Hillary Clinton’s leaving a vacuum, and President Barack Obama’s going to try to fill it.
As Clinton holds off announcing a run for president, Obama is set to launch a three-month blitz of messaging and travel that’ll be the first phase of a late-term effort to reassert himself politically and set the stage for Clinton. More than just trying to convince voters that he deserves credit for the economy’s improvements, he’ll be looking to define the Democratic Party for years after he’s gone.
“I want the president out talking about, ‘Here’s the economy I inherited, here’s the economy we have today,’” said Clinton confidant Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, who last week urged Obama to take on a greater role directly when Democratic governors met with the president at the White House. “Whoever the nominee is, it’s important to talk about: This is what happens when you elect Democrats.”
Democrats spent the 2014 midterms blaming one another for failing to make a convincing argument for Democratic ideas. Obama and his aides chafed at pressure to keep the unpopular president off the trail. Campaign operatives complained that he never seemed able or interested in presenting a coherent argument for the party.
But with Clinton waiting until as late as the summer to announce her campaign, Democratic leaders say that, for now, Obama’s the only one who can stand in.
And not just on the economy. On Wednesday, for example, as Republican hopefuls fly in to Washington to prove themselves in front of the Conservative Political Action Conference, Obama will fly to Miami for a bit of counterprogramming at an MSNBC-hosted town hall on immigration reform.
Obama’s party legacy is at stake, too. He knows the party’senthusiasm is moving on from him, and he doesn’t want to go down as just the Democrat between the Clintons. And he knows that his effort to build Organizing for Action as an alternative to the Democratic National Committee has fallen short.
Obama and his aides are reluctant to appear as though they’re exerting too much control over 2016, and there’s no formal coordination between the White House and Clinton’s nascent campaign. Publicly and privately, Obama was very circumspect even in having any input on the convention host city. But they are eager for some sort of a role and have been calling in advice from outside on how to do it.
“There is both a policy and political choice the American people are facing,” said White House political director David Simas, whose office on the first floor of the West Wing remains staffed and open, three months after the midterms. “He is going to be articulating that the Democratic approach — his approach — to governing and economics worked.”
Obama’s motivation is less about getting a third term for his agenda than making sure next year’s election isn’t a repudiation of his two terms. The model will be his speech to the DNC winter meeting on Feb. 20: Remind people of how much the economy has changed, rip Republicans for claiming they knew better then and still opposing him now, but stay away from direct attacks on any of the likely GOP presidential candidates.
That’s implicit, he and his aides believe, as is the connection to the person whom he’ll wait to formally endorse until after what’s shaping up to be a perfunctory primary process.
“He has a worldview, and the Democratic nominee is going to have a very similar worldview, that is diametrically opposed to the Republican worldview,” Simas said.
Clinton, meanwhile, has kept her politics confined to four issue-oriented tweets since the beginning of the year, plus a New York Times op-ed on children’s health insurance.
One of those tweets, though, did eagerly embrace Obama’s agenda in the State of the Union, which she wrote “pointed the way to an economy that works for all.”
“He’s made it happen, and now we have to make sure people know about it,” said Kentucky Gov. Steve Beshear, who spent part of his own speech to the DNC winter meeting criticizing party leaders for focusing too much just on electing the president. “As people know about it, there will be a lot more support for him, and for Democrats in general.”
In a measure of how much feelings about Obama have changed, a year ago Beshear was eager to see both Clintons, Vice President Joe Biden and first lady Michelle Obama campaign for Senate candidate Alison Lundergan Grimes, but held off on encouraging Obama to fly in. On Friday, he said an Obama campaign stop in this year’s Kentucky governor’s race would be “helpful.”
The White House is putting together a heavy travel calendar for Obama, along with a series of executive actions like the one he signed Monday protecting retirement investments.
But the kinds of stops Obama will make remain up in the air. The day after the State of the Union, he went to Idaho in an effort to show his agenda had support far from blue states. Democrats say they’d rather see him go places that will be competitive in a presidential election, or even to find a way back to South Carolina, where his primary win in 2008 helped secure him the nomination but which is now just one of three states he hasn’t been to as president. He’s got an invitation to the state party’s Jefferson-Jackson dinner that’s still waiting for a response.
All this comes as a Democratic establishment within the DNC and many state parties, bitter from the distance Obama kept in the past, tries to sort out its own changing feelings toward him.
“The focus is on Hillary. They feel encouraged by the Obama record. But they feel no personal connection, and the White House never built a connection,” said one DNC official.
Still, there’s a mix of nostalgia and excitement about the verve Democrats are suddenly seeing from him. The State of the Union got them going. The distilled, punchier version delivered last week to the DNC got a number of standing ovations, even though the crowd was just 355 people, according to a hotel crowd count that the White House pushed out.
“I can sense the enthusiasm building, from two days before the speech, and after,” said Rhode Island Democratic Chairman Joe McNamara.
As the president’s time in office winds down, “we’re entering a period of goodwill,” said Stuart Appelbaum, president of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union and a member of the DNC. He said he was particularly excited to see Obama talking more about unions now, too, in a further embrace of Democratic base principles that haven’t been a large part of his script.
Technically, Obama will be the leader of the party until the last night of the convention next July in Philadelphia. Realistically, he’ll long have faded as the dominant political figure. But until Clinton really steps up, Democrats say he’d better follow through on his promise to be more involved. He can do another round of jokes about how this one really, really is his last campaign.
“He’s still very much the guy,” said Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii), a DNC vice chair. “People are looking to President Obama as he finishes his last two years.”
After all, Obama will continue to be a GOP target even after there’s a Democratic nominee, with Republican presidential candidates making controversies of issues such as what he won’t say about Islam and extremism, his take on the Crusades, whether he loves America.
“When they have constructed their entire politics around opposing one person, that becomes the litmus test of credibility, of course they’re going to continue down that path,” Simas said. “It seems like they’re stuck in reaction.”
Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2015/02/hillary-clinton-waits-obama-steps-up-115475.html#ixzz3SzVDxgcQ
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