President Obama admitted today that his electoral successes didn’t lead to durable political strength. David M. Drucker reports in the Washington Examiner:
President Obama on Friday conceded that he failed as leader of the Democratic Party to transfer his success down ticket.
Obama was the first Democrat to win more than 50 percent of the vote in consecutive presidential elections since President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. But other than the coattails that lifted down-ballot Democrats in his first campaign, in 2008, the president’s party generally suffered under his leadership, and sits at a historic low point as readies to exit the White House.
“It’s been something that I’ve been able to do, successfully, in my own campaigns,” Obama said during his final year-end news conference. “It is not something I’ve been able to transfer to candidates in midterms and sort of build a sustaining organization around. That’s something that I would have liked to have done more of, but it’s kind of hard to do when you’re dealing a whole bunch of issues here in the White House.”
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