In his first news conference since Donald Trump’s election victory, President Obama spoke about his own party’s loss.
“When your team loses, everyone gets deflated,” Obama said Monday. Democrats, he noted, must do some soul-searching in defeat, and added, “I think it’s a good thing for me not to be bigfooting that conversation.”
That sounds like he is humbly stepping aside after his eight years in the White House. But it is also an evasion of responsibility for the wreck he leaves behind. If Obama were a trucker, you might expect him to say something similar as he walked away from the flaming hulk of a semi he had just crashed.
Obama isn’t just leaving political life, he is also leaving the Democratic Party a smoldering ruin. He took office on a wave that turned America blue. Since then, Democrats have have lost (pending some outcomes) 63 seats in the House and 12 in the Senate. They have gone from controlling 62 of the nation’s 99 state legislative chambers to just 30. They have also lost a net 12 or 13 governorships, depending on how North Carolina is eventually tallied.
The last four elections point toward a massive miscalculation by Obama. He confused his own electoral strength as a candidate with popular support for his ideas. In the end, his transformative policies proved so unpopular that far too many other Democrats could not survive them.
From the beginning, Obama decided that he couldn’t be bothered to cultivate a working relationship with the opposition. “I won,” he famously said. And he was, himself, able to survive the total war he sparked over Obamacare, the stimulus package and other like legislation. He could also weather the blowback from his executive orders and regulations essentially declining to enforce immigration laws. He got away with making war on coal country, and intensifying the culture wars by obliging elderly Catholic nuns to pay for contraceptives and abortifacients, and issuing a diktat confusing the distinction between girls’ and boys’ bathrooms in schools.
But while Obama’s personal popularity has remained strong, his fellow Democrats have been cut down in huge swaths whenever their leader was not on the ballot. Obama led House Democrats like sheep to the slaughter in 2010 and 2014. In the Senate, Democrats who voted for Obamacare were wiped out as well.
The stunning 2016 result puts an exclamation point on all this. Hillary Clinton was crushed even though her experience, demographic trends and expectations were on her side. Not only that, but she faced an opponent apt to overload Democratic opposition researchers with juicy material. Yet she was routed in six states that Obama had carried twice.
This all happened despite exit polls showing that the same electorate that chose Trump still had a favorable opinion of Obama himself.
There are perhaps two main lessons to draw from this. First, it is possible that the chaos surrounding Trump’s campaign, and his struggles with party leaders, hid the fact that the GOP has grown much stronger as an electoral force since Obama’s return to power four years ago.
Second, it demonstrates that Obama’s personal strength fooled not only him but the entire pundit class into thinking that a crippled Democratic Party, just as unappealing as it had been in 2004, was thriving under his stewardship.
Obama has the luxury of walking away from this wreck, but other Democrats are going to have to pick up the pieces.
