Obama's lack of a political instinct

Mark Lilla ponders the 2010 election:

What’s particularly frustrating for someone who’s been watching the Tea Party lately is the inability of Democrats, and especially our president, to capitalize on issues where they actually have an advantage over Republicans, especially economic fairness. Many key words of our political vocabulary have been copyrighted by Republicans over the past thirty years, notably “freedom,” which was the major leitmotif of Ronald Reagan’s administrations and the label he stuck on all his foreign and domestic policies. The symbolically loaded terms that mobilized voters for the Democrats in the sixties and seventies--”equality” and “justice”--now drive them away; unfortunate but true.

But there is still one powerful symbol the Democrats could capture because today’s Republicans explicitly reject it: fairness. “Life isn’t fair” is a refrain you hear constantly from the right. Yet there is a strong sense in the nation today that things are rigged, especially at the top of the economic ladder, and this has only intensified since the bailouts of early 2009. The unwillingness of the Obama administration to engage in economic populism in this intensely populist age, when skepticism of “Wall Street” just keeps rising, is utterly baffling to me. This is the one area where they could get a toehold, if not with the Tea Party hardcore then with the vast numbers of independents who sympathize with it and have floated back to the Republican Party because of it.

I see in Wednesday’s New York Times a survey of election-day voters that touches on this and doesn’t surprise me in the least. Most responses show just how divided the nation is, except on one question: Wall Street. When asked whom they most blame for our economic troubles, 41 percent of Republicans blamed Obama, 55 percent of Democrats blamed Bush. But 32 percent of Democrats also listed Wall Street, as did--find a seat, quick--37 percent of Republican voters. At the crucial moment last year when AIG was bailed out and bonuses were paid, President Obama let pass a golden opportunity to seize the issue of economic fairness and steal some of the right’s populist thunder. Whatever political instinct it is that tells a politician he’s got an opening, that a potent political symbol is lying there waiting to be picked up, our president lacks it. As for progressive pundits and Democratic Party leaders, they need to get out of their limousines and talk to some of those people with the misspelled signs. They’ll discover some potential allies among them.

Lilla is right to distinguish the TP core from the majority of those favorable to it. When people who blame bankers for our recession are voting Republican, the messaging has been completely botched.

Obama presumably is too highminded to stoop to "class warfare," as the GOP calls it when anyone resists the upper class.