bryan and set the United States on a course to become a world industrial power

  • The election of 1932, in which Franklin Delano Roosevelt created the coalition that made the Democratic Party the dominant political force for almost fifty years

  • The election of 1980, in which Ronald Reagan attracted working-class Democrats to his cause and launched a generation of conservatism

  Will the election of 2012 usher in America’s seventh political realignment?

  A convincing argument can be made that it will. For the election will not only be a referendum on Barack Obama, the most liberal president this country has ever had, but it will also be a plebiscite on the future direction of America. If Obama is defeated, everything the Left stands for—universal healthcare, mandatory union membership, wealth distribution, a bigger and bigger federal government—will be defeated along with him. But if Obama wins, the Left will be entrenched for years to come, and the United States will continue its headlong rush toward a bloated, deficit-ridden entitlement state similar to those in Europe.

  The election will present voters with a stark choice between a leftwing president who believes in engineering “the equality of outcome” and a conservative candidate who believes in the “equality of opportunity.” A vote for Obama will be a vote in favor of an ever-larger role for the federal government to ensure so-called “fairness” in the system. A vote for the Republican candidate will be a vote for less government and greater individual freedom. Every indicator suggests that America is balanced between these two philosophies, and that the country could go either way.

  “There is a genuinely interesting and important debate of ideas to be had over the size, reach, and role of the federal government in our lives,” writes Peter Wehner. “Honorable people have very different views on this matter; some, like Obama, are drawn to a European-like model of social democracy, one that wants to centralize more and more po
wer with the federal government as a means to eliminate income inequality and ensure greater fairness. Others believe the federal government has dramatically exceeded its constitutional authority, that it is leading us down a path to fiscal ruin, and in the process it is undermining civic character.”

  Obama does not want to engage in such a debate because he knows he will lose it. Over the past four years, the American people have become more conservative. According to a Gallup poll:Democrats have lost their solid political party affiliation advantage in 18 states since 2008, while Republicans have gained a solid advantage in 6 states.... The findings make it clear that U.S. states have undergone a dramatic political transformation since 2008, the year President Obama was elected, moving from a Democratically dominant political environment to one of parity.... Clearly, President Obama faces a much less favorable environment as he seeks a second term in office than he did when he was elected president.

  And there is more bad news for Obama from the Gallup organization. According to a February 24, 2012, poll, a majority of Americans, 51 percent, say that Obama’s political views are too liberal. “Americans’ perception of Obama’s ideology,” says Gallup, “has changed significantly since he was elected. Four years ago, when Gallup first asked this question about Obama while he was competing for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination, a plurality, 47 percent, thought his views were about right. At that time, 37 percent said his views were too liberal, compared with today’s 51 percent.”

  Faced with these poll numbers, David Axelrod, Obama’s political Merlin, has waved his magic wand again and conjured up a new persona for his candidate in 2012. Gone—poof!—is the American Messiah of 2008, who promised “hope and change.” Gone—poof!—is the self-righteous figure who once proclaimed, “If you don’t have any fresh ideas, then you use stale tactics to scare voters. If you don’t have a record to run on, then you paint your opponent as someone people should run from.” Gone—poof!—is Mr. Nice Guy.

  Axelrod has ripped a page out of Harry Truman’s 1948 playbook and fashioned a campaign for Obama in which he demonizes his opponents and runs against a “Do-Nothing” Republican Congress and its wealthy supporters. You can hear an echo of “Give ’em Hell Harry” when Obama declares: “This Congress—they are accustomed to doing nothing, and they’re comfortable with doing nothing, and they keep on doing nothing.” Or when he says, “My attitude is, get it done... [but] if they don’t get it done, then we’ll be running against a Congress that’s not doing anything for the American people, and the choice will be very stark and will be very clear.”

  Axelrod’s strategy is virtually a copy of a sixty-five-year-old memorandum written by Harry Truman’s political guru, Clark Clifford, and titled “The Politics of 1948.” The gist of Clifford’s memo was the need to divert attention from Truman’s domestic and foreign problems and make the contest a conflict between Congress and the president. In such a battle, Clifford argued, “[t]he presidency is vastly more flexible than Congress.... There is little possibility that [the president] will get much cooperation from the Congress, but we want the president to be in a position to receive the credit for whatever they do accomplish while also being in a position to criticize the Congress for being obstructionists.”

  “It is obvious that Team Obama is deliberately following the Clark Clifford strategy,” E. Michael Young wrote in American Thinker. “Like Truman, Obama called a special session of Congress to propose his American Jobs Act, knowing in advance that the Republican-controlled House would reject it. Like Truman, Obama used an executive order to effect social change in the military (by allowing gays to openly serve) to prop up his liberal base. And like Truman, Obama is giving speeches all around the country, saying the obstructionist ‘do-nothing’ Republicans in Congress are blocking his jobs bill, hurting the economy, and currying favor with the wealthy elites.”

  Axelrod’s update of the Clifford strategy is aimed at solidifying the Democratic Party base, reclaiming the middle, and dividing the country through class warfare against “millionaires,” “fat cats” and “the owners of yachts and corporate jets.” There are, however, several problems with this approach. To begin with, despite the conventional wisdom, Truman’s campaign against the Republicans in Congress was not the main factor in his come-from-behind victory against Republican Thomas Dewey in 1948. The economy had a lot more to do with it. The unemployment rate in 1947 and 1948 was a more than acceptable 3.5 percent, and the American economy was growing at a sizzling 6.8 percent in the first half of 1948. Compare that with Obama’s situation today, when unemployment is above 8 percent, and the economy is growing at an anemic 2 to 3 percent.

  Second, in 1948, the Democratic Party was still the dominant force in American politics. Franklin Roosevelt was dead only three years, and many Americans still had fond memories of him and his New Deal. The Republicans, by contrast, were burdened by the albatross of “Hooverism”—a reputation for being indifferent to the plight of the poor and the struggling middle class. About 40 percent of the country identified with the Democrats back then. Today, only 33 percent identify as Democrats—and that number is declining all the time.

  Third, “If Obama were a Republican, he could win with this sort of strategy: Repeat your party’s most orthodox positions, and then rip your opponent to shreds,” writes columnist David Brooks. “Republicans can win a contest between an orthodox Republican and an orthodox Democrat because they have the [mistrust] in government issue on their side. Democrats do not have that luxury. The party of [big] government cannot win an orthodox vs. orthodox campaign when [only] 15 percent of Americans trust government.... It’s suicide.”

  Fourth, a strategy of class warfare threatens to damage the coalition that Obama put together in 2008. “The president won the lion’s share of everyone making under $35,000,” notes Mark Penn, a Democratic pollster.

  He then did very poorly with middle class voters, but he got a remarkable half of the 26 percent of voters whose households make over $100,000. Never before have so many voters fallen into that category and never before had so many of them voted Democratic. Even [a majority of] the so-called top 1 percent making over $200,000 ... voted for Obama. Without similar support from those upper-income voters, Obama has no way to recreate the numbers that sailed him to victory.... What was so brilliant about the Obama 2008 election was that it brought together the upper and lower classes in a common mission of hope and change. Today, he is smashing apart that coalition....

  When voters are asked in 2012, “Are you better off today than you were four years ago?” they can give only one possible answer: “No!” Therefore, the only way Obama can win a second term in the White House is by diverting attention from his incompetence and sliming his Republican opponent.

  “Over $15 trillion in debt,” writes Joe Hagan in New York Magazine, “[more than 8] percent unemployment, yawning structural problems, a severely gridlocked government—Obama is in a box, and there is only one way out of this box: the low road.”

  Obama knows this, and he is gearing up for a campaign that will in no way resemble his inspirational “hope and change” campaign in 2008. This time around, his goal is to raise an overwhelming $1 billion campaign chest, unleash super-PACs backed by the unlimited financial resources of such leftwing billionaires as George Soros, and get down in the mud and wage the ugliest campaign in modern American history.

  “It’s a deeply pessimistic time,” says Steve Schmidt, who served as senior strategist to the presidential campaign of Senator John McCain in 2008. “Neither party is talking honestly or directly about the country’s problems and challenges. It’s going to be an extremely mean-spirited campaign, filled with nonstop attack ads. The whole focus will be on disqualifying the alternative, not on the country’s future. It will be very much the opposite of the hope-and-change theme of four years ago.”

  Obama’s strategy will be to convince voters that he isn’t the issue—that his Republican opponent is the issue—and that, as Fr
ance’s Louis XV famously said, “After me, the flood.” The idea will be to frighten voters away from the “scary” Republican alternative.

  “This is a choice about who we are and what we stand for,” Obama declared, “and whoever wins this next election is going to set the template for this country for a long time to come.... The alternative I think is an approach to government that would fundamentally cripple America in meeting the challenges of the 21st Century.”

  Cripple America. Strong words that suggest a Republican president would devastate, ruin, and destroy the United States. One can just imagine David Axelrod sitting in his war room in Chicago and screening the infamous 1964 anti-Barry Goldwater TV commercial, which was created for President Lyndon Johnson by Tony Schwartz of Doyle Dane Bernbach, and which showed a little girl picking petals from a daisy while an ominous-sounding male voice counted down to the launch of a nuclear missile. As the camera slowly zoomed in, her eye was filled with an atomic mushroom cloud. The implication was that Goldwater would start a nuclear war and cripple America, destroy it. A voiceover from Johnson stated, “These are the stakes! To make a world in which all of God’s children can live, or to go into the dark. We must love each other, or we must die.” Then another voiceover, this one from sportscaster Chris Schenkel, said, “Vote for President Johnson on November 3. The stakes are too high for you to stay home.”

  It’s a pretty safe bet that David Axelrod will try to devise an updated version of the “Daisy Girl” commercial in 2012, and that Barack Obama’s mantra will be: The stakes are too high for you to vote for that frightening Republican.