The 2010 midterm elections have not occurred yet, and already some are speculating whether President Barack Obama will run for a second term or not. The idea is primarily being pushed by right-wing bloggers and pundits — for the time being.
The speculation started in the pages of the UK Telegraph, when Toby Hamden wrote:
“When David Plouffe, President Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign manager, wrote recently that his former boss was ‘not concerned with his re-election’, there was predictable scepticism.
After all, it has long been a truism that every politician wants to cling to power and a reality that presidential campaigns are planned years in advance. Pronouncements about not looking at polls and concentrating on getting things done are, moreover, standard fare from poll-driven, election-obsessed politicians and their apparatchiks.
“In this case, however, Plouffe may inadvertently be onto something. Almost everything Obama does these days suggests that he doesn’t care much about being re-elected. Strange as it might seem, perhaps he wants to be a one-term president.”
Hamden has an interesting point. Most of President Obama’s policy prescriptions have been undertaken without regard to public opinion. From health care reform to canceling the Constellation space exploration program, from stimulus spending to suing Arizona over illegal immigration, Obama’s agenda is opposed by healthy majorities of Americans. Even many of President Obama’s statements seemed to have been designed to annoy people, like support for the 9/11 Mosque.
Neil Cavuto is suggesting that Obama might want to stick to one term because he has done all he could accomplish already. It is a beguiling idea, to avoid a humiliating defeat at the polls, that the sitting President might decide to go out (at least in his own mind) with a win.
Of course these speculations do not take into account the immense ego of the President. Others may think that a man who had governed so much against the will of the people, whose poll numbers have been in a death spiral for months, who shows no sign of tacking to the middle, would be doomed to an epic thrashing in 2012. But President Obama may not think as others do.
Barack Obama sees himself less as just another President of the United States than as a historic, transformative figure, someone above the petty dynamic of day-to-day politics. In his own mind, he will beat all comers because he is Barack Obama, the One, as Oprah Winfrey once declared him. So what if a lot of people oppose him, even protesting him in the streets? Tea Party rabble clinging to their God and guns, as he once suggested.
Besides, if Obama does not run again, who will? Joe Biden? Let us guffaw with gusto? Hillary Clinton? Does anyone want a Clinton Restoration anymore? It seems so 1990s. Howard Dean? Another run by the Screamer may be entertaining, but one that will end in tears for the Democrats.
Mind, there is the possibility of a primary challenge from Clinton and/or Dean. But in the end, it is likely that President Obama will be the Democratic nominee in 2012.
Sources:
Does Barack Obama want to be re-elected in 2012?, Toby Harnden, UK Telegraph, August 21st, 2010
Does Obama Want a Second Term (Video), Neil Cavuto, Fox News, August 23rd, 2010
