The WH is not seeking to lose congress

[Kurt_and_Hunter]

For the last month or three the WH has rather deliberately antagonized an un-named group of "some Democrats" as being unreasonable, naive and disloyal.

This is not good electoral politics in that it cannot plausibly lead to more votes being cast for Democrats in the upcoming elections. But it is not fatally bad electoral politics. Centrist policies may be broadly politically damaging but these little centrist jabs are not. If we lose it will be because of disillusioned moderates, not because of disillusioned leftists. (Irony of ironies, disillusioned leftists will turn out and vote Dem at a higher rate than almost any other demographic.)

Defenders of the WH strategy say that the criticisms are correct or deserved but nobody can say they are sensible as electoral politics.

There is no sensible scenario where a voter who would not cast a Dem ballot this fall changes her mind because the WH snarks off on some un-named lefty element of the Party. And these little jabs from the WH do not have any effect in positioning the President or Party as moderate nationally. These are internet and inside-the-beltway stories of little interest to non-partisans.

(Obama has done a lot of stuff in rhetoric and policy to try to position himself as a moderate in the eyes of independent voters, but not these little jabs at the left of the Party. Independent voters are not the audience at $30K Dem fundraisers.)

Since the WH is not utterly stupid and these jabs are clearly not good electoral politics some make a point-to-point assumption that the WH is seeking to lose congress.

But that is not right either, IMO. The WH might gain, politically, from losing congress but I see no reason to assume the whole WH is a bunch of sociopaths. Consciously seeking to lose congress would be outright evil, not merely misguided.

The most straight-forward explanation is that these jabs are not electoral politics at all.

The WH and the broad PR-sphere of strong loyalists has been trying to shape opinion on the assumption that we might lose congress and the WH doesn't want to be blamed within the party. This is entirely intra-party stuff.

Parties have competing wings. As DU demonstrates, idealogical or values communities are fractal. No matter how tightly the membership of DU is controlled it will recapitulate the national scene, finding interior left/right fault-lines within the group. The Democratic Party has those fault lines and every group within the party has them. Etc..

If we have a bad election there will be a lot of "soul searching" and blame-fixing.

The WH knows they will get most of the blame for a bad election, but how much of a most? There is a difference between 75% of the blame and 85% of the blame.

As with many things, the truth is neither the official story nor the most sinister possible interpretation.

__________________________

Note: I am not crazy about the "some say" approach but I am not interested in calling anyone out. In the many DU threads about intentional left-jabbing there are usually some posts postulating that the WH wants to lose congress. It is that view to which I am responding. As a frequent critic of the whack-a-hippie tactic I feel a parallel obligation to pour cold water on what I see as the most extreme interpretations of the phenomenon.

[flamingdem]

1. Of course not, what a ridiculous right wing meme nt

[Kurt_and_Hunter]

2. Least likely RW meme ever

Of all the things one might hear a RWer say, "Obama is trying to lose congress to us on purpose because he's so conservative" is not on the list.