Yesterday in The Washington Post, Doug Schoen and Patrick Caddell, two formerly hotshot pollsters, wrote what certainly has to be the most disingenuous, cynical and purely dumb op-ed article of the year. Called “One and Done,” Schoen and Caddell argue the entirely preposterous position that to be a great president, Barack Obama should not seek reelection in 2012.
“If the president goes down the reelection road,” the pollsters write, “we are guaranteed two years of political gridlock at a time when we can ill afford it. But by explicitly saying he will be a one-term president, Obama can deliver on his central campaign promise of 2008, draining the poison from our culture of polarization and ending the resentment and division that have eroded our national identity and common purpose. We do not come to this conclusion lightly. But it is clear, we believe, that the president has largely lost the consent of the governed. The midterm elections were effectively a referendum on the Obama presidency. And even if it was not an endorsement of a Republican vision for America, the drubbing the Democrats took was certainly a vote of no confidence in Obama and his party. The president has almost no credibility left with Republicans and little with independents.”
There’s no gainsaying the president’s predicament, but other presidents have faced worse, and in any regard, self-castration won’t help. Presidents have power in no small measure because people believe they have power, and one of the simplest ways a president is imbued with power is through the belief that he is going to be around for awhile granting favors to his friends and smiting his foes. Try to remember how effective President Bush was during the financial crisis in the fall of 2008. You can’t; he wasn’t. He had mentally checked out, remaining only a constitutional rubber stamp for policies developed by Hank Paulson and Ben Bernancke and passed by Congress. The notion that Obama would be able to lead a unity government to find bipartisan solutions to our problems is the sort of political vision one might tolerate if it had been authored by a high school sophomore. A slow high school sophomore.
I don’t entirely blame Schoen and Caddell from taking this absurd position. When nobody is paying attention to you, sometimes you have to do something ridiculous or embarrassing to get noticed. I’m sorry the Washington Post chose to publish this piece, however; with an outstanding group of regular contributors, the paper shouldn’t feel obliged to to run an article just to boost page views. What the pollsters are suggesting is neither realistic nor potentially beneficial nor anywhere within the realm of likelihood. On the other hand, their names are being mentioned.