Whatever else there is a shortage of there’s certainly no shortage of advice on what President Obama should do next. This morning there’s contradictory advice from two top Democratic operatives. Marshal Foch Bob Shrum advises President Obama to get on the attack:
First, Obama and Democrats have to redraw the battle lines for the midterms. Don’t cast the campaign merely—and too cautiously—as a choice between the Bush collapse and an Obama turnaround that a majority of Americans don’t yet believe in. They are already rid of Bush; their anger at the status quo drives them toward the GOP—a reversal of the dynamic that swept in Democrats in 2006 and propelled the improbable Obama in 2008.
What’s called for is a starker choice rooted in progressive conviction. September is the time and tax cuts are the cause—if the President and his party are bold enough to break with the conventional wisdom that this issue invariably favors Republicans, and wage the battle not in the arcane interstices of the legislative process, but in the glare of the national spotlight.
while Doug Schoen recommends that he dash for the center:
I first met with Mr. Clinton privately in early 1995, after the Republicans gained control of Congress for the first time since 1954. I warned him that he could not be re-elected in 1996 unless he turned around his administration’s reputation: from one of big-spending liberalism (represented by his attempt to massively overhaul the health-care system) to one of fiscal discipline and economic growth.
Mr. Clinton did just that, and now Mr. Obama must do the same—and quickly. Yet the White House seems to believe its approach should be to blame George W. Bush for everything. Polls suggest that this approach is likely to have only the most limited success.
I have little doubt that Mr. Schoen will be castigated as a DINO for his advice but it probably needs to be remembered that Bill Clinton won re-election in 1996; Bob Shrum has been a top advisor for nearly every failing Democratic presidential run in recent memory.
The problem this time around is that there’s very little center to run to. I think that fiscal discipline and economic growth are always good advice. The paths that actually produce those things are far from clear.
Mr. Shrum’s advice is presumably intended to buck up the base but it will do so at the expense of, well, everybody else and the reality with which progressives much come to terms is that while President Obama may not be able to win without them he can’t win with their support alone.
