President Obama must trumpet the improving economy as he overhauls his message for the 2016 elections, a sales pitch that has eluded him throughout his six years in office, argue Democratic Party strategists and insiders.
That would represent a dramatically different strategy for Obama than what he employed in the lead-up to the November midterms, which ended in embarrassment for the White House.
“Under Obama, America is better,” said Simon Rosenberg, a presidential campaign adviser for Bill Clinton and founder of the New Democratic Network, a Washington think tank. “Democrats need to make the contrast between performance of the U.S. economy under the last two Democratic and GOP presidents a central theme of 2016 election.”
Obama has made a more concerted effort lately to promote his handling of the economy.
“So far this year, over the first 11 months of 2014, our economy has created 2.65 million jobs,” Obama said Friday, trumpeting the strong November jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics before he announced his nomination for secretary of defense. “That’s more than in any entire year since the 1990s. Our businesses have now created 10.9 million jobs over the past 57 months in a row. And that’s the longest streak of private-sector job growth on record.”
The president’s attempts to stay out of races involving vulnerable Democrats proved ineffective this year, and party insiders and strategists say it’s futile for him to try to do so again since any Democratic hopeful for the White House will largely have to run on his policies.
That reality is even harder to ignore if Obama’s former secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, the likely Democratic presidential frontrunner, enters the race.
But for a president with approval ratings hovering around only 40 percent, it is certainly difficult to envision how the White House can redefine Obama’s accomplishments in a more palatable way for Democratic candidates.
And economic confidence has lagged, even as the data has shown recent improvements in the job market.
“The president can point to all the numbers he wants, but it won’t matter if the average American isn’t feeling what he’s talking about,” a veteran Democratic pollster told the Washington Examiner. “I would argue that is his central challenge over the next two years. At the most basic level, that’s what 2016 is about.”
Republicans did not hesitate to tie Hillary Clinton to Obama on the economy, even with the release of a positive jobs report.
November’s “jobs report shouldn’t be an aberration; it should be the norm,” said Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus. “Sadly, it’s not. The Obama-Clinton Democrats have prioritized other things like Obamacare regulations, energy regulations and small business regulations. Translation: they pushed job-killing policies when we needed job-creating policies.”
However, a more favorable electoral map than November’s bolsters Democrats’ 2016 hopes.
Republicans have to defend 24 Senate seats in 2016, seven of which are in states Obama carried in 2012. It’s almost a total reverse from this year, when Democrats had to fight on political terrain decidedly favoring the GOP, such as the Deep South.
Perhaps that’s why Obama has been aggressive in the wake of the humbling midterm defeats, pushing through unilateral policies on immigration and climate change likely to play well with the Democratic base.
“Playing it safe didn’t work,” the Democratic pollster said. “The president is going in a completely different direction now. And the rest of the party has to adapt to that.”
