Pirate's Cove

Well, that’s good to know, since neither the Senate nor House Democrats have actually released any sort of platform for the mid-terms as a group. At one point, Debbie Wasserman-Schultz and Nancy Pelosi promised to release a platform in 100 days. That would be the day before the election. But, according to the Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza, Obama was less than helpful to Democrats

28 words that Democrats really wish President Obama didn’t say today

President Obama was at Northwestern University on Thursday to deliver an economic speech that, he and his team hoped, would lay out the case for why the public is better off today than they were six years ago — even if they didn’t feel it in their everday lives. Instead, Obama just gave every Republican ad-maker in the country more fodder for negative ads linking Democratic candidates to him.

Here are the four sentences that will draw all of the attention (they come more than two thirds of the way through the speech): “I am not on the ballot this fall.  Michelle’s pretty happy about that.  But make no mistake: these policies are on the ballot.  Every single one of them.” Boil those four sentences down even further and here’s what you are left with: “Make no mistake: these policies are on the ballot.  Every single one of them.”

You can imagine Sen. Mark Pryor of Arkansas or Sen. Kay Hagan in North Carolina or Alison Lundergan Grimes in Kentucky grimacing when they heard those 28 words. That trio has spent much of the campaign insisting that this election is NOT about Barack Obama, that it is instead about a choice between themselves and their opponents.

Cillizza paints the problem in an obvious way: Obama is very unpopular in many of the States where Senate seats are in play. True. But he ignores a central premise: if Obama’s policies are so darned unpopular that Democrats cringe when discussing them, how good are those policies? If Democrats do not want to even bring them up, policies they either voted for or tacitly supported when Obama unilaterally decided to implement them, it’s Obvious with a capital O that the Democrat vision is Bad For America.

Crossed at Right Wing News.