Carter and Reagan had their bad times. It's Obama's turn.
In 1984, Mondale mounted an unsuccessful challenge against Ronald Reagan. In their second debate, Reagan told a long, meandering anecdote about driving down the Pacific Coast in California, losing the thread of the story and bewildering the audience. At the time, the Mondale campaign chose to keep quiet about the gaffe. But Mondale said last week that he had found Reagan so shaky during the debate that “I was scared he’d fall down.” He said, “When you look at that performance, there’s some question of whether he wasn’t beginning to lose it already.”
As for Obama, Mondale said, “He’s doing a good job,” adding, however, that when the President first took office he was “a bit green.” Also, he said, “In my opinion, Obama had a few false presumptions. One was the idea that we were in a post-partisan era.” The other was “the idea of turning things over to Congress—that doesn’t work even when you own Congress. You have to ride ’em.” Further, he suggested that Obama should stop thinking about what he can get from the Republican opposition: “You should explain clearly what you want, and, if they oppose you, attack them for it.”
Mondale has always been an unusually candid politician (as voters who remember his suicidal 1984 campaign pledge to raise taxes know), so it may be comforting to Democrats that he thinks it unlikely that Obama will face a primary challenger in the next election, as Carter did. “I don’t see it,” he said. “I think he’s in a fairly good position to keep the Party united.” But he predicted that the next few months may hold more of the sorts of troubles that bedevilled the Carter years. “The public’s expectations are so outsized,” he said. “We’re going through this drama again. November might be a disaster.”...Jane Mayer, New Yorker
It's kind of scary to think of Reagan as a wind-up toy controlled by a White House team, given his White House team. As for Obama, it seemed clear to me this morning, listening to "left wing" radio, that this president is as much at the mercy of forlorn progressive talkers as Robert Gibbs said. But not quite in the same way.
Democrats do tend to writhe and bumble in public, giving more airtime to the right's puppet shows (Glenn Beck's rally) than to the Dems' best efforts. Now, thanks to the Tea Party, Republicans are now doing the same thing -- albeit their style of suicidal public appearances is a bit different. John Boehner, Newt Gingrich and a number of "young guns" beg the question as to whether they aren't, like Reagan, "beginning to lose it already."
From the beginning (this has probably been repeated in this blog too often) progressives lost the chance to steer the pre-Tea-Party movement toward liberal populism. Dick Armey got there first with a bagful of bucks. Our bad.
