There’s a large swath of rural America, extending from somewhere in Oklahoma up into West Virginia, where Barack Obama never had a chance, and it really showed last night.
A majority of Kentucky’s 120 counties voted against Obama in the state’s Democratic presidential primary, opting instead for “uncommitted.” Big margins in Louisville and Lexington saved the president from the supreme embarrassment of actually losing the state, not that his overall 57.9 to 42.1 percent victory is anything to write home about.
In Arkansas, the other state to hold its primary yesterday, the results were only slightly less humbling to Obama, who defeated an actual human-being candidate — a Tennessee lawyer named John Wolfe — by a 58.4 to 41.6 percent spread, with more than a third of the state’s 75 counties siding with the challenger. Wolfe, if anyone asked him, was running against Obama from the left, on a progressive economic message. But to the average Arkansas voter, his name might just as well have been “not Obama”; he had no money, no campaign organization, and no name recognition, and he received scant media coverage.
Whether this qualifies as Obama’s most humbling primary night of 2012 is open to debate. Just two weeks ago, a federal inmate who somehow maneuvered his way onto the West Virginia ballot racked up nearly 41 percent against the president in that state’s primary and carried 10 counties. Back in March, Obama was held to 57 percent in Oklahoma, losing 15 counties to anti-abortion zealot Randall Terry and another gadfly candidate. Terry actually qualified for delegates in that contest, prompting national Democrats to invoke their “LaRouche rule” and deem him unqualified to actually receive delegates.
There were also problems for the president in pockets of Louisiana, where Wolfe cleared the 15 percent delegate eligibility threshold in several congressional districts. Democrats are refusing to actually allocate any delegates to him, though, on the grounds that he failed to file a comprehensive delegate selection plan – a rationale that is also being invoked in Arkansas. Wolfe is vowing to overturn the rulings in court.
In terms of deciding the Democratic nomination, obviously, none of this really matters. Obama has won most states by the massive margins that incumbent presidents typically rack up against fringe challengers and “uncommitted,” and he long ago surpassed the magic number of delegates needed for re-nomination. In most of America, this year’s Democratic primaries have been just as uneventful and unremarkable as they were in 1996, the last time a Democratic incumbent sought reelection.
But then there’s that sea of resistance in Appalachia and states like Arkansas and Oklahoma. A case can be made that Obama’s energy policies contributed to his West Virginia headache, but otherwise there’s no sense trying to pin this on anything he’s actually done as president because the resistance was just as apparent when he ran four years ago.
Back then, Obama was crushed by Hillary Clinton in West Virginia by 41 points – even though it was clear by primary day that he was on his way to being the nominee. In Kentucky, Clinton’s margin was 35 points. In Arkansas (where she served as first lady for more than a decade), it was 44. And in Oklahoma, it was 25. The same largely poor, rural and white areas that gave Clinton her best numbers in 2008 are now doing the same for John Wolfe, “uncommitted” and Randall Terry. The problem was just as apparent for Obama in the fall of 2008, when he improved on John Kerry’s 2004 performance in just about every corner of the country except the Oklahoma-to-West-Virginia swath.
Chalking this up only to race may be an oversimplification, although there was exit poll data in 2008 that indicated it was an explicit factor for a sizable chunk of voters. Perhaps Obama’s race is one of several markers (along with his name, his background, the never-ending Muslim rumors, and his status as the “liberal” candidate in 2008) that low-income white rural voters use to associate him with a national Democratic Party that they believe has been overrun by affluent liberals, feminists, minorities, secularists and gays – people and groups whose interests are being serviced at the expense of their own.
The good news for Obama is that this probably doesn’t say much about what will happen in November. The damage is limited to states he was already expecting to lose to Mitt Romney. Not that this will stop Republicans from playing up Kentucky and Arkansas as the latest proof of Obama’s shattered popularity. But that’s just spin. He could have a 60 percent approval rating, and he’d still be getting embarrassed in these states.
One of the themes I’ve been emphasizing is the role of context in the presidential race. President Obama’s reelection prospects depend on swing voters considering not just the current state of the economy, but also the factors that led us here and the economic vision that Mitt Romney would bring to the presidency. Romney’s hopes, on the other hand, depend on those same voters either ignoring or rationalizing away the context that Obama tries to introduce and simply voting him out because of their profound economic anxiety.
This often results in maddeningly deceptive messaging from Romney and his allies, something that the newest ad from the Karl Rove-affiliated Crossroads GPS illustrates perfectly:
There’s nothing very complicated going on here, just an attempt to connect an everywoman’s despair about what a weak economy has done to her family with a bunch of scary-seeming statistics about spending and debt under Obama.
The CliffsNotes version of what’s wrong with this: 1) There’s been no spending explosion under Obama; 2) the increase in debt under Obama can be traced to the economic crash (which dramatically reduced federal revenue), the wars, the Bush tax cuts (which, yes, Obama agreed to extend – at the insistence of Republicans), the 2003 Medicare prescription drug law, and only to a very minor extent the 2009 stimulus; and 3) the economy would actually be in better shape now if Obama had spent more.
That’s the context that the Obama campaign needs the public to understand, and you can see why it’s such a struggle. Voters have a demonstrated tendency to express concerns about deficits only when the economy is bad. This is why, for instance, the Democrats during the 1981/82 recession reaped a political windfall while railing against Ronald Reagan’s massive deficits, but gained zero traction on the issue when the economy improved in 1984 – even though deficits were even higher (and still soaring) then.
The lesson is that most voters don’t actually care about the deficit itself, or really understand what it is. But it’s a scary-sounding word that conjures thoughts of government bloat and reckless spending, which makes it an irresistible weapon for a recession-era opposition party.
The logic behind the Obama campaign’s emphasis on Mitt Romney’s private equity background makes plenty of sense. Romney is pitching himself as a job-creator extraordinaire, and there’s probably a tendency among voters to associate business success with economic competence. So surely there’s something to be gained in reminding Americans – over and over – that what Romney was actually doing at Bain Capital was making wealthy investors even richer, not building the economy and helping the middle class.
But, as Jamelle Bouie argued yesterday, even if this strategy does lead voters to dislike Romney and conclude that he’s a heartless capitalist, that hardly guarantees that they’ll follow through and vote against him because of it. There may be some evidence of this in a new ABC News/Washington Post poll, which finds Romney and Obama running dead even (47 percent each) on the question of who would do a better job handling the economy. But on the question of which candidate better understands people’s economic problems, Obama enjoys a healthy 8-point edge.
This is only one bit of data in one poll, and there are several possible explanations for it. But it seems plausible that Romney’s lower score on understanding people’s struggles at least partly reflects his well-established image as an out-of-touch, top-1 percent guy. And yet, because their overall economic anxiety is so high (83 percent say the economy is in “not so good” or “poor” shape), a potentially critical number of voters who don’t think he understands their problems still see him as the better choice to manage the economy.
Similarly, a new PPP poll conducted for the SEIU finds that 57 percent of voters believe that Romney was mainly interested in making profits at Bain, while just 12 percent say he was motivated to create jobs. This is exactly the kind of split that Democrats are aiming for with their attacks, which only bolsters the question Bouie raised about whether it ultimately will turn voters away from Romney.
It’s only May, of course, and it may be that weeks and months of repetition in speeches, ads and debates ends up having a decisive effect on swing voters. So there’s no reason for Democrats to stop invoking Bain; it very well might end up working. But it would also be reasonable to develop some other counter-punches for the Romney message, which boils down to: If you don’t like where the economy is, don’t ask questions – just vote the guy in charge out.
In the new ABC/WaPo poll, one possibility jumps right out: George W. Bush. By a margin of 49 to 34 percent, voters still see him as more responsible for the current state of the economy than Obama. That 15-point spread is actually down, though, from back in January, when 54 percent of voters blamed Bush and only 29 blames Obama.
Maybe there’s nothing the Obama campaign can do about this evolution, and the longer he’s president – and the closer the November election gets – the more voters will ignore the former president and focus on the current one. But it may also be that the Obama campaign has been a little too quiet in reminding voters exactly what kind of economic catastrophe Obama inherited, whom he inherited it from, and how closely Romney’s economic program resembles what was in place just before the meltdown that started this all.
Cory Booker did an awful lot of talking last night, but he didn’t really say anything.
After refusing requests all day, the Newark mayor agreed late in the day to a live interview on Rachel Maddow’s MSNBC show. By this point, Republicans had launched an online petition urging their supporters to “stand with Cory” against the Obama campaign’s “attacks on the free market.”
“It wasn’t until the GOP went across that line that I said, ‘Forget it. I’ve heard all I can stand and I can’t stand no more,’” Booker told Maddow when the interview started.
If you only watched Booker’s 12-minute performance last night, you’d probably be tempted to believe his claim of near-total innocence and even victimhood in an episode that overtook the presidential campaign Monday. This only makes sense; Booker can talk with the best of them. But in all of his earnest pleadings and verbose answers, he never actually confronted what landed him in hot water in the first place.
On Sunday’s “Meet the Press,” Booker seemed to call the Obama campaign’s attacks on Mitt Romney’s private equity record “nauseating” and to liken them to efforts by some on the right to make Jeremiah Wright an issue in the race. On Maddow’s show, he played off the “nauseating” line as a reference to super PAC-era negative campaigning in general and copped only to some sloppy phrasing.
“Obviously, I did things in the ‘Meet the Press’ interview, as I told you, that did not land the points that I was trying to make,” Booker said. “And in some ways, frustratingly, I think I conflated the attacks that the Republicans were making with Jeremiah Wright with some of the attacks on the left. And those can’t even be equated.”
And as he did in a hastily produced video on Sunday night, Booker insisted that Romney’s Bain Capital past is fair game, and that he’s happy to “echo” Obama’s efforts to highlight it. Other than that, though, Booker mainly talked around the private equity issue. He invoked marriage equality several times, the war on women, universal healthcare and college tuition affordability, and bragged that “I’ve been standing with Barack Obama since before most people were standing with Barack Obama.” He also excoriated Republicans for not focusing on issues affecting cities like his and moralized at length about the corrosiveness of attack ads.
This was damage control at its slipperiest. The reality is that Booker did more than just clumsily register his objections to the negative tone of politics on “Meet the Press.” He specifically stood up for Romney’s private equity firm and its record:
“I have to just say from a very personal level, I’m not about to sit here and indict private equity. To me, it’s just we’re getting to a ridiculous point in America. Especially that I know I live in a state where pension funds, unions and other people invest in companies like Bain Capital. If you look at the totality of Bain Capital’s record, they’ve done a lot to support businesses, to grow businesses.”
He had no interest in grappling with this in his Maddow interview, though, so he filibustered.
What’s happening here really isn’t that complicated. Booker, like many Democrats (especially in the New York/New Jersey area), spent years cultivating Wall Street and the investor class. He was better at it than most, building an enviable network of elite financial supporters by leveraging personal ties (from his Stanford/Yale/Oxford days) and convincing them that he shared their basic worldview.
In the Clinton-era, this was a standard part of the Democratic playbook, but in post-meltdown America, intimate ties to Wall Street can be poisonous inside the party. Booker, who likes to portray himself as a third way/new politics figure, clearly didn’t appreciate this before Sunday. And now, with Democratic activists turning on him, he’s scrambling to put out the fire – without completely contradicting himself or permanently alienating the Wall Street base that will still be crucial to his statewide political aspirations.
The result was his 12-minute display of charismatic evasion last night.
* * *
After Booker’s interview last night, I was on MSNBC’s “The Last Word” to talk about it:
Richard J. Codey, a fixture in New Jersey politics who spent years as the state Senate president and a 14-month stint as governor, knows Cory Booker very well. He isn’t exactly surprised at the mess the Newark mayor has made for Barack Obama by challenging his campaign’s emphasis on Mitt Romney’s private equity background.
“He’s someone who’s been courting big money ever since he first ran for office,” Codey told Salon today. “It is what it is – not that there’s anything wrong with doing that if you want to. But what Mr. Romney and his fellow millionaires did at Bain Capital is fair game, no question about it.”
Money from Wall Street and the investor class has played a big role in Booker’s rise, helping him level the playing field in his 2002 mayoral bid against incumbent Sharpe James and to ward off serious competition in his follow-up campaigns in 2006 and 2010. His cultivation of and sympathy for Wall Street, though, may come as news to many of Booker’s rank-and-file Democratic admirers.
“People inside politics have always understood it,” Codey said. “He’s just played that game very, very well. And if you run for statewide office like it looks like he wants to, that’s going to be helpful for you.”
Booker’s name is frequently touted in connection with next year’s gubernatorial race and Frank Lautenberg’s Senate seat in 2014. The state’s most powerful Democratic boss, George Norcross of South Jersey, cited Booker as the party’s top contender to face Chris Christie just a few days ago. Booker’s statewide popularity, in fact, is probably stronger than ever, thanks to his recent dash into a burning building to save a young woman.
But behind the scenes, Booker’s relationship with Norcross has deteriorated, and insiders suggest that Norcross, who has emerged as Christie’s most important political ally in the state, sees him as the perfect sacrificial lamb – not likely to beat Christie in ’13, but strong enough not to hurt the down-ballot Democratic candidates the Norcross empire depends on. Booker himself enjoys a solid working relationship with Christie, whose poll numbers are up of late, further complicating a potential campaign next year.
This is why the assumption is that Booker will wait until the 2014 Senate race to make his move. The 88-year-old Lautenberg is vowing to run again, but he’s now locked in a very public feud with the Norcross crowd, and it seems inevitable that he’ll draw a primary challenger (or challengers).
Codey, who has been both an ally and enemy of Booker’s in various Democratic turf wars, said he thinks the Bain story will be forgotten by Democratic voters long before Booker embarks on a statewide campaign. But in an interview with Capital New York’s Josh Benson today, state Sen. Ronald Rice, one of Codey’s top home county allies (who waged a quixotic campaign for mayor against Booker in 2006), touted Codey as an ideal Booker opponent for a ’14 Senate primary. Codey groaned at that.
“Thank you very much, Ron.”
What may be most surprising to those who know Booker as one of the biggest stars of New Jersey politics is how shaky his standing is in his Newark base. He became a national star through his near-miss challenge of Mayor Sharpe James in 2002, and when the embattled James stood down in 2006, the rest of the city’s old guard essentially gave Booker a pass. But running against feeble (and now imprisoned) opposition in 2010, Booker failed to clear even 60 percent of the vote.
It was proof of the suspicions that linger among many residents over whether Booker, who was raised in the suburbs and has made himself into something of a national celebrity, is really one of them. His willingness to undercut Obama on Bain, who enjoys super-human popularity in Newark, and to stand instead with the Wall Street crowd could exacerbate this image problem.
“I think there’s always going to be the story that he’d rather be with those kinds of people than with his own constituents,” Codey said. “And whether that’s something the people of Newark think and how they feel about it, that’s for them to decide.”
The next Newark mayoral race is in 2014. If Booker runs, the expectation is that he’ll get a serious opponent this time around. Two political legacies, Donald Payne Jr. and Ron Rice Jr., are both now vying in a special election for the Newark-based congressional seat vacated by the death of Payne’s father. Whichever of them falls short will probably look hard at the mayor’s race — another incentive, perhaps, for Booker to look outside Newark for his political future.
Talk to Democrats on Capitol Hill and one impression jumps out: This might be it for Nancy Pelosi.
The current House minority leader and former Speaker made one of her periodic Sunday show appearances yesterday, issuing a confident assessment of her party’s November prospects on ABC’s “This Week.” Noting that Speaker John Boehner recently said there’s a one-in-three chance Republicans will lose their House majority, Pelosi said, “I think it’s bigger than that. But what he did say that’s correct was that there are about 50 Republican seats in play. I would say 75. I feel pretty good about where we are.”
Take this with a grain of salt. It’s basically the same thing Pelosi says every election year around this time. That’s just her job. But while her public posture remains as steady and focused as ever, there’s reason to suspect that this year’s midterms could be a win-or-go-home proposition for the 72-year-old California Democrat.
Obviously, if Democrats somehow pick up the 25 seats they need for a majority, Pelosi will stick around for two more years, at least, becoming the first Speaker since Sam Rayburn in the 1950s to lose the gavel in one election and win it back in the next. But the takeover odds she quoted on “This Week” are awfully optimistic.
Because of the size of the Republican wave in 2010, there are plenty of pick-up opportunities for Democrats on this year’s map, even the occasional gimme. But redistricting has imperiled several Democratic incumbents, while a few others who represent heavily Republican districts have opted to retire.
The situation calls to mind 1996, the last time a Democratic president sought reelection. Then as now, the party was coming off a midterm debacle and sought to channel popular anger toward a poisonously unpopular Republican Congress into a majority-making wave. The magic number back then was 19, and Democrats ended up knocking off 18 Republican incumbents (13 of them freshmen); but when retirements and open seats (particularly in the South) eroded the net gain to nine seats, thereby denying Dick Gephardt a chance to be Speaker.
That ’96 result came even as Bill Clinton cruised to a second term, beating Bob Dole by eight points in a race that was never really in doubt. It’s still theoretically possible that a jolt of good economic news will lift Barack Obama to a similarly commanding victory this fall, but it’s far more likely that his race with Mitt Romney will be decided by a point or two either way – probably not big enough, in other words, to produce the kind of down-ballot tide Pelosi is counting on.
This is where the Pelosi retirement talk kicks in. The best tool that one party can have in trying to gain seats in the House is for the other party to control the White House. So if Democrats fall short in the House this fall but Obama is reelected (the scenario considered most likely for now), it will be hard for Pelosi – or anyone – to lead the party to a better result in 2014, when the playing field will probably be tilted in the opposition party’s favor. Only once since James Monroe’s presidency has the White House’s party gained congressional seats in a “six-year itch” election (the one exception: 1998, when the GOP’s unpopular drive to impeach Clinton produced a backlash). And 2016, which would then feature an open seat presidential race after eight years of Democratic rule, probably wouldn’t be conducive to significant Democratic gains either.
Under this scenario, Pelosi might well conclude that her window of opportunity to win back the top job in the House has closed and opt for retirement. If this were to happen, the change for House Democrats would be dramatic. Pelosi hasn’t just been their public face for more than a decade; she’s also been an unusually powerful and canny leader, filling key caucus posts with loyal allies who have subordinated their ambition to hers and identifying and isolating those she views as potential threats. This means that there’s no clear heir apparent if Pelosi goes, at least not yet.
The No. 2 post is currently occupied by Steny Hoyer, but age could be an issue with him (he’ll turn 73 in a few weeks). So could his status as Pelosi’s longtime rival and nemesis. Through nearly four years of fits and starts, she and Hoyer waged an epic battle that culminated in her 23-vote victory in a 2001 race for party whip. That set Pelosi up to succeed Gephardt as minority leader the next year and to become Speaker after the 2006 midterms. She’s never stopped looking over her shoulder, though, taking sometimes dramatic steps to hold Hoyer’s influence (and whatever ambition remains) in check. It’s hard to imagine her leaving without first ensuring that Hoyer doesn’t succeed her.
The next highest-ranking House Democrats, 71-year-old James Clyburn and 63-year-old John Larson, aren’t widely seen as party leader material either. Larson, in fact, owes his post entirely to Pelosi’s distrust of Hoyer; in a famous behind-the-scenes maneuver, she used him as a last-minute vehicle in 2006 to prevent a Hoyer ally, New York’s Joe Crowley, from winning the party’s No. 4 leadership post.
If she does hang it up, Pelosi will presumably seek to play a role in anointing her successor, but it’s not clear whom she’d have in mind. A wide-open leadership fight seems possible.
Not that it’s necessarily wise to begin thinking about life after Nancy. After all, in the run-up to the 2010 midterms, it was commonly assumed that she’d stand down as leader – and retire from Congress – if her party lost the House, like Republican Dennis Hastert did after the ’06 midterms. Pelosi had no interest in walking away, though, and maybe she still doesn’t. Or maybe Mitt Romney will end up winning this year, putting in place just the right formula for a House Democratic revival in 2014…
Steve Kornacki writes about politics for Salon. He’s previously written about politics for the New York Observer and Roll Call, and his work has also appeared in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal and on the Daily Beast.
President Obama(Credit: AP) 
George W. Bush (Credit: AP/Ron Edmonds) 
Cory Booker (Credit: AP/Seth Wenig) 
Nancy Pelosi (Credit: Reuters/Jonathan Ernst) 
