The College Fix

When President Obama spoke before more than 37,000 supporters Friday at USC, he was clearly running scared.

In the year of his own election, he did everything he could to raise expectations — to convince voters that he really did have a chance of defeating Hillary Clinton and John McCain. But his playbook has changed. Ten days out from a midterm election in which Democrats are sure to take a beating, Obama is subtly trying to lower expectations.

It seems like the President is borrowing from Hillary’s old playbook. Senator Clinton’s campaign acted like Iowa should be taken as the decisive primary until Obama’s poll numbers began surging there in late 2007. Suddenly, Iowa was “just another primary” and Clinton was warning supporters to brace for a long, tough fight.

The change in Obama’s tune isn’t as abrupt or brazen as Clinton’s, but is still telling about how his White House gauges the mood of the country. “I don’t want to fool anybody … This is going to be a difficult election,” he said. Why? In a word: Bush.

“For most of the last decade, the middle class has been hurting,” Obama said. Republicans, he warned, simply hope to channel frustration over George W. Bush’s lingering mess into 2010 gains. It’s a narrative that’s been taking shape all year. As Obama pointedly reminded listeners yesterday, this is “the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression … We haven’t seen anything like this since the 1930s.” It’s only natural that people are frustrated and angry. Obama says this makes them vulnerable to exploitation by a GOP whose “whole campaign strategy is amnesia.”

The Administration recognizes that its party can’t avoid a loss on November 2, so has switched to damage control. Here, Obama is borrowing from the other Clinton — Bill. The 44th President sees how the 42nd managed to outmaneuver Newt Gingrich after a disastrous 1994 midterm to come back and win in ’96.

By distancing himself from responsibility for the setbacks in 2010, Obama hopes to have a hedged position for 2012. If a Republican Congress thwarts his policy ambitions, he will have a clear scapegoat for his own failures. It Obama pushes his agenda through successfully, he’ll look all the better for having done so in a bipartisan manner.

In the meanwhile, Obama is chalking up inevitable Republican gains to extremism and demagoguery. The President is keenly aware of the ground his party has lost among the independents and moderates who propelled him into office two years ago. Anything he can do to make Republicans look scary is progress toward winning back the middle.

A particularly choice jab yesterday was that even Lincoln himself “couldn’t get a nomination in today’s Republican party.” It couldn’t be that tall, gangling self-made Illinois lawyers with limited political experience and once-in-a-generation oratorical gifts are unelectable, could it? No, Obama clearly meant that Lincoln wasn’t enough of an extremist for the modern GOP.

As a historical assessment, it’s simply flawed, but as a political move, it’s revealing. President Obama has clearly come to accept what Senate Majority Leader Reid did months ago: 2010 is a lost cause. Instead, he has turned to the very Clintonian business of explaining this year’s losses away and plotting a comeback in 2012. If he can convince voters that the midterm results stem from nothing more than misdirected anger toward his predecessor, and that these losses are responsible for anything that goes wrong for him over the next two years, Obama will have a very good chance of pulling off a repeat of 1996. If he can convince voters of all that, Republicans might just have to nominate Lincoln to take back the White House.

John-Clark Levin is editor emeritus of the Claremont Independent and a junior at Claremont McKenna. He is a contributor to the Student Free Press Association.

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