Will Obama drag down Democrats in 2014?
The president's agenda could cause problems for members of his own party
President Obama's hope to salvage his second-term agenda by helping Democrats win control of Congress appears to have run into trouble already. Obama's approval ratings shot up after he won re-election in November, but the honeymoon is already showing signs of fizzling. A new Siena College poll found that Obama now has the approval of 56 percent of New Yorkers — still high, but down significantly from his February rating of 66 percent. Could Obama wind up weighing down Democrats, instead of lifting them to victory?
Winning full control of Congress, which would entail holding on to the Senate and picking up a net total of 17 seats in the House, is "a feat that could make the difference between limping to the end of his presidency and going out with a bang," says Alex Isenstadt at Politico. Some Democratic candidates and operatives, however, say that "the message and issues Obama has emphasized since the election are creating a difficult political headwind" in the districts likely to decide which party gets control of the House.
Winning back the House was going to be tough even if Obama executed his plans flawlessly, says Michael Barone at Human Events, but the White House is already "flailing." Obama expected Republicans to cave on the sequester budget cuts, but they didn't. And he is quickly losing credibility because his doomsday warnings about the sequester have so far failed to materialize. Indeed, Democrats may have enough trouble keeping the Senate.
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Still, Obama's game plan is based on sound logic, according to Robert Schlesinger at U.S. News & World Report. "A chasm has grown between the main stream of the electorate and the base of the GOP," Schlesinger says. That means Obama can hammer the GOP on issues where the party is most out of touch — taxing the rich, for example — and it's a "win-win" for him. "As he works that issues gap, he either ends up with wins or campaign issues."
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Harold Maass is a contributing editor at The Week. He has been writing for The Week since the 2001 debut of the U.S. print edition and served as editor of TheWeek.com when it launched in 2008. Harold started his career as a newspaper reporter in South Florida and Haiti. He has previously worked for a variety of news outlets, including The Miami Herald, ABC News and Fox News, and for several years wrote a daily roundup of financial news for The Week and Yahoo Finance.
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