All politics is national

Democrats are fretting over midterm elections. But if they start fighting back -- and drawing key distinctions with Republicans -- now, they'll fare much better in November.

Robert Shrum

Whenever you hear a party say our candidates will do fine because midterm elections are just a series of local contests, you know there’s trouble. And we’ve been hearing that from too many Democrats.

All politics now is national. The Republican strategy for 2010 has been both conscious and clear for months. The GOP wants Obama to fail and the economy to fail. At every turn they are determined to obstruct. This reached the point a week ago where seven Republicans in the Senate, including John McCain, voted against a bill they had cosponsored -- simply because Obama had endorsed it.

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Robert Shrum has been a senior adviser to the Gore 2000 presidential campaign, the campaign of Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, and the British Labour Party. In addition to being the chief strategist for the 2004 Kerry-Edwards campaign, Shrum has advised thirty winning U.S. Senate campaigns; eight winning campaigns for governor; mayors of New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, and other major cities; and the Democratic Leader of the U.S. House of Representatives. Shrum's writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, The New Republic, Slate, and other publications. The author of No Excuses: Concessions of a Serial Campaigner (Simon and Schuster), he is currently a Senior Fellow at New York University's Wagner School of Public Service.