You know, you just know, that after the president goes out there and announces he wants to make community college free for all Americans — as though anything government does is “free” — or is unilaterally and unconstitutionally legalizing millions of undocumented immigrants, he comes back to the offices, pulls out the presidential BlackBerry, and gleefully follows along as the Right goes completely ape over these wild policy decisions.
Imagine his delight after it “leaked” that he will propose raising taxes on the wealthy by $320 billion over the next 10 years, including increases to the capital gains and inheritance taxes.
This, of course, has no chance of passing. But then Tuesday night’s State of the Union address could be the first one in history deliberately designed solely to generate a Pavlovian rage response in members of the opposing party.
Back in November, in this paper, Jonah Goldberg asked the question: “Maybe President Obama is just trolling?” Two months later, the question seems to have been answered in the affirmative.
Obama and his team have clearly decided that one of the metrics by which they will measure their success is by just how wild he drives his Republican opposition in Washington and conservatives across the country.
That outrage in turn generates passionate support for the troll from people who agree with him generally. They then join the battle on his side by directing even more ad hominem nastiness at the other guys. And the troll grins and giggles and collects his clicks.
The liberal writer Bill Scher thinks this is good politics. “Fortunately for Obama,” Scher wrote just after the November 2014 midterms, “bringing out the worst in Republicans serves both his political and his policy purposes.”
The problem with that theory is Obama’s own political instincts are pretty bad, except when it comes to his own immediate self-preservation.
The president could have gone one of two ways after the midterms, in which his party lost control of the Senate in a wave that really could not have gone better for Republicans.
First, he could have looked at some alarming data and noted how he is practically the only elected Democrat in the country who has benefited from his presidency. Since 2010, the Democratic Party has lost 69 seats in the House of Representatives and 14 Senate seats — and a staggering 913 seats in the state legislatures.
Among presidents, “It is Barack Obama who holds the modern record for overall losses, at least through 2014,” writes Larry Sabato of the University of Virginia.
In the House and state legislatures, “Obama has doubled (or more) the average two-term presidential loss from Truman through Bush.”
This Democratic political wipeout, says Chris Cillizza of The Washington Post, is “the most undertold story in politics.”
What that story suggests is not that the president should be trolling his opponents, but that he should be doing what he can to find common ground — if only to save his party from further destruction.
Tuesday night’s State of the Union address could be the first one in history deliberately designed solely to generate a Pavlovian rage response in members of the opposing party.
But that is not where he has gone. Instead, he has doubled down on presidential unilateralism and executive authority.
He has done this because it’s what he likes and wants to do. It has long been a conscious choice of this White House to pursue what David Plouffe, a key Obama adviser, called the “stray voltage theory.”
Major Garrett, then of National Journal and now of CBS, explained it in early 2014: “The theory goes like this: Controversy sparks attention, attention provokes conversation, and conversation embeds previously unknown or marginalized ideas in the public consciousness.
This happens, Plouffe theorizes, even when — and sometimes especially when — the White House appears defensive, besieged or off-guard.”
You can see how convenient such a theory is, since it works even when the White House appears to have blown it!
But this stray voltage has done nothing for any of his allies on Capitol Hill and has hardly advanced the liberal Democratic agenda.
Ah, you might say, but Obama was re-elected and he used “stray voltage” to his advantage, so someone was helped! Not necessarily.
Most serious students of the 2012 election, including supporters and allies of the president, now believe his victory was primarily due to so-called “fundamentals” favoring him — the benefits of incumbency and the condition of the economy in the months leading up to the election.
As Joshua Tucker of New York University pointed out in November 2012, “the [economic] growth rate between January and September of 2012 averaged 1.8%,” and using a “fundamentals” formula, “this yielded a predicted share of 51.2% of the two-party vote for incumbent Obama.” Which was almost exactly what he won on Election Night.
Meanwhile, his years as president have led to Republicans controlling 30 state legislatures, the most for the GOP since 1920. That’s not only bad for the cultivation of future Democratic Party leaders. It makes the furtherance of a liberal agenda at the state level nearly impossible over the next few years.
As Cillizza writes, “Policy is made at the state legislative level. That’s policy pertaining to states and policy that gets bumped up to the federal level. With Republicans in control of so many state governments, the policy incubator for their side will be vastly superior to what Democrats can do at the state and local levels.”
The only real data point in the president’s favor — and it is a significant one — came out in polling from CBS News late last week.
Support for his immigration plan is startlingly high; 62% favor while only 34% oppose. Democrats are overwhelmingly on his side (79% to 18%), while Republicans oppose it but with less force (57% against and 37% for). Most important, independents back it, 63% to 32%.
What this means is that when it comes to immigration the president is not engaging in “stray voltage” behavior. Rather, he is closer to the center of American public opinion than Republicans are.
Might it not have been better both for the body politic and for his party’s own standing with the American people if the president had made his full-court press on immigration matters without going all stray voltage and seeking to get Republicans to blow their stack?
With numbers like these, he could have won an argument — by enlisting the American people in the effort, putting the GOP on the defensive in its opposition to his policies, and possibly splitting the rival party.
But that’s not how Barack Obama rolls — or, rather, trolls.