The Vision Thing

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"Oh, the vision thing."

George H.W. Bush

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In the waning days of the 2010 midterm campaign, I found myself thinking a lot about Barack Obama's insistence that there was nothing wrong with the message, it just hadn't been conveyed properly.

Well, it seems the voters, in that time–honored way, shot the messenger. But was it fatal? Or was it, in the words of the Black Knight in "Monty Python and the Holy Grail," merely a flesh wound?

From what I could see, the voters agree with Obama about many of the things that need to be done. But they elect presidents to make often painful choices between what absolutely positively must be done and what needs to be done but can be put on the back burner.

They did not believe that Obama has been making those tough choices so they tried to get his attention in the only way they could.

The resounding message from the voters on Nov. 2 was not that they had experienced a change of heart about Republican government. They are still wary of the Republican Party, still inclined to blame it for the policies that they believe contributed heavily to the economic mess we face today, and they are particularly concerned about its members who ran as Tea Partiers.

But they were willing to put all that to one side in this election and deliver an urgent message of their own to the Democrats.

The number of voters who told exit pollsters that jobs led their lists of concerns dwarfed everything else — health care, the environment, you name it. And those voters want to see improvement in that area.

Their message was clear — their expectations aren't being met.

What this means for the future of the Obama presidency is not immediately clear. I suspect much will depend upon what Obama does in the next couple of years. He must be a leader. He must bring diverse people together.

He will have to do things he has not had to do up to this point in his life — not just his political life but his life in general.

But Democrats in the House should have taken a long, hard, critical look at the leadership record of Nancy Pelosi.

The electoral defeat, the loss of control of the House was as much Pelosi's failure as Obama's. Yes, Obama is the president, the leader of his party. His support appears to have meant very little for embattled Democrats across the nation, and the Republicans' midterm triumphs are being interpreted as a rejection of Obama's leadership. Certainly, he deserves his share of the blame.

But a loss of this magnitude reflects poorly on the speaker, perhaps more than it does on the president. The president is the head of the executive branch of government; the speaker is the most visible leader of half of the legislative branch.

These were her people who got swept away in the Republican tsunami. Any serious evaluation of the reasons for this defeat must reach the conclusion that Pelosi failed to adequately defend her colleagues — and that is why her retention in a leadership role is so bewildering.

If I had been asked before the election, I would have said that no House speaker who presided over the loss of more than 60 seats in a single election would be kept in a leadership position.

I would have said that, it seems to me, the logical thing for a devastated party to do is seek new blood to lead it.

In fact, if it had been up to me, I would have chosen North Carolina's Heath Shuler over Pelosi.

Shuler, as you may know, spent a few years playing pro football, but he retired after injuring his foot, completed his degree work at the University of Tennessee (where he had been runnerup for the Heisman Trophy) and embarked on a new career in real estate. He was elected to the House in 2006, defeating an eight–term Republican incumbent in a traditionally Republican district.

Anyway, Shuler challenged Pelosi for minority leader and was defeated. The newspaper in the largest city in Shuler's district, the Asheville Citizen–Times, and its readers were not impressed. Leroy Goldman called Shuler's bid for the leadership role a "stunt," and Angela Leonard wrote in a letter to the editor that Shuler should go ahead and join the Republican Party.

Once again, a centrist takes the blunt of the punishment for the extremists' failures.

Pelosi has been speaker since Shuler came to Washington in 2007. In Pelosi's first election after becoming speaker, Democrats enjoyed gains that were primarily due to one of two things — the presence of Obama at the top of the ticket or the presence of George W. Bush in the White House for the previous eight years.

What happened in that election had little, if anything, to do with Pelosi.

But the 2010 election results had Pelosi's fingerprints all over them. She's a polarizing figure, and Republicans capitalized on that in advertisements from coast to coast.

Yes, it is true that this election was, in part, a referendum on Obama. But let's be clear here. They've been conducting presidential approval surveys going back to FDR's days, and what happened to Obama is nothing new in the American experience. It was a little more extreme than most, not new.

But there are certain warning signs Obama should heed as he prepares for his re–election campaign. When I see things like surveys that report that 42% of people under the age of 30 are familiar with the operating system for Google's smartphones but only 14% know who the speaker of the House will be in the next Congress — I have serious doubts about the stability of Obama's 2008 coalition.

That isn't an indictment of young voters only. It seems to me that more members of every demographic group could correctly identify some product than the incoming speaker of the House — and that isn't a very good commentary on the culture in general.

But, frankly, I find it hard to understand why a House speaker whose party has just lost more than five dozen seats, many in Midwestern states that are expected to play pivotal roles in the next presidential election, should be retained as her party's leader. Haven't congressional leaders been toppled for losing much less?

That, certainly, is what recent history has told us. Newt Gingrich, after all, lost his leadership role when the Republicans lost only a handful of seats after the 1998 midterms — but they had been expected to gain ground with Bill Clinton facing impeachment proceedings. I always felt Gingrich was ousted more out of disappointment than anything else.

Gingrich's successor, Dennis Hastert, remained in the House after Democrats reclaimed control of that chamber in 2006, but he did not seek a minority leadership role and retired two years later.

And the last Democratic House speaker before Pelosi, Tom Foley, went down in the Republican tidal wave of 1994. Would he have remained as minority leader if he had not been narrowly rejected? I doubt it.

Pelosi's main argument in favor of her retention seems to be the devout belief that, had it not been for whatever role she may have played in making the tough choices about which Democrats to throw under the bus so they could reallocate electoral resources from what had come to be seen as lost causes, the 2010 midterms would have been much, much worse.

Has a familiar ring to it, doesn't it? It certainly is an odd yardstick for success — "Things could have been worse ..." — but the White House uses it. We'll see how it works out in two years.

Actually, by choosing to keep Pelosi in a leadership position, Democrats seem to be taking their cue from the last time a party lost as many seats in the House as Pelosi's did. It was 62 years ago, when Joe Martin's Republicans lost more than 70 seats after controlling both chambers of Congress for two years.

The House speaker couldn't really take the rap on that one, though. It was a presidential election year, and Democratic President Harry Truman pulled off an unexpected victory over Tom Dewey. In the process, he swept some Democrats into office along with him.

Martin may have shared some of the responsibility for the 1948 losses, but most of it surely belongs with Dewey, the party's titular leader as its presidential nominee.

Martin was retained by the Republicans as minority leader. Then, a few years later, he was restored as speaker of the House when Republicans rode the popularity of Dwight Eisenhower back into congressional power. But they collapsed in the 1954 midterms and remained the minority party for the next 40 years.

So the back–to–the–future example of Martin and the Republicans of 1948 might not be the best one for Democrats to emulate — although, two years ago, I did write about speculation that Obama was following Eisenhower's lead.

If he was, somehow he must have wandered off the path — because, although Ike's Republicans, like Obama's Democrats, were reduced to minority status in the House in the midterm elections, Eisenhower's popularity rating always was greater than his disapproval rating. The same clearly cannot be said for Obama.

I guess, though, it's always possible that Obama knows what he is doing and, in time, he will be vindicated.

Call it that vision thing.