During the president’s first year, as Obama’s and the Democrats’ poll numbers fell, and as the Democrats lost key elections in Virginia, New Jersey, and Massachusetts, a kind of fatalism took hold in Washington. It was inevitable, the feeling went, that an administration facing an economic downturn would get drubbed in the next elections, and perhaps even lose the House and the Senate. But this argument assumed the kind of static insider model that the Obama administration followed during its first year. This model needs to be discarded, and replaced by the kind of political model that would be familiar to Franklin Roosevelt or Ronald Reagan: one where the politics of maneuver within Washington was supplemented—or better, transformed—by a politics of vigorous protest and advocacy. That’s the real lesson of the health care battle.
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John B. Judis, Democrats Discover Their Base | The New Republic
[A good “sideways glance,” as my thesis advisor always used to day.]
