Opinion: Top Obama strategist sees a ‘titanic struggle’ next year
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A top former White House aide to Barack Obama sees a ‘titanic struggle’ emerging as the Democratic incumbent confronts awful economic numbers and Republican political opposition that seems bent on defeating the guy for some reason.
David Axelrod, who used to work in the White House but has since fled back to Chicago as the reelection campaign’s top political strategist, uttered his unfortunate floating metaphor to a New Hampshire audience Tuesday.
Speaking at a college in Manchester, Axelrod also used a sailing metaphor:
‘In 2008, we had the wind at our backs. Now, we don’t have the wind at our back. We have the wind in our faces, because the American people have the wind in their faces.’
With two out of three Americans thinking the country is on the wrong track under Obama and more than half disapproving of Obama’s overall job performance, exactly what winds Axelrod had in mind are left to wild speculation.
Unemployment above 9% when an 8% maximum was promised? A healthcare bill that was supposed to reduce costs but hasn’t and waivers for special Americans with connections? An unfolding scandal over a half-billion dollar loan to a fundraiser’s company? A fondness for regulation and a desire to raise taxes and a kind of chronic indecision over many things except giving more speeches at fundraisers appealing for more time because so much is undone?
Axelrod, a recovering newspaper reporter who used to cover Chicago politics, did not have time in his remarks to explain that those winds in Americans’ faces came from his boss’ failed economic stimulus and growing business fears of rampant regulations.
Because he lives and works in Chicago and helped elect Democrats of the machine that has ruled that city for 80 years, Axelrod is apparently unfamiliar with the role of a competitive opposition political party to, well, oppose incumbents with its own plans.
The Obama strategist kept a straight face as he feigned surprise that Obama opponents in Washington would actually, well, oppose the Real Good Talker’s plans to spend trillions more dollars that the country doesn’t have.
‘We honestly thought,’ Axelrod said with a straight face, ‘when we got to Washington, we’d get some cooperation from folks across the aisle.’
That kind of phony naivete sounds normal in the Windy City where uncooperative citizens can find themselves and their licensed businesses enduring a plethora of building and health inspections and citations, along with unexplained stoppages in garbage collections, etc.
In the interests of bipartisanship and passing the president’s doomed jobs bill, Axelrod called the D.C. opposition ‘the most ideological, partisan group of Republicans in my lifetime.’ Axelrod was born Feb. 22, 1955.
Still, despite all those adverse winds in the Windy City and across the country, Axelrod said he was confident that President Obama would sail through these troubled waters and not become yet another Democratic president like Truman, Johnson or Carter, who were terminated by popular demand after one elected term.
“We’re on the right side of the fight and I believe we’re going to win that fight,” he said.
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-- Andrew Malcolm
Photos (from top): The Titanic. Credit: White Star Line
Edward Smith, captain of the doomed Titanic. Credit: White Star Line
An image from director James Cameron’s movie ‘Titanic.’ Credit: Merie W. Wallace