President Obama left fighting for relevance

Two things were clear long before the votes were counted Tuesday night: President Barack Obama would face a Congress with more Republicans for his final two years in office, and the results would be seen as a repudiation of his leadership.

But that was not the way Obama saw it. The electoral map was stacked against him, he argued, making Democrats underdogs from the start. And his own party kept him off the trail, meaning he never really got the chance to make his case. "You're in the Final Four," as one aide put it, "and you're on the bench with a walking boot and you don't get to play."

The midterm elections culminated a season of discontent for the president - and may yet open a period of even deeper frustration. Sagging in the polls and unwelcome in most competitive races across the country, Obama bristled as the last campaign that would influence his presidency played out while he sat largely on the sidelines. He privately complained that it should not be a judgment on him.

"He doesn't feel repudiated," the aide said Tuesday night. But in a hyperactive, deeply polarized time in history, Obama faces a daunting challenge in reasserting his relevance in a capital that will soon enough shift its attention to the battle to succeed him. If the hope-and-change phase of his presidency is long over, he wants at least to produce a period of progress and consolidation to complete his time in the White House.

‘He’s going to be aggressive’

He will kick off that effort Wednesday when, aides expect, he will hold a news conference seeking bipartisan accommodation on issues of mutual interest, and he plans to host Republicans at the White House on Friday. At the same time, aides said, Obama is eager to throw off the constraints of a campaign that he did not direct and begin to defend his record in a more robust way again.

“He’s going to be aggressive. He’s ready to go,” said another senior official, who like others did not want to be identified discussing plans before the election results were tabulated. “We’ve got a lot of important stuff to get done in the lame duck. He’ll talk about that tomorrow. We’ve got a lot of important stuff to get done in the last two years. He’s anxious to get going on that.”

To Republicans, it sounded as if Obama was hardly chastened or heeding the message of the election, evidently more eager to find excuses than to rethink the way he has governed. Absent a change in attitude from the president and a genuine outreach on issues that matter to them, Republicans said, the next two years could simply usher in even more political squabbling.

“There’s a huge opportunity to get things done if his frame of mind is in the right place, and it’s not clear it is,” said Sara Taylor Fagen, who was President George W. Bush’s political director when he lost Congress in 2006. “He’s never shown an interest or willingness to work with members of Congress. Talk to Democrats - they don’t feel he ever made an effort to court them. It’s not clear he’ll make an effort to court Republicans.”

Rep. Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill., said both parties need to find a way to get past their mutual suspicions to forge a new working relationship. “He feels burned, and we feel burned too,” Kinzinger said. “For four years, it’s been a lot of mistrust on both sides.” Just two years after Obama’s re-election, the midterm results underscored just how far he has fallen in the public mind. Nearly 6 out of 10 voters Tuesday expressed negative feelings about his administration, according to exit polls. For every two voters who said they had cast ballots to support Obama, three voters said they were voting to express their opposition to him.

Electoral pessimism

The electorate was deeply pessimistic about the country, with 7 out of 10 describing the economy as not so good or poor and 8 out of 10 expressing worry about the direction of the economy in the next year. Numbers like that discouraged Obama’s aides, who said they have not done a good job getting out the president’s record, noting that the deficit has fallen by half, unemployment is now below 6 percent, the price of gasoline has fallen sharply and the economy is growing at a decent rate.

Obama and Vice President Joe Biden talked about that at a lunch last week, according to an administration official, and the vice president later gave voice to it in a CNN interview aired Monday. “We have to be more direct and clear about exactly what it is we’re looking to do,” Biden said. But Obama was focused on the odds against him.

His staff researched it and told him that no president in more than a half-century had as many Senate seats open in states lost by the president. "This is probably the worst possible group of states for Democrats since Dwight Eisenhower," Obama told WNPR radio in Connecticut on Tuesday. Obama's day on Tuesday was spent in almost defiant disinterest in the elections that would steer his fate.

He had lunch again with Biden, then met with Christine Lagarde, the director of the International Monetary Fund, and later with Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel. He also convened a meeting on the latest developments on the Ebola outbreak.

Aides said he was briefed from time to time about the elections, but beyond calling four radio stations, he made no public comments on them and headed back to the residential quarters for the evening to watch the results, updated by David Simas, his political director.

Obama is not the first second-term president to lose seats in his last midterm election, nor is he the first to find plenty of explanations for why that was not a judgment on his tenure. There is something about this point in a presidency that brings trouble - the last four two-term presidents all faced arguably the greatest crisis of their own creation about this time.

Richard Nixon resigned just three months before his second midterm. Ronald Reagan became caught up in the Iran-Contra scandal, which was revealed in the days after his. Bill Clinton was impeached barely six weeks later. And George W. Bush faced a war that he was on the verge of losing. And yet Reagan, Clinton and Bush also rose to the occasion during the remainder of their terms, surpassing their problems to score important achievements in their final years.

Anita Dunn, a former White House adviser to Obama, noted that voters Tuesday were just as negative about Republican leaders as they were about Obama. In the end, she said, voters were eager not for more failure but for progress by both parties.

“The message for anybody who’s in power is that voters are looking for a change in how they approach getting things done,” she said.

New York Times