A Year Later, Obama Needs to Start Campaigning Again

MADISON, WI -- One year ago today, Barack Obama had redefined American
electioneering to such an extent that it was possible to believe that
his transformational campaign would lead to a transformational
presidency.

After all, he had already changed most of what America "knew" about politics.

The freshman senator from Illinois was not only winning an election for the presidency of the United States on November 4, 2008.

He was not just rewriting the rules that had made the upper reaches
of electroal competition the domain of white men of a certain class.

He was not merely putting an end to the Bush-Cheney interregnum that
had divided the nation along seemingly insurmountable chasms separating
red and blue states.

He was restoring a measure of presidential legitimacy to a country
that had for the better part of two decades seemed to wander in the
wilderness. And with that legitimacy it seemed possible that he might
make real the promise of "change."

It had been 20 years since a president was elected with a majority
of the popular vote and no serious debate about his Electoral College
majority. While Democrats delighted in reminding Republicans that
George Bush's 2000 "victory" was imposed by a Republican-dominated U.S.
Supreme Court and that his 2004 "victory" relied upon a shaky "mandate"
of Ohio's disputed result, Republicans noted that (because of the
interventions of Ross Perot in 1992 and 1996) Bill Clinton "victories"
were attained with less than 50 percent of the vote.

Obama's victory needed no quotation marks.

He won without qualifiers or footnotes.

He won big - bigger than any presidential candidate in 20 years,
bigger than any Democratic presidential candidate in more than four
decades.

But Obama, always a more cautious man than his campaign suggested, has not governed big.

His has been a constrained presidency that has erred too frequently
on the side of compromise and the pursuit of bipartisan cooperation -
even when partners have not been readily available.

The man whose election inspired talk about how he might renew the
"First 100 Days" ambition of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's "New Deal," or
the no-holds-barred legislating of Lyndon Johnson's "Great Society"
administration, has governed far more mildly than his supporters hoped
or - despite all the noise they have made - than his critics feared.

Obama White House maintained the mild approach on the anniversary of
his election by "celebrating" with a remarkably low-key event in a town
that backed his campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination by
an overwhelming margin and that backed his campaign for the presidency
itself by an even more overwhelming margin.
In keeping with a "playing-it-safe" presidency, Obama played it safe in
marking the anniversary of one of the greatest political achievements
in American history.

Considering what Obama was up to a year ago, a visit to a middle
school in Madison, Wisconsin, seems an oddly circumspect celebration
for a president who one year earlier became the first president since
Lyndon Johnson in 1964 to be elected with resounding popular-vote and
Electoral College majorities and huge partisan advantages in the House
and Senate.

In 2008, Obama and his team sought a mandate.

They refused to settle for 50-plus-one. They wanted it all.
Obama's campaign, which began to looked like a winner from the day that
the economy tanked in mid-September (and Republican presidential
nominee John McCain had his "fundamentally sound" moment), and which
looked inevitable after Republican vice-presidential nominee sat down
for an extended interview with CBS New anchor Katie Couric, ran full-on
until the last vote was cast.

Schedules were shifted, resources were redirected, messages were
adjusted with an eye toward winning where no Democrat had won in a
generation - or generations.

On November 4, 2008, just about everything worked. Obama won the
popular vote - which should matter for something in a democratic
republic -- by almost 10 million votes over McCain. He took 28 states
and the District of Columbia, as well as one congressional district in
Nebraska (where electoral votes are assigned by district) for a 365-173
Electoral College landslide. Ohio, Florida, Indiana, Colorado and
Nevada - red states in the immediately previous presidential elections
had gone Republican Georg - were painted a Democratic shade of blue.
Virginia, which has not backed a Democrat for president since 1964,
voted for Obama. So did another state of the old Confederacy, North
Carolina.

The tide of Obama votes washed over into House and Senate contests,
building Democratic majorities of the sort that party strategists never
dared imagine.

It was a remarkable victory; a historic, transformational win.
And, then... Obama stopped campaigning. In some senses, this is what we
ask of presidents. They are supposed to mount a superhuman quest for
power and then, when they power is achieved, they are supposed to wear
its mantle casually, with a deference to their foes, much talk of
bipartisanship and a willingness to compromise proposals and even
principles in the hope of seeming magnanimous.

But these are not magnanimous times.

Obama's critics, led by radio personality Rush Limbaugh, declared
their desire to see him fail as a president. And Limbaugh's call was
taken up by whole media networks and then by the whole of a Republican
Party in which senators openly announced their hope that the
commander-in-chief would meet his "Waterloo."

A year into his presidency, Obama can point to accomplishments. And,
no, we're not talking here about that appropriately controversial Nobel
Prize for Peace. The stimulus package that he signed has been
criticized from the left and the right, yet Obama argues that it has
already done much to stabilize a shaky economy - and the latest
statistics, especially those suggesting an upturn in manufacturing
activity, seem to support the president's case. Obama is especially
proud of the fact that his administration has provided critical support
for education at a tenuous time.

The president will use the anniversary of his election to highlight
those economic and educational accomplishments with an appearance in a
town that was a hotbed of Obamania in 2008.

But Obama is not coming to Madison to lead a celebration like the
one that brought tens of thousands of cheering supporters into the
streets of this city -- and so many others -- after his election was
confirmed last November 4.

The choice of Madison -- a city where Obama won some precincts by
20-1 margins, in a county where he won almost 73 percent of the vote
and carried every city, village and town, in a state he carried by a
56-42 margin and took 59 of 72 counties - reflects the caution that has
characterized Obama's presidency.

There are few "safer" cities for the president. Indeed, if he faces
criticism in Madison and surrounding Dane County, it tends to be from
the left. The demonstration outside Madison's Wright Middle School was
not a right-wing "Tea Party" but a "Books Not Bombs" protest organized
by critics of the war in Afghanistan.

The Madison visit was planned before the results of the November 3
off-year elections were known. But at a time when Obama aides were
wisely worried about contests for governorships in New Jersey and
Virginia and a complicated congressional election in New York state,
they weren't taking any chances.

However, the caution inherent in Obama's choice of Madison has less
to do with the fact that it is a safe city than with the fact that the
event he is doing is so very safe.

He's visiting a racially- and ethnically-diverse public school that is an educational success story.

It will be a tightly-controlled, essentially-closed event with a small, friendly audience and a soft, almost apolitical message.
In other words, Obama is not campaigning on the anniversary of his campaign win.

He is presidenting.

And that's the problem.

Democrats just lost the governorships of two states Obama won
because turnout among people of color and young people - core Obama
constituencies - dropped dramatically from 2008 to 2009.

There's an enthusiasm gap. And that gap is something that should worry Obama.

There's nothing wrong with making a presidential visit to a middle
school. In fact, there is a lot that's right about such a move.

But after a morning of presidenting, Obama should have done some campaigning.

In Madison, a city known for its massive turnouts for Democratic
rallies, Obama could have celebrated the one-year anniversary of his
election with a great big rally at the state Capitol - where tens of
thousands of people have regularly shown up for events featuring Walter
Mondale, Bill Clinton, Al Gore and John Kerry. "I was surprised that
they didn't do a Capitol rally," said state Rep. Mark Pocan, one of the
state's most powerful and politically-savvy Democratic legislators. "If
the president had done a noontime rally at the Capitol, the crowd would
have been overwhelming - and overwhelmingly friendly. It would have
brought back all those positive memories from last year, all the huge
crowds cheering Obama on."

Pocan's right.

The president's team should have thrown caution to the wind and
organized a great-big, rip-roaring celebration in Madison. And the
president should have delivered a stem-winder speech outlining his
health-care reform agenda and promising to fight harder than ever for
the change his campaign promised.

Critics would have accused him of being too political.

In fact, Obama has not been political enough.

At this point in his presidency, recognizing both his challenges and
his potential, Obama should borrow a page not from Democratic mentors
such as Roosevelt and LBJ but from a Republican: Ronald Reagan.

Reagan never had a Republican Congress to work with - Democrats held
the House throughout his two terms while control of the Senate shifted
- but his was a strong presidency. Why? Because Reagan and his aides
understood the power of the bully pulpit.

A visit to a middle school looks and is presidential.

A great big rally in the middle of a supportive town on the anniversary of a great big victory is campaigning.

But campaigning produces powerful images of a popular president
being cheering on by supporters who want him to fight rather than
compromise.

Reagan would tell Obama that presidents who succeed know that they
can never stop campaigning. (And Roosevelt and LBJ would echo the
sentiment.)

Obama needs to keep visiting schools. That's what good presidents - and even not so good presidents -- do.

But Obama, the brilliantly successful campaigner of 2008 but the not
quite so brilliantly successful president of 2009, should start
visiting the bully pulpit. That's where presidents who are serious
about governing built the popular support and the political strength to
make words like "hope" and "change" into something more than mere
slogans.