Rare News Desk
Last week we discussed how President Obama’s late June trip to Minnesota made sense inasmuch as Democrats are safe enough in Minnesota that they’re unlikely to be seriously wounded by association with the unpopular commander-in-chief.
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But this week Obama is in Colorado. It’s much rockier terrain, and not just in the literal sense. What gives?
The incumbent Democrat, Sen. Mark Udall, has an edge over his Republican challenger, but his lead is razor-thin in most polls. We rate the race as leaning toward the Democrat, but we’ll call it a toss-up if Rep. Cory Gardner comes out ahead in few polls, and that doesn’t seem unlikely.
Gardner’s campaign strategy leans heavily on linking Udall to Obama, and for good reason. Obama’s approval rating, per Quinnipiac, is at 38% in Colorado, with 59% disapproval.
Not surprisingly, Udall is avoiding Obama like the plague. His conspicuous absence at Obama’s public appearances was widely noted before the trip began, and this morning Udall’s campaign announced that “last-minute voting and legislative activity” would keep the senator from joining the president even in private. Obama will attend a fundraiser to help with Udall’s re-election today, but Udall won’t join him.
President Obama is a potent attraction for high-dollar Democratic donors. However, the Udall campaign appears to have calculated that the political price of presidential proximity is just too high four months before election day, even at an event closed to the press.
So what is Obama doing in Colorado? Here’s a theory: He’s campaigning, not for Democrats who are up for re-election (at least not directly), but for himself.
As Obama travels around giving speeches, glad-handing crowds, and meeting with people who’ve written him letters, he looks an awful lot like a candidate. It may be that the White House is going into campaign mode to stem the bleeding on those approval ratings.
Obama did win Colorado twice, after all. Now a non-trivial slice of the electorate doesn’t approve of the president they voted for. Perhaps Democrats can benefit from reminding those voters why they liked Obama in the first place. He’s always been more appealing as a candidate than as a president, after all.
If that’s the play, it seems like a Hail Mary. How much ground can Obama really regain?
But there’s another possibility: Maybe there’s no real strategy at all. There is periodic speculation in Washington that Obama feels smothered by the presidency, and he’s been taking more unscheduled walks outside the White House, gleefully declaring, “the bear is loose!”
Maybe when the White House casts his jaunts across the country with the same “bear is loose” theme, they really mean that flying to Denver is almost as much a function of Obama’s personal whims as a walk down Pennsylvania Avenue to Starbucks. Maybe Obama isn’t acting like a candidate because it’s what he’s good at doing so much as it’s what he feels good doing.
If that is indeed the case, if Obama isn’t following his political advisers’ playbook and is instead indulging a craving for fresh air and average voters, Democrats up for re-election should worry. If the bear gets loose too often, they’re the ones who’ll get mauled.
