Obama, the Democrats’ Liability

What is the worst thing a Democratic candidate in the upcoming Nov. 4 elections for U.S. Congress can say? That he or she voted for Obama. Alison Lundergan Grimes, who until recently had been in close competition with Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, declined to say for whom she had voted in 2012. Two days later, her fellow party member Michelle Nunn did the same.

Grimes and Nunn are surprisingly competitive candidates in two conservative Republican states — Kentucky and Georgia, respectively — but their behavior reflects the fact that Barack Obama has become a type of “electoral Ebola” for the Democrats, who know they will not be able to win control of the House of Representatives and would settle for maintaining their majority in the Senate.

The president’s popularity has dropped to 41.5 percent on average in the third trimester according to data from the consulting company Gallup. Only George W. Bush was less popular at this point in office, and only by a small margin, since his endorsement came in at 39.1 percent. You could say that the current president has managed to defeat himself.

He has defeated himself in such a way that the Democrats do not want such an individual nearby. The best evidence is that, until Monday, Obama did not take part in any event supporting any candidate. Instead of that approach, he has limited his support to using his tremendous ability to raise money to finance his party members’ campaigns, but without appearing in the photo. This strategy contrasts markedly with that of his Democratic predecessor Bill Clinton and of his 2008 rival — and possible 2016 candidate and successor — Hillary Clinton. Both have offered support to their colleagues in states like Arkansas and Iowa.

And there is another underlying problem: since Obama was elected president in 2008, the Democratic Party’s results in the elections for governor, senator and congressman have oscillated between mediocre and terrible. And that has started a civil war between the Democrats of Congress and the White House. Add to that the fact that neither forging coalitions nor getting along in the short term are among the president’s virtues and you get an excellent cocktail for the Democrats’ favorite sport: fratricidal war.

Nerves are so tense that the first recriminations for the failed elections have begun even before the elections. On Sunday, The New York Times, the newspaper with the closest ties to the White House, cited anonymous sources from Obama’s surrounding circle who lamented that the congressional candidates had ignored the black electorate in the elections. However, it was Obama, under the direction of Congress, who decided to postpone until after the elections the immigration reform that he had introduced with great hype at the beginning of the summer. Thus, it was both — the president and Congress — who chose to fight the Republicans in more favorable territory for the latter: the whites.