Democrats are doing a little crowing this morning after their defeat of a referendum that would have made it harder for public worker unions to bankrupt the state of Ohio. Other Dem victories in Kentucky and various other spots around the nation have got to encourage the party of Obama as we head into a presidential election year. This is good for Democratic morale, but despite the happy talk that will be coming from the White House and the Democratic National Committee, they know they’re still in trouble for 2012. With a failing economy and the administration’s record of mismanagement, they realize they’re in for a rough time. But the main question today is whether Republicans understand the same thing.
For months, most Republicans and conservative pundits have been talking and writing as if the next presidential election was a foregone conclusion. Obama’s record of failure is such that many in the GOP have acted as if didn’t matter who their candidate was next year or what the party did or said in Congress or elsewhere. If you think every road leads to victory, it can make you overconfident. Yesterday should be a reminder to conservatives the tide of political fortune can change every day, and while Obama is eminently beatable, his defeat is by no means a certainty.
The Ohio referendum will be noted as an example of a Republican overreach. That’s more than a bit unfair because addressing the looming crisis of state debt caused by out of control state worker contracts was both courageous and necessary. But the verdict of 2010 — when Tea Party activism fueled by widespread disgust with Obamacare and the stimulus created a GOP midterm landslide — was just one moment in time. Democratic policies may have helped deepen the economic downturn, but their skillful use of class warfare is a more potent weapon in times of financial distress.
The dynamic of our political culture is such that the American people are always predisposed to administering a check to either party if it is perceived to have gone too far in pursuit of an ideological agenda. That helps explain the 2010 shellacking administered to Obama. So it’s no surprise that this year’s special congressional and midterm elections were a mixed bag of results for both parties as each in turn have felt the voters’ displeasure.
The liberal case for more government and spending is a poor one, and the dismal economic statistics that show the country heading into a double dip recession are proof of the poor job Obama has done. Being the incumbent gives Obama a record to defend, and that is a huge problem for the Democrats. Conservatives have come to believe it means he cannot be re-elected, but that isn’t true. The power of incumbency is real. The president gets to set the national agenda and control events in a way no challenger can. Obama also has certain advantages that can’t be erased even by his mistakes. He will always be the first African-American president and receive more sympathetic and at times adulatory coverage from a liberal media than any conservative will ever get. He has raised a huge campaign war chest and will recklessly spend it attacking his foes.
The coming presidential election is a tremendous opportunity for Republicans. Obama’s missteps have, in effect, made it the GOP’s race to lose. But no matter how bad the economy gets or how foolish Obama’s policies are proven to be, if all Republicans do in the next year is attack each other for deviations from conservative orthodoxy on various issues or play to the base, Obama may be re-elected.
