The White House is in denial over the fact that President Obama will, most likely, cost Democrats the U.S. Senate. In order to combat the inevitable fallout, they’re “preemptively spinning a midterm defeat” by blaming “candidates for not supporting President Obama enough.” The National Journal,
As a top White House official told The Washington Post‘s Karen Tumulty, “He doesn’t think they have any reason to run away from him. He thinks there is a strong message there.”
This is pure delusion: Obama is the main reason Republicans are well-positioned to win control of the upper chamber next Tuesday. And Democrats’ biggest strategic mistake in this election is that most candidates didn’t run away far and fast enough. Given the president’s rock-bottom approval numbers in the many Republican-friendly Senate states that Democrats needed to win—as well as the reality of a worsening political environment for the party as early as last winter—that distance was a downright necessity. But a host of Senate candidates failed to create it, and the party is likely to pay the price in Senate seats…
This year’s midterms are shaping up to be a referendum on President Obama’s management, giving anxious voters an opportunity to express their frustration about everything from the president’s handling of health care, growing terrorism threats, an Ebola scare, and a broken immigration system, among others. It’s far from an election about nothing. Democrats should have recognized that the president was falling out of favor with the public and inoculated themselves a long time ago. Instead, many bought the White House’s spin, and are at risk of going down with a sinking ship.
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