Does Barack Obama really believe that calm bipartisanship is a successful political strategy in modern Washington DC? Well, it got him elected, didn’t it? Matt Yglesias takes it from there:
My worry would be that it strikes me as very plausible that a political strategist could overlearn the lessons of his own success. The fact of the matter is that Obama’s margin of victory was more-or-less exactly what you would expect based on fundamentals-driven models of presidential elections. We know that the strategy Obama employed “worked” (he won, after all) but there’s no clear evidence that it was particularly brilliant. But you can easily imagine Obama and David Axelrod and other key players becoming overconvinced by their own success.
Nobody ever, ever, ever believes this. There’s always a narrative behind presidential victories, and there always will be, despite the fact that 90% of them are dead wrong. Obama ran an excellent primary campaign and a perfectly decent general election campaign, but the latter boiled down to one word: “Change.” That’s what most elections boil down to: “Time for a change” vs. “Experience counts.” They both work fine in alternate cycles, but neither is especially brilliant or especially new. Pericles pioneered them both in his long career, and that was 25 centuries ago.
The post-partisan schtick might yet work. But even though it was effective during last year’s campaign, it’s not really what won him the presidency. A little bit of ruthlessness vs. Hillary Clinton got him through June, and repeating a nice, simple message over and over and over kept him on top throughout the fall. That’s a combination he might want to remember.
