Epitaph for Barack Obama's Democrats: 'Is that the best you can do?'

By Toby Harnden

Bob Schieffer and Mark Halperin are not exactly Tea Party activists. Within their respective generations, they are archetypes of the media elite, inside-the-Beltway, liberal-leaning purveyors of the conventional wisdom. They don’t want to be wrong, of course, so at times they are also weather vanes – when the conventional wisdom has undeniably changed, they swivel.

So the White House and the hapless Democrats running for re-election on November 2nd must be in near despair over David Axelrod’s interview with Shieffer yesterday. In it, the host of CBS’s Face the Nation was incredulous at Axelrod’s focus not on the economy or jobs or health care or the Islamist threat or the wars America is engaged in but, er, the possibility that the US Chamber may be funding ads with foreign money. A charge, of course, which would be called racist if Republicans had levelled it against Obama.

Did you get that last comment from Schieffer? “I guess I would put it this way. If the only charge Democrats can make three weeks into the election is that somehow this may or may not be foreign money coming into the campaign, is that the best you can do?” Ouch.

Obama himself has been ditching the hope ‘n’ change riffs to make the charge, drawing on a report posted on the liberal blog Think Progress, even though it has been thoroughly debunked by the New York Times, again not normally seen as a tool of the vast Right-wing conspiracy.

Then today we have Time’s Halperin piling on with a piece carrying the web-bait headline “Obama Is in the Jaws of Political Death” (since, apparently, changed to the much tamer “Why Obama is Losing the Political War” – no doubt there were some anguished calls from the White House). With a metaphorical knee to Obama’s groin, he writes:

With the exception of core Obama Administration loyalists, most politically engaged elites have reached the same conclusions: the White House is in over its head, isolated, insular, arrogant and clueless about how to get along with or persuade members of Congress, the media, the business community or working-class voters.

Double ouch. Accusing Obama of losing bitter clingers, blue collars voters, moderates, independents, Reagan Democrats etc etc is one thing. But “politically engaged elites”? Halperin certainly knows how to hurt a Harvard Law grad.

Axelrod is not backing down. When the post-mortems are done on the mid-term campaigns, the fact that Obama himself and the rest of the Democratic party saw fit to try to frame the election by hitting out at George W. Bush, Karl Rove and the US Chamber of Commerce will certainly be prominent.

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/tobyharnden/100058504/epitaph-for-barack-obamas-democrats-is-that-the-best-you-can-do/