Conservative
Type 40
Dems Begin the Post-Obama Blame Game « Commentary Magazine
Some Democrats are apparently not waiting for Barack Obama to lose the presidential election before starting the inevitable recriminations about whose fault it was.
That the Times would publish a piece on October 24 that takes as its starting point the very real possibility that the president will lose, and that blame for that loss needs to be allocated, is astonishing enough. But that their nominee for scapegoat is the man who is almost certainly the most popular living Democrat is the sort of thing that is not only shocking, but might be regarded as a foretaste of the coming battle to control the party in 2016.
Heres the gist of Bais blame-Clinton thesis:
You may recall that last spring, just after Mr. Romney locked up the Republican nomination, Mr. Obamas team abruptly switched its strategy for how to define him. Up to then, the White House had been portraying Mr. Romney much as George W. Bush had gone after John Kerry in 2004 as inauthentic and inconstant, a soulless climber who would say anything to get the job.
But it was Mr. Clinton who forcefully argued to Mr. Obamas aides that the campaign had it wrong. The best way to go after Mr. Romney, the former president said, was to publicly grant that he was the severe conservative he claimed to be, and then hang that unpopular ideology around his neck.
In other words, Mr. Clinton counseled that independent voters might forgive Mr. Romney for having said whatever he had to say to win his partys nomination, but they would be far more reluctant to vote for him if they thought they were getting the third term of George W. Bush. Ever since, the Obama campaign has been hammering Mr. Romney as too conservative, while essentially giving him a pass for having traveled a tortured path on issues like health care reform, abortion and gay rights.
If Clinton thought that he could apply the lessons of his own victories to President Obamas re-election problem, he was wrong. As Bai points out, Clinton truly was a centrist, something that no one (except perhaps the president himself) thinks about Obama.
But no matter where the Democratic fingers are pointing, the fact that they are already starting to blame each other for an Obama loss has to send chills down the spines of Democrats who are still operating under the assumption that Romney cant win.