Democrats Run Away from Obama

At the beginning of an intense political battle for control of the Senate majority in the United States, a handful of Democratic candidates, who are struggling to be re-elected to their seats, avoid President Barack Obama like the plague these days.

The bad shadow of the president, whose popularity is under water at barely 41 percent, has become a toxic element for his own Democratic group, who consider him a heavy burden today in the difficult mission to retain control of the Senate.

The president’s problems, particularly the stumbles in the implementation of the health care law, have become a trench for Republicans, who will seek to thwart, at any cost, the Democratic Party’s desperate attempts not to lose seats in Alaska, Arkansas, Louisiana, North Carolina, Virginia and South Dakota, where Republican candidates appear to be potential winners.

Obama himself has recognized the problem the president represents in the re-election campaigns of some of his fellow party members: He has promised not to make appearances in their re-election campaigns.

“The president told us that he would understand if some [candidates for re-election] in the Senate do not ask him to appear at their campaign events,”* stated a veteran Democratic Party staffer in reference to the meeting held last week between President Obama and members of the Senate.

As a general rule, it is rare for a president not to have made mistakes or not to suffer the natural wear-and-tear of the sixth year in power. The cases of Dwight Eisenhower in 1958, Lyndon B. Johnson in 1966, Richard Nixon in 1976 or George W. Bush in 2006 confirm this unwritten rule that has become a powerful variable in midterm elections during a second term.

Among the few exceptions to this rule is the case of Bill Clinton, who not only did not lose control of the Senate in 1998, but instead, was able to win some seats in the House of Representatives.

However, contrary to Clinton, during his years in the White House, Obama has fought an underground war of racial hatred that has prevented the advance of his agenda for change against the Republican Party. After having been elevated as a sort of Democratic electoral messiah, Obama has turned into a fallen angel, whom many Democratic candidates whose future is at stake avoid.

The pessimism that surrounds Democrats these days contrasts with the optimism in Republican circles, which have begun to foresee the victory that would allow them to tie the president’s hands during the last two years of his term, forcing him to defend himself with a series of presidential vetoes to try to avoid the dismantling of his change agenda.

“We still have problems to resolve, but I believe we are better positioned to retake the Senate than we were a year ago,”* said the Republican senator from Kansas, Jerry Moran, in reference to the profound internal divisions between the moderate faction and tea party extremists, who have staked it all to dismantle Obama’s change agenda.

Despite these divisions, there is conviction among Republican Party leaders that the president’s low approval ratings and the multimillionaire resources they can count on — thanks to brothers David and Charles Koch, petrochemical industry magnates and Obama enemies — will allow them to win control of Congress, while Democrats flee as far as possible from the president to avoid being dragged into an eventual torrent of defeats.

*Editor’s note: These quotes, though correctly translated, could not be verified.