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Obama
- learn from Clinton
Can Democrats avoid another 1994?
or House Republicans, it looks like
1994 all over again. A president is beleaguered, the economy is
lifeless.
A speaker-in-waiting has taken center stage. He has unveiled a
statement of principles. A big win, giving the
GOP control of the House, seems inevitable.
1994 looms large for the president, too. The economy has improved under
his watch, but not enough,
and certainly not in time, to sway an anxious electorate. He has
scored major legislative victories, but early
enough in his term that voters have forgotten about them. The
Republicans have succeeded in convincing
large numbers of Americans that he is somehow strange, "not one of us."
A big loss, giving the GOP
control of the House, seems inevitable.
But if the Republicans want to make this year 1994 redux, Barack Obama
needs to make it 1995, when a
rebuked Democratic president rebounded by depicting himself as
protector-in-chief -- protector of average
Americans against the depredations of a band of radicals out to make
middle-class lives less secure and less safe.
What Obama’s got going for him, just like what Bill Clinton had going
for him, is an opposition whose loudest
voices are not only extreme but extremely quotable, and a majority of
the electorate that does not trust extremists...
But Obama has shown he will not use their words against
them.
He's had two years of the craziest quotes in American political history
and he's still down 30 points.
What Obama needs is CHANGE but he, of all people, seems reluctant to
change..
Americans respect a winner in the
White House -- they didn’t agree with Reagan policies, but they did
love
the guy. Obama scored a big win on healthcare; instead of failing to
mention it, he and the rest of his party
should trumpet the achievement -- and explain that those who favor the
bill’s repeal are the real radicals.
But nooooooo. Democrats are
running AGAINST Obama and his health care plan.
Where are those millions of people who BEGGED for health care reform?
Well, no sense in finishing that sentence.
The people who CLAIMED they wanted affordable health care
are as quiet as little church mice as the rethugs promise to repeal it.
Americans like a leader who is
strong, even if he sometimes muscles his way to the wrong conclusion.
When Obama does his on-the-one-hand-on-the-other-hand routine about
"The mosque at ground zero,"
his strength oozes away. The 30 percent of Republicans who think he’s a
Muslim will remain apoplectic
if he is forthright in defense of the structure, but there are
independents and moderates who still think the
Constitution is about more than the right to own guns, and go without
health insurance.
What the idiot, ignorant voters
need is EDUCATION.
Anyone in the Democratic party know how to list the facts?