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Buzz Cut:
• The most revealing quote about Obama’s political instincts
• Reid relapses with Koch amendment
• Roberts packs punch in first debate
• Rubio teams with Romney foreign policy alums
• That’s a lot of breadsticks
THE MOST REVEALING QUOTE ABOUT OBAMA’S POLITICAL INSTINCTS
President Obama said this weekend that fears of damaging his party’s chances of holding the Senate were not behind his decision to abandon plans to use executive action to grant temporary amnesty to large numbers of illegal immigrants. Instead, the president told NBC News’ re-launched Sunday chat show, that he waited for a different political reason. Obama said he pulled back because voters changed their mind on the subject of immigration itself after seeing the chaos at the southern border amid the surge of Central American minors seeking sanctuary in the U.S. “The truth of the matter is, that the politics did shift midsummer because of that problem,” Obama said, going on to blame Republicans for “exploit[ing] the humanitarian situation.” (Not that Democrats would ever do such a thing…) What the president said, in essence, was that he is not doing what he knows to be right because people are paying too much attention. Instead, Obama said he will wait until voters have calmed down lest his action be rolled back amid a public outcry. Or an even shorter version: “Of course it’s not about politics for Senate Democrats, it’s about politics for me.”
That explains it – Obama’s answer doesn’t seem to be an evasion, since the evasive answer would have been to say that the measures weren’t ready or weren’t satisfactory or anything else he could think of. But instead, Obama was delineating between playing politics to push the issue itself as opposed to the somehow less noble pursuit of preserving his Senate majority, as if the two weren’t connected. Of course the amnesty action would have hurt Democrats, but so did threatening it for months on end. Eliminating the threat temporarily will make things less bad, perhaps, but it will also hurt Democratic turnout in key precincts. What a mess. Obama going from a mass-amnesty, impeachment-bait measure to no measure at all is far worse than if he had done nothing at all. How did he manage to screw up the one thing he was doing (other than a bajillion fundraisers) to try to help Democrats?
Obama, party of one – First, he waited and waffled. The politics of the issue have been clear for more than a month. Rather than ratcheting up speculation, Team Obama could have quietly started stepping on the executive action story line instead of pumping it up. Second, Obama did not understand his foes. He expected Republicans to freak out and start drafting articles of impeachment, but instead the GOP has done what the president has failed to do: keep its political focus on the task at hand. Third, and most importantly, Obama overestimated his commitment to his allies. The president may have once imagined himself willing to risk his legacy and one of his most prized issues with an audacious move, but flinched as he got closer. The verdict of this cycle is the same as most of Obama’s presidency: He is a party of one. Obama needed listeners to know that he was politically savvy, but also wanted them to know he wouldn’t waste his acumen on something so crass as saving his fellow Democrats.
SUPER MODELS FOR GOP SENATE TAKEOVER
The prognosticators reset their dials after another round of public polling on key Senate races, showing a timely shift in favor of Republicans.
