Democrat in Chief?

Obama still has a strong connection with voters. Whether this connection helps other Democrats get elected remains to be seen.

By MATT BAI
NYT Magazine

A year and a half after they sat, shivering and awestruck, on a January morning and listened to the sounds of a million cheers careering off the marble walls of the Capitol, the Democrats who work under the dome can feel those same walls closing in fast. Throughout the dismal spring, it seemed as if every visiting delegation that drove up in a coach bus — Main Street merchants, family farmers, Rotarians and Elks — arrived with tales of angst and unrest back home. Every well-paid pollster who came through the door brought with him a stack of surveys and focus-group memos, each more dispiriting than the last, numbers portending an emphatic rejection of the majority in this fall’s elections. Every new thickly bound jobs report landed with a sickening thud on the desks of committee chairmen — a reminder that, despite modest improvements, time was running out to change people’s minds about the direction of the economy.

And then there was the president — their president — who for 17 months had cajoled them into taking tough votes on stimulus spending, on the trading of carbon emissions, on health care. Barack Obama, the postpartisan president. He continued to go out and shake his head disbelievingly at “the culture of Washington,” which to the Democrats in the House sounded as if he were saying that his own party was the problem, as if somehow the Democratic majorities in Congress hadn’t managed to navigate the bulk of his ambitious agenda past a blockade of Republican vessels, their ship shredded by cannon fire. And all this while the president’s own approval ratings fell below 50 percent — an ominous sign, historically speaking, for a majority party.

This frustration among Democrats was bound to find an outlet, and that’s what happened at a meeting in Nancy Pelosi’s conference room at the end of April to discuss the party’s election-year message. Around three sides of the table were close to a dozen Democratic leaders in the House. On the remaining side sat David Axelrod, the president’s senior adviser and message-molder, along with two other White House operatives: Jim Messina, the deputy chief of staff, and Stephanie Cutter, a senior aide to the president.

Chris Van Hollen, the Maryland congressman in charge of House campaigns this fall, and James Clyburn, the Democratic whip and an Obama ally, complained to Axelrod about the president’s unrelenting assault on Washington rather than on Republicans specifically, according to three people who were in the room. “A ‘Washington is broken’ message doesn’t help incumbents running for Congress,” Van Hollen pleaded with the aides.

(More here.)