by Jules Witcover

As President Obama continues his campaign to reawaken his apparently slumbering 2008 army of supporters in time to avert Democratic loss of Congress on Nov. 2, he endlessly strives to shake them out of what he calls a bad case of "amnesia."

It's his shorthand way of warning them that such loss would mean a reversion to the days and ways of the George W. Bush administration and would raise further roadblocks to the change he promised when this army put him in the White House 20 months ago.

At a small fund-raising dinner of about 50 well-heeled Democrats at a private home in Cresskill, N.J., the other night, Obama borrowed from the folksy playbook of Vice President Joe Biden. He quoted him as saying, "Don't compare me to the Almighty; compare me to the alternative."

The plea was the political version of old standup comedian Henny Youngman line in response to the question, "How's your wife?" Youngman would reply: "Compared to what?" But Obama is looking for more than a laugh as he presses the faithful to weigh the likely consequences of a bad outcome in next month's congressional elections.

"I think Democrats would be well-served right now to keep that uppermost in their minds," he told the upper-crust listeners, who shelled out about $15,000 a clip for the Democratic National Committee, which is working under Chairman Tim Kaine to avert a widely predicted setback.

The faithful, Obama preached, must remain "constantly focused on the choice before us, and understanding that we're not finished, but unless we are able to maintain Democrats in the House and the Senate, then we're going to be stalled for two years or four years, and we could even start going backwards."

The sermon followed a brief reminder of the now famous economic "ditch" into which Obama repeatedly has said Bush and Co. drove the country, and from which the Republicans now refuse to join in extricating it. "And so our first job was to stop the crisis," he said, "and we've done that. ... But one of the reasons I ran for president was not just to put a tourniquet around the crisis."

Obama ticked off the "tough choices" he made, from health care and financial system reform to revamping the education system. Only then did he acknowledge the high unemployment rate that has fueled the Republican campaign argument against him and Democratic candidates this year.

That rate, now at 9.6 percent, "gives an enormous advantage to whoever is not in power," he conceded, "because they can simply point at the status quo regardless of causation and say, 'You know what, it's the folks who are in power that are at fault.' And so that gives sort of a natural momentum behind their arguments."

In defense, Obama argued he was focused on "the long game. We're not just thinking tactically, ... we're not just thinking about what's convenient for us next month or in the next election, but what's good for the next generation. That's what we've tried to do over the last 20 months," he explained, "and we've got to make that argument robustly over the remaining four months of this midterm (election campaign)."

As pep talks go, it was a bit optimistic and perhaps naive to hope that voters in a country mired in high unemployment now will look beyond it, concentrate on "the long game" and reward its promises at the approaching congressional elections.

So, in the end, the best card for Obama to play now may be calling on Democrats, and independents with bad memories from the Bush years, to see the November elections as their best chance to keep the country from slipping back onto the Republican path the electorate rejected two years ago.

Obama's argument that voters may be suffering from amnesia would be strengthened if he himself were not still essentially on that path in Afghanistan, with his approval of the U.S. troop surge there. His refocus of that mission on chasing the al-Qaida perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks has not made the public forget that our troops are still fighting that war -- nor does it allay skepticism that he will start withdrawing the troops next July as promised.

 

Available at Amazon.com:

The Backlash: Right-Wing Radicals, High-Def Hucksters, and Paranoid Politics in the Age of Obama

The Feminine Mystique

The Disappearing Center: Engaged Citizens, Polarization, and American Democracy

The Virtues of Mendacity: On Lying in Politics

Bush on the Home Front: Domestic Policy Triumphs and Setbacks

The Political Fix: Changing the Game of American Democracy, from the Grassroots to the White House

Washington Rules: America's Path to Permanent War

 

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