According to a September 12th New York Times article, with a critical midterm election cycle approaching, a number of Democratic candidates for national office are attempting to distance themselves from their party and its recent legislative actions. Rather than riding President Obama’s coattails, it seems Democrats are marketing themselves as the renegades (or mavericks, if you will) of their party.
For instance, Democratic House Representatives Mark Schauer, Suzanne M. Kosmas, and Glenn Nye all ran campaign ads in which they criticized the status quo in Washington, the latter explicitly stating “‘I stood up to my party leaders and voted no.'”
It is worth noting that this strategic distancing is taking place as Republican candidates and groups run significant numbers of advertisements criticizing current “Washington insiders”, namely President Obama and Nancy Pelosi. This is likely more than just political coincidence. Both parties appear to sense a general dissatisfaction with the current state of national politics. Further, both are trying to capitalize on it– Republicans by drawing the public’s attention to the undesirable consequences of two years of Democratic political control, and Democrats by dissociating themselves with the political mechanism that produced these consequences.
This dynamic is strikingly similar to that which dominated the national political scene in the time surrounding the 2008 presidential elections. After eight years of the Bush presidency, Democrats insisted on an urgent need for new leadership, while Republicans looked to endorse “political outsiders” who could not be blamed for the Bush-era policies the American public found so unsatisfactory.
Interestingly enough, it has only taken President Obama two years to reach an analagous– if less extreme– state of political exile in his own party, and this begs the question, “How will Democrats view his administration come the 2012 elections, and how eager will they be to put their full support behind his reelection?”
