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Democrat in Chief?

Obama still has a strong connection with voters. Whether this connection helps other Democrats get elected remains to be seen.Credit...Luke Sharrett/The New York Times

A year and a half after they sat, shivering and awestruck, on a January morning and listened to the sounds of a million cheers careering off the marble walls of the Capitol, the Democrats who work under the dome can feel those same walls closing in fast. Throughout the dismal spring, it seemed as if every visiting delegation that drove up in a coach bus — Main Street merchants, family farmers, Rotarians and Elks — arrived with tales of angst and unrest back home. Every well-paid pollster who came through the door brought with him a stack of surveys and focus-group memos, each more dispiriting than the last, numbers portending an emphatic rejection of the majority in this fall’s elections. Every new thickly bound jobs report landed with a sickening thud on the desks of committee chairmen — a reminder that, despite modest improvements, time was running out to change people’s minds about the direction of the economy.

And then there was the president — their president — who for 17 months had cajoled them into taking tough votes on stimulus spending, on the trading of carbon emissions, on health care. Barack Obama, the postpartisan president. He continued to go out and shake his head disbelievingly at “the culture of Washington,” which to the Democrats in the House sounded as if he were saying that his own party was the problem, as if somehow the Democratic majorities in Congress hadn’t managed to navigate the bulk of his ambitious agenda past a blockade of Republican vessels, their ship shredded by cannon fire. And all this while the president’s own approval ratings fell below 50 percent — an ominous sign, historically speaking, for a majority party.

This frustration among Democrats was bound to find an outlet, and that’s what happened at a meeting in Nancy Pelosi’s conference room at the end of April to discuss the party’s election-year message. Around three sides of the table were close to a dozen Democratic leaders in the House. On the remaining side sat David Axelrod, the president’s senior adviser and message-molder, along with two other White House operatives: Jim Messina, the deputy chief of staff, and Stephanie Cutter, a senior aide to the president.

Chris Van Hollen, the Maryland congressman in charge of House campaigns this fall, and James Clyburn, the Democratic whip and an Obama ally, complained to Axelrod about the president’s unrelenting assault on Washington rather than on Republicans specifically, according to three people who were in the room. “A ‘Washington is broken’ message doesn’t help incumbents running for Congress,” Van Hollen pleaded with the aides.

Axelrod said the House leaders needed to listen to what the president was actually saying out there — Obama was, in fact, drawing sharp contrasts between his party and the Republicans. But Axelrod also informed them that the president would continue to acknowledge the general discontent with Washington in his public comments, in the hope that he might help lessen what White House aides sometimes call the “toxicity” in the air. He would make the case for Democrats by reminding voters of all that he and his party had been able to accomplish legislatively, even without Republican help. Washington was broken, and if you told people what you were doing to fix it, then they would side with you. “You’re not going to will it away — the discontent,” Axelrod said. “The most important message is that we took on difficult problems, and they sat on the sidelines and rooted for failure.”

This didn’t satisfy the Congressional leaders, who thought the message had to be more about their “fighting for the middle class” versus the indifference of Republicans. They wanted Obama to go out there and tell the public that installing a Republican Congress would be like climbing into a time machine and teleporting right back to the Bush era. Privatizing Social Security, ending Medicare, repealing the health care law and reinstating tax cuts for the wealthy — that’s what the Republicans were proposing, and the lawmakers said they needed Obama to drive that point home with the electorate.

Voices rose and drowned out other voices as the meeting grew tense. “The fact is,” Pelosi said, addressing herself to Axelrod, “that the longer you say Washington is broken, and you’ve been saying that for 18 months, the more that becomes the story.”

When the other lawmakers departed for a vote, Pelosi remained with the White House aides and some staff members. The speaker strolled down to Axelrod’s end of the table and delivered the message bluntly. Obama, she insisted, needed to be cutting and clear about the choice between parties that he was asking voters to make. Did the president really think he could enhance his own standing with the public by criticizing his Democratic allies?

“Look, if the president could take 10 points off his numbers to give you 10 seats — ” Axelrod began, referring to Obama’s approval ratings.

“That’s not what we want,” Pelosi said, cutting him off. “That doesn’t do any of us any good.” In the end, Axelrod pointedly declined to say that the president would stop acknowledging the failures of both parties in Washington, but the message was received. In the weeks that followed, Obama intensified his rhetoric about Republicans, playing to his constituencies on the Hill as well as to the audiences he was addressing.

This was not only a conversation about the fall elections but also an airing of grievances that have been building slowly since the opening days of the administration, when Obama sided with Republicans by condemning some of the more easily caricatured provisions of the stimulus bill, like money for family planning and to restore the National Mall. Perhaps the most significant moment in Obama’s State of the Union address came when, after chastising Congress for its extreme partisanship, he cut off applause from the Democratic side of the aisle. “I’m speaking to both parties now,” Obama scolded.

For Democrats in Congress, what Obama does over the next several months — and how passionately he does it — will answer some unresolved questions about the kind of party leader he aspires to be. For most of George W. Bush’s presidency, he and his resident Machiavelli, Karl Rove, made little secret of their grand plan to sculpture a partisan majority that would endure for decades, enabling Republicans to reshape American society. After Democrats took a sledgehammer to those ambitions in 2006 and 2008, expanding their own sphere of dominance from coastal cities into the suburbs of the Midwest and the Rocky Mountain states and even into the South, many of the party’s leaders in Congress talked openly of their own lasting, Rooseveltian realignment.

Unlike his predecessor and some of his own political allies, however, Obama has never betrayed much interest in building political empires. Obama ran on the notion of transcending partisan distinctions, rather than making them permanent, and the political identity that enabled him to draw millions of new voters into the process two years ago is both intensely personal and self-contained. It’s not clear that Obama can translate his appeal among disaffected voters into support for a party and its aging Washington establishment. Nor is it clear, as he looks ahead to 2012, how hard he’s going to try.

It is difficult to overstate the role that 1994 plays in the tormented psyche of the Democratic Party. For those who went through them, those midterms were less a bunch of elections than a single, sudden event that they never saw coming until it was on them, like something out of “War of the Worlds.” Most of the Democrats who woke up firmly in control of American government on Nov. 8, 1994, had no memory of a time when they didn’t make all the laws, and they couldn’t really conceive of it; by nightfall, 40 years of near-total Democratic dominance in both houses of Congress had been washed away. The costs, for years afterward, were too painful to fully contemplate. Without the voter uprising of 1994, there would have been no Speaker Gingrich, no impeachment and almost certainly no George W. Bush, who, by winning election as the governor of Texas, found himself swept into office that year along with a lot of other political neophytes who might otherwise have disappeared into political obscurity.

Republicans in 1994 gained a net total of 54 House seats and 8 Senate seats and emerged with a majority of governors for the first time in more than 20 years, and state legislatures for the first time in a half century. This year, they need to gain 40 House seats and 8 Senate seats to regain control. Taking back the House is eminently doable; taking the Senate is remote but hardly unthinkable. Contempt for Washington — personified by incumbent candidates in both parties — is everywhere, as evidenced by this year’s early primaries in May, in which two sitting senators (Robert Bennett of Utah and Arlen Specter in Pennsylvania) were knocked off and a Republican senatorial candidate in Kentucky who had the blessing of the national party was sunk. The glimmer of hope here for Democrats is that the antiestablishment fervor in a wide number of Republican primaries is likely to yield more than a few nominees who are on the extreme end of the ideological spectrum (Rand Paul in Kentucky, say), making the Republican alternative a harder sell for a lot of moderate and unaffiliated voters.

Meanwhile, Democratic governors are bracing for their own losses. The effect of a drubbing at the state level, while likely to garner less attention than what happens in Washington, could be devastating for Democrats, just as it proved to be 16 years ago. Governors have generally proved to be the intellectual catalysts for both parties, and it’s not incidental that four of the five presidents immediately preceding Obama sprang from their ranks. Parties that fail to hold governors’ mansions also fail to develop compelling candidates for national office.

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NEW POLITICKING On behalf of the Democratic Party, Obama is expected to shake hands with donors and tour factories. But the business of politics is somewhat at odds with his brand.Credit...Luke Sharrett/The New York Times

No matter how similar conditions throughout the country now may seem, 2010 really isn’t all that comparable to 1994, if only because the underlying forces that are endangering Democrats this year — that is, the structural trends in the electorate — are quite different. The 1994 elections marked the culmination of a decades-long transformation. For 30 years before then, since the triumph of the civil rights agenda, Democratic strongholds in the South and in the working-class Midwest had been teetering toward the Republicans. Bill Clinton’s missteps no doubt hastened this process, but so did redistricting based on the 1990 Census, after which Democrats were assured safe, urban seats in minority districts while whiter, more conservative districts were created in the suburbs. The 1994 campaigns were the first waged on this map in a nonpresidential election year, and it all but guaranteed that many longtime Democrats would lose.

This year’s challenge for Democrats has more to do with the normal cycles of what you might call tidal politics. (And not the kind created by oil gushing into the Gulf of Mexico.) Think of presidential years as the high tide coming in. That is, a successful presidential candidate usually, though not always, carries with him a wave of Congressional seats, depending on the scale of the victory. During the off years, the tide generally goes out again, and the president’s party is bound to lose some of those marginal seats. Only two presidents since 1862 have seen their parties gain House seats in their first midterm election. One was Franklin D. Roosevelt, whose Republican opponents were still reeling from that whole Great Depression thing. The other was George W. Bush, in part because of fears of terrorism, but also because he had been elected without a plurality of the popular vote in 2000, meaning he hadn’t carried a wave of marginal congressmen into office to begin with. If the tide doesn’t come in, then it doesn’t go out, either.

In 2006 and 2008, Democrats did something that had not been done in American politics since the Great Depression, which is to string together two consecutive “wave” elections — roughly defined as a gain of at least 20 seats in the House of Representatives. They gained a total of 55 House seats and 12 seats in the Senate; the tide came in twice and with unusual strength. That means that some significant number of the Democrats elected in the last two cycles, to put it bluntly, really don’t have much business holding their seats in the first place. Either their districts normally trend Republican — 49 Democratic House members were elected from districts that voted for John McCain — or they themselves probably wouldn’t have cleared the threshold for a successful candidacy in a more conventional election year. (Eric Massa, the former Democratic representative from New York who admitted to the intense tickling of a staff member at a birthday party, comes to mind.)

Neither Obama nor any other Democratic president was ever going to keep the tide from leaving the beach in 2010, and certainly not with the economy lurching slowly from awful to just plain bad. The only question is whether the Democrats will lose control in at least one chamber of Congress, an outcome that might paralyze Obama’s presidency and thrust his party into a prolonged depression of its own.

Of the five living Americans who have served as president, Obama is the only one who never worked as some kind of party strategist. George H. W. Bush oversaw the Republican National Committee for a time, and his son, George W. Bush, played a pivotal role in the headquarters of his father’s failed re-election bid in 1992. Bill Clinton got his start in politics helping to run George McGovern’s campaign in Texas. Even Jimmy Carter, who was thought to disdain tactical politics, was the chairman of the Democratic Party’s national midterm campaign in 1974. These men rose through their party organizations (in Bush’s case, this was more about a famous name than it was about holding a series of jobs), and they were intimate with the relatively cozy world of organizers, donors and local power brokers, the few thousand activists who control the workings of a political party.

Obama did his door-to-door campaigning as a community organizer, but he never worked in party politics until he ran for office, and as a presidential aspirant he never bothered with trying to remake his party or modernize its message in the same way that Reagan (a spokesman for the conservative movement) or Clinton (a leader of the centrist New Democrats) did. Other than to assert (dubiously, perhaps) that he wasn’t a “triangulator” like the Clintons, Obama did not run against the party establishment, as other candidates had before, but with indifference toward it.

In this way, as in many others, Obama is emblematic of the generation that found its political consciousness in the years after Vietnam and Watergate, when the ruling classes of both parties lost their credibility. Carter, Clinton and George W. Bush were presidents rooted in their parties who went out of their way to cultivate outsider pedigrees. Obama, a good 15 years younger than our last two boomer presidents, is the opposite; he is a genuine outsider who spends a fair amount of energy reassuring Democrats that he really does care about the organization.

“Fundamentally, I just think he wants to be bigger than that,” says Cornell Belcher, who was one of Obama’s pollsters during the 2008 campaign. “It gets back to being a transformational leader. A party leader isn’t about transformation.”

Obama’s advisers have spoken of his brand, which is a stand-in for the party identity that defined other presidencies. Obama’s brand is about inclusivity, transcendence, a generational break from stale dogmas. Inevitably, Obama’s brand management runs up against the culture of his party. State activists are sometimes told their requests for the president to appear at a typical political event, in some ballroom with room dividers or at the local labor hall, aren’t going to fly. Aides know that if they bring that kind of thing to Obama, he’ll ask, “Can’t we do any better than that?” As a rule, Obama no longer speaks at the traditional Jefferson-Jackson dinners where state Democratic parties gather to raise money from the faithful. “For what?” a senior aide responded when I asked why. “To talk to the same people he already has?” Obama prefers venues, preferably outdoors or in large theaters, where he can reach voters who aren’t party regulars. He generally refuses to do “robo-calls,” those ubiquitous, recorded messages in which a politician asks you to go out and vote for the party. “He’s got a practical objection to them, which is that they’re irritating,” Axelrod explained to me.

While Obama attended four times the number of fund-raising events that Bill Clinton did during his first year in office, he garnered a fraction of the contributions. “He is the worst Washington fund-raiser in the history of presidents,” a White House aide proudly admitted to me a few months back. All of this exasperates operatives on the Hill who are obsessed with keeping other Democrats in office, and who think maybe Obama should be a little more obsessed with it too. “When you go to the D.N.C., his picture is on that wall,” a longtime strategist who is working for a Congressional campaign told me. “There’s a reason.”

Unlike other modern presidents, Obama, who was elected largely on the strength of an unprecedented outpouring of small-dollar contributions, has no Terry McAuliffe, someone whose unspoken job it is to make sure the party’s donors are kept happy and engaged. David Plouffe is his strategist, Axelrod a message guy, Valerie Jarrett a kind of ambassador and protector — but none of them have raised huge sums of cash from big contributors, and none of them are nearly as devoted to the party’s prospects as they are to the president. In fact, Obama seems to have outsourced much of the traditional party-leadership role to Rahm Emanuel and Joe Biden, the two principal Washington insiders in his administration, both of whom seem better suited to the role.

Unlike Clinton, who loved the game of politics almost as much as the governance, Obama doesn’t pore over polling data or study the shaded zones on electoral maps. For that he has Emanuel, his chief of staff, who was the chief strategist behind the Democratic takeover of the House in 2006 and who knows as much about the individual Congressional districts in play as any operative in town. Because of this history, Emanuel occupies a unique position in the West Wing and one that places him apart from the close circle of loyalists who have been alongside Obama from the first day of his presidential campaign. Emanuel, too, is devoted to the president, but he also maintains close relationships with dozens of the House members he recruited, and friends say he anguishes, more than Obama or other White House advisers, about the possibility of losing their seats.

He’s also not above getting involved in party primaries; it was Emanuel, according to the White House’s own report last month, who initiated the effort to try to nudge Joe Sestak, the Pennsylvania congressman, out of the race for the Democratic Senate nomination in that state so that Arlen Specter could run unopposed. Sestak, of course, stayed in the race and won. Stories about potential job offers to Sestak and another primary challenger, Colorado’s Andrew Romanoff, have attracted attention from the news media and from Republicans, which speaks to the importance of the Obama brand in this election year. Such informal overtures are a standard and predictable part of politics in both parties (Karl Rove was relentless in trying to clear certain primary fields during the midterm elections of 2002). But Obama has cast himself above such things, which is why stories of tawdry favor-swapping have a resonance in Washington that they would not otherwise have.

Meanwhile, although Obama has to this point headlined only a handful of fund-raising events dedicated to House members, Biden has happily attended more than 15 of them, with more on the calendar. This is partly because the loquacious vice president has yet to meet the podium he doesn’t want to fling himself upon, but also because, in a lot of the more conservative, working-class districts in the South and Midwest, Obama’s approval ratings are considerably lower than they are in national surveys. In these parts of the country, Biden — plain-talking, profane and nobody’s idea of a closet Muslim — may not only be a more enthusiastic partisan than the president but a more persuasive one as well.

If the president isn’t going to be his party’s chief strategist or its most prolific fund-raiser, then aides say there are two things he will do for his party that are, ultimately, more important — and that are, not coincidentally, in keeping with the brand. The first is to remind voters that Democrats didn’t create the current economic morass. As Rahm Emanuel told me when we sat down in April, “The American people know overwhelmingly that he inherited a” — and here Emanuel used a word I can’t repeat — “sandwich.” (Suffice it to say the sandwich wasn’t pastrami.) “They know that. They don’t need to be educated. I believe it’s worth reminding them of the scale, size and scope of the” — that word again — “sandwich we got.

“Ultimately,” Emanuel went on, “everything about politics — everything, everything — is about choice. The choice is not about what we did versus the ideal. The choice is about what we did versus what we inherited. We inherited George Bush’s Great Recession, and we broke its back.” Emanuel is fond of talking about breaking the body parts of things — backs, necks, etc. “We inherited the financial ruins of Wall Street, and we fixed them. We inherited a country in the worst fiscal condition it has ever been in, and we are in the beginning stages of finding a consensus to turn that around. But the option of going back is not an option, and we’re in the early stages of digging out of the ditch we got handed.”

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Credit...Luke Sharrett/The New York Times

Emanuel said that Obama would continue to spend a block of every month on the road, as he has since January, when voters in Massachusetts elected Scott Brown, a Republican, to what had been Ted Kennedy’s seat in the Senate. “We’re getting him out of here, out of Washington,” he said. “I want him less here and more in the country, and when he’s out in the country, more in touch with people.”

The second thing Obama can do for Democrats, in the view of the White House, is to change the way they run their campaigns. Democrats running for the House and the Senate, like the party’s presidential candidates, have generally relied almost exclusively on the unions and other constituency groups to get out the vote, using paid phone banks and door-knockers. Starting out, Obama didn’t have that option. His party’s existing organizational structure was largely beholden to Hillary Clinton through the 2008 primaries, so Obama recruited an army of volunteers, many of them previously uninvolved in any kind of party politics, who ended up organizing blocks and precincts in their towns, lobbying neighbors door to door on Obama’s behalf and squeezing out the vote on Election Day. It was, in effect, much like the volunteer-driven network employed by Bush’s campaign in 2004, although less centralized and more Internet-focused.

Obama emerged from the campaign having assembled what was essentially an alternative apparatus to the party itself — a closely guarded, state-by-state list of more than 10 million names, many of them door-knockers, phone-bankers, letter-writers and small-dollar donors. This network, loyal to the president but not necessarily to his party, helped Obama amass upward of $300 million for the general election and registered millions of new voters for him. The shorthand for all this, in Obama’s orbit, is “the new politics,” meaning that what Obama created is the replacement for the special-interest politics of the last century. The new politics are tactical, encompassing no specific ideological agenda, although most of the more ardent adherents tend to consider themselves more liberal than the party establishment. Obama’s advisers say they believe they can, at least in some measure, bequeath the new politics to the party itself. And their message to Congressional Democrats running this year is that if they don’t adopt the tactics of the Obama campaign, they’re probably going to lose.

To understand why this might just be true, it helps to revisit the tactics that made Obama only the fourth Democratic president in history — Jackson, Roosevelt, Johnson and Obama — to claim more than 51 percent of the vote. There were, roughly speaking, two ways in which Obama managed to change the electoral calculus for Democrats. First, if exit polls can be believed, he carried 52 percent of independent voters, outpacing John McCain by eight points. The other major component was to simply create more voters — and this is where the new politics were especially important. Obama’s campaign team maintains that its volunteers had a lot to do with getting some 15 million to 20 million first-time voters out to the polls, and about 7 in 10 of those voters cast their ballots for Obama. The campaign pulled more black voters, Hispanic voters and white college-age voters into the process than most analysts previously thought possible, which made a crucial difference in more conservative states like Indiana, North Carolina and Virginia.

Twenty months later, if independents haven’t deserted the party altogether, then they certainly seem to be gathering their things and saying their goodbyes. The progressive policy group Third Way, analyzing exit-poll data from last year’s governor’s races in Virginia and New Jersey and the special Senate election in Massachusetts in January, found that only about a third of independents in all three states voted Democratic, compared with about 54 percent who voted for Obama in 2008. According to the latest polling from the Pew Research Center, Obama’s standing among independents has dropped from a high of 63 percent early in his presidency to about 47 percent now.

That would seem to leave only one way for Democrats to avoid being swept away on the receding tide, and that’s to turn out some sizable portion of those first time-voters from 2008 — the “surge voters,” as his aides like to refer to them. This was hard enough to do in a presidential year, but in a midterm cycle, when generally only the most reliable voters bother to participate, it feels almost wishful. The disappointing turnout among these younger, more educated and minority voters in New Jersey and Virginia in 2009 jolted a lot of Democrats who assumed, after 2008, that Obama’s victory somehow permanently changed the electoral math.

“What we’ve seen over the course of Obama’s time in office so far is that his constituencies have been relatively sleepy compared to his opposition,” Andrew Kohut, the president of the Pew Research Center, told me. “Voting is a habit. The problem with these people” — meaning the surge voters — “is that they came out for the first time, and so they’re nonhabitual voters. Not only does Obama have to do what he did back in ’08 in terms of getting them to come out in greater numbers, but he has to get them to shake off their drowsiness.”

The chief architect and spiritual leader of the new politics is David Plouffe, who retains a kind of mystical aura among Obama’s campaign confidants, probably because he was the only member of the inner circle to decline a role in the administration. His record remains unsullied by the inevitable failures of governance. This is why, days after Scott Brown’s victory, the White House let it be known that Plouffe would be coming back as an “outside adviser” for the midterms. The announcement of Plouffe’s return was meant to head off a panic among jittery congressmen and senators who worried that the president had lost control of the political environment. Plouffe personified the notion (true or not) that Obama really did have a plan for 2010, and absent that, it might have been much harder to get a lot of vulnerable Democrats to cast difficult votes for health care reform.

At 43, Plouffe is a boyish-looking, somewhat-reclusive operative who makes little secret of his disdain for Washington. When I visited him in April at the K Street building where he rents a one-room office but rarely actually visits, he seemed intent on dispelling the impression that the White House itself wanted to create last January. “I think my role was described in a way that was sort of overheated after Massachusetts,” Plouffe told me. “You know how Washington is. It’s always, what kind of change is going to happen in the aftermath of a setback? That’s just kind of a ritual in Washington. And so in this case, me spending a little more time on things became part of that.

“We’re not running these campaigns,” Plouffe declared, lightly pounding a conference table, surrounded by signed posters of Obama. “It’s the candidates, most important, the consultants and the staff — they’re running the campaigns. They’re allocating the resources. They’re executing their strategy every day. And the notion that the White House was going to come in and take over the running of these campaigns is just asinine. It’s just not grounded in reality.”

Even so, Plouffe says he has been thinking about how to hold the surge voters since the day Obama was elected. Within weeks after the campaign ended, Plouffe took the grass-roots campaign organization known as Obama for America and renamed it Organizing for America, moving the entire operation into the first floor of the renovated Democratic National Committee building, in the space set aside for the party’s nominee during presidential campaign years. The idea was to transform Obama’s list of activists and small-dollar contributors into a neighborhood-by-neighborhood organization that could be mobilized to support his policy agenda, starting with energy and health care.

The job of integrating O.F.A., as it is known, into the Democratic National Committee fell to Tim Kaine, then the governor of Virginia, whom Obama named party chairman in January 2009. Kaine was an early endorser of Obama’s and is a devotee of the new politics, and anyone who spends much time in the national headquarters today will quickly realize that, under his direction, O.F.A. has virtually supplanted the party structure. O.F.A. is sending some 300 paid organizers to the states — several times the number the national party hired for the 2006 midterms under Kaine’s predecessor, Howard Dean. When Democratic officials inside the headquarters say “we,” they are more often than not talking about O.F.A. rather than the party organization that existed before.

The transition from being an outside-the-establishment campaign organization to being an inside-the-establishment policy promoter has not been an easy one for O.F.A. The first year was marked by widespread frustration, as volunteers tried to get their heads around the arcane changes in, say, the health care bill as it meandered its way through Congress, while simultaneously being urged not to attack members of their own party who wavered on the agenda. “Sometimes the lack of tangibility can be distressing for people,” Plouffe told me. “Because they’ll go out there and say: ‘I worked hard. I had a press conference. I had all these people write letters to the editor. And my member of Congress voted against health care. It didn’t seem to matter.’ That’s reality, unfortunately.

“That’s what’s good about elections,” Plouffe added — that volunteers know how they can affect the outcome. “If they go out there and talk to 10 new voters, and 4 of them say yes, they’re inclined to vote, then you can take that to the bank, because you know that’s important, and you understand how that fits into the whole thing.” The mission for O.F.A. in this election year, Plouffe told me, is to re-energize enough of Obama’s base to subtly shift the math in enough competitive districts to minimize Democratic losses. Volunteers will do this one phone call and one door-knock at a time, armed with voter files containing the names of those first-time registrants who might be compelled to vote again. Kaine announced in April that the party was making a $50 million commitment to its Congressional, Senate and gubernatorial candidates, but only about $20 million of that money will come in cash, to be divided among the various campaign committees. The rest will be transferred in kind, through on-the-ground organization — and, in that way, Plouffe and his team may end up directing more of the midterm campaigns than he’d like to admit.

“I’m not going to suggest we’re going to change the electorate like we did in 2008,” Plouffe said, tamping down expectations again. “But I think we can have some impact on the electorate in November. So perhaps it’s a shade younger, or perhaps it’s a little more African-American than it’s been in past off years.”

For Plouffe, the unstated goal is to lay the groundwork for Obama’s re-election campaign in 2012. By trying to build up volunteer networks in states like Indiana and Virginia and Colorado, all states where Democrats have crucial Congressional and Senate races this fall, Plouffe and his operatives are looking not just to protect their Congressional majorities but also to reconnect with the surge voters whom Obama brought into the process, in hopes that they won’t just get bored with politics and wander away in the years between presidential campaigns, never to return.

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Credit...Luke Sharrett/The New York Times

This time, however, O.F.A. volunteers won’t be asking their friends and neighbors to vote for a young, electric, racially transcendent presidential candidate. Instead, in a lot of districts, they’ll be asking their friends and neighbors to vote for some aging member of Congress who has been on the ballot 10 times already, which is a considerably harder sell. “Let’s be clear — these are not Democratic voters,” Cornell Belcher, the Obama campaign pollster, cautioned me. “They’re Obama voters.” The lesson that Plouffe and his operation took away from the dismal 2009 elections is that Obama can act like a matchmaker of sorts, introducing the party’s candidates to new voters and vouching for their intentions, but it’s only going to matter if the candidates themselves embrace the so-called new politics. What that means, practically speaking, is that the White House is urging candidates to divert a fair amount of their time and money — traditionally used for buying TV ads and rallying core constituencies — to courting volunteers and voters who haven’t generally been reliable Democrats.

This is not what members of Congress or their campaign managers are trained to do, and it has created something of a cultural chasm between the White House and the party apparatus. There is a strong generational component here. With some exceptions, Obama’s passion for organizing finds more enthusiasm among candidates closer to the president’s age and newer to politics (candidates like Senator Michael Bennet of Colorado), while older Democrats have a harder time imagining that a bunch of volunteers and a dozen virtual town-hall meetings are going to matter more than labor endorsements and some killer 30-second spots. Longtime party strategists also point out, fairly, that Obama raised such an absurd amount of money during his presidential campaign that he never had to choose between, say, TV ads and door-to-door canvassers in any given state; he had both, and in record numbers. Few, if any, House or Senate candidates will have that kind of good fortune, which means, for most Democrats, that embracing the new politics also means cutting back on other bedrock campaign tactics.

One respected Democratic Senate aide who is skeptical of the Plouffe strategy suggested to me that Obama’s emphasis on O.F.A., like the controversial “50-state strategy” that Howard Dean pursued as party chairman, was just the latest fad to distract the party headquarters from its more fundamental mission of raising cash and airing ads. “The D.N.C. has allowed itself to become a Rorschach test of whatever politics is at the time,” the aide told me. “ ‘We are whatever you want us to be’ is the new politics. What we’ve gotten away from is being there for the campaigns.”

By Democratic Party standards, this is a relatively muted internal disagreement. But it nonetheless points to the emergence of rival schools of thought within the party when it comes to Obama’s importance as a party leader. Some see him as having transformed both the electorate and the nature of campaigning in what could be a lasting and fundamental way, meaning that things are possible now — both in terms of liberal governance and winning elections — that did not seem possible before. Others view 2008 mostly as a cathartic election that had more to do with conditions in the country than with Obama’s peculiar magic, and they don’t think the party should assume that there are millions of new voters out there who can be tapped if you just knock on the right doors. These two worldviews coexist uneasily among the party’s elected officials and candidates, young and old, in every part of the country — sometimes just hours apart.

Virginia’s second Congressional district winds around the state’s easternmost shore and leaps across the Chesapeake Bay to Virginia Beach and Norfolk, home to the largest Naval basein the world. In 2008, Obama carried the district by a mere two points on his way to an impressive victory in the state. If you get on the road and drive about 100 miles due west, you’ll hit the fifth Congressional district, which encompasses the fading manufacturing cities of Martinsville and Danville, along with a lot of old tobacco towns and some of the highest unemployment rates in the state. Here the election tilted the other way, but again it was close, with McCain winning by about the same two-point margin. In both districts, however, the surge vote in 2008 was strong enough to unseat Republican representatives and replace them with a pair of novice Democrats whom no one had given much of a chance until the final weeks: Glenn Nye in the second district and Tom Perriello in the fifth.

On paper, Nye and Perriello were remarkably similar candidates. Both men were just 34 when they ran, their birthdays exactly one month apart. Nye is a Georgetown graduate who worked for the federal government in the Balkans and Iraq. Perriello is a product of Yale’s law school and a former human rights lawyer in West Africa. Both won in mostly white, historically conservative districts with sizable African-American voting blocs and similar per-capita incomes. Both Nye and Perriello will tell you that the voters who elected them are tired of ideological barriers and voted for a new kind of pragmatism.

“They wanted to get away from the model of just voting the party line and doing what the party leadership says,” Nye told me during a recent conversation in his Washington office. “When I talked to people back home, what I heard consistently is that we’d really like someone who uses their own conscience and their own mind to make decisions that they think are best for the district.” Perriello told me much the same thing when I visited him in his district, as we slogged through a mix of mud and manure at a dairy farm to show how stimulus money was being used to make energy out of dung. “There was a decidedly anti-ideological component to the vote,” Perriello said. “It was a reaction to the ideological extremism of the Bush administration, replacing it with someone who didn’t fit a traditionally liberal space but who represented a more pragmatic approach.”

And yet, Nye and Perriello have very different ideas about what pragmatism means. Nye, who practices moderation in the mold of a Southern blue-dog Democrat, voted for the stimulus package early on, but since then he has broken with Obama on some of the administration’s most pressing domestic initiatives, including the energy plan and health care reform. Perriello, whose 727-vote margin of victory in 2008 was the tightest in the country, has instead been one of the more tireless advocates for Obama’s agenda. When he has criticized the president and his advisers, it has been because Perriello sees the White House as insufficiently courageous in taking on Wall Street and unemployment.

The distance between Nye and Perriello on the Obama agenda can be explained, in part, by some of the mundane realities of politics. Obviously the two congressmen harbor some different ideological convictions. And their districts are shaded a bit more differently than they appear on paper; Nye’s district is stamped with a military kind of conservatism that stresses national security and self-reliance, while Perriello’s leans more toward the populist variety. But there’s something deeper going on here, too, a localized version of the greater confusion that surrounds the party two years after Obama’s election. When all those Obama surge voters flooded the polling places and voted for change, what exactly were they voting for? Did postpartisanship and pragmatism mean the less ideological, more fiscally responsible vision of government that Nye thought it meant? Or was it about the progressive, ambitious approach that Perriello represents?

It’s no accident that even those who surfed in on the Obama wave should have such different notions of what it signified. Obama himself never really settled the point. During the campaign, he alternated seamlessly between two sides of his political persona: the postpartisan reformer and the progressive revivalist. On one hand, reaching out to disaffected and independent voters, he vowed to dispense with the culture wars and leave behind the 20th-century orthodoxies of both parties. At the same time, he inspired a hopeful frenzy among liberals who assumed that he was, at heart, one of them. Propelled through the fall campaign by a cratering economy and his opponent’s weak campaign, Obama was never really compelled to reconcile these two ideals. The vague notion of “change,” whatever kind of change that meant, seemed good enough for an anxious electorate.

Throughout his first year in office — perhaps out of necessity, given the near depression he inherited, but also under pressure from older leaders in his own party who spoke openly of another New Deal — Obama tilted toward progressive revival. Since the Massachusetts vote, however, Obama seems to be pushing back in the other direction, moving to reclaim his reformist appeal. In recent months, he has renewed his overtures to Republican lawmakers, thrown his support behind nuclear power and, most significant, established a commission on fiscal reform — all of which probably amounts to an acknowledgment that he can’t continue to hemorrhage confidence among the independent voters who were an integral part of his election.

In a sense, the 2010 elections, like pretty much all midterm elections, represent the coda to the presidential vote that preceded them. What happens in closely contested Congressional districts this fall — whether the Obama voters of 2008 will come out again to show their support for a Tom Perriello, whether they will re-elect a Glenn Nye, whether they will punish either man for his decisions — will go a long way toward clarifying which of the two Obamas, the reformer or the revivalist, most voters really thought they were getting. And that, in turn, will give Plouffe and the rest of the president’s inner circle a clearer sense of where the country is heading toward 2012, as they prepare to break out the maps and fire up the e-mail lists for what they expect to be the final campaign of Obama’s brief and improbable career.

Even given the strong possibility that Democrats could lose control of at least one chamber of Congress this fall, Obama’s aides seem confident about his re-election, in part because they are drawing some inspiration from another midterm election year that isn’t quite yet ancient history — not 1994, but 1982. According to Gallup, Ronald Reagan’s average approval rating during the fifth quarter of his first term — the period between January and April 1982 — was 46.3 percent, just south of Obama’s average mark of 48.8 percent over the same period in 2010. Reagan’s ratings, too, fell in close relation to the nation’s rising unemployment rate during his second year in office, as the economic recovery he had promised took hold sluggishly. The voters punished Reagan’s party in the 1982 midterm elections, but in a far less catastrophic way than they did during Clinton’s first term.

Obama’s advisers say it is only a matter of months before voters begin to feel in their daily lives the steady, if unspectacular, improvement that has been showing up in recent economic reports — and by which time, presumably, the leak off the Louisiana coast should be plugged. The question no one can answer is whether a lift in public optimism might come in time for Democrats to reap any benefit in November. Just about every strategist of either party in Washington will tell you that the best indicator of whether the voters are growing less skeptical — and, thus, of whether Democrats can survive the November elections intact — can be found in the president’s approval rating. There is a political theorem that illustrates this, supported by data from past elections and often repeated by Democrats now, and it goes like this: If the president’s approval rating is over 50 percent in the fall, then his party will suffer only moderately. If his rating is under 50 percent, however, then the pounding at the polls is likely to be a memorable one.

There is a corollary to this theorem, which Rahm Emanuel explained to me when we talked in April. For every point that Obama’s approval rating dips below 50 percent, Emanuel said, there are probably four or five more House districts that will swing into the Republican column, and vice versa. Emanuel reeled off a series of polls from that week — some that had the president just under 50 percent but one, from The Washington Post and ABC News, that put the number at 54 — in a way that made it clear that he was, if not obsessed with these numbers, then clearly transfixed by them. “It does matter where he is,” Emanuel told me. “For the midterms, if you’re at 50, that’s a different scenario for the president then if you’re at 47.”

The thing about political theorems, unlike mathematical theorems, is that they are predictive until the moment they aren’t. There are cultural and social departure points in the life of a country, markers between one period and the next, that can be fully appreciated only in hindsight, and that render old formulas suddenly obsolete. And Obama represents nothing if not a cultural departure point. As is often the case with Obama, then, the old formulas may not apply. After all, while it’s certainly not unusual for presidents to register much higher approval ratings than Congress, that divide has been particularly pronounced during Obama’s presidency; in April, while approval for the Democratic Congress was registering in the Pew poll at 25 percent, its lowest point in the 24-year history of the survey, Obama’s own approval rating remained close to 50 percent. What this disconnect means, perhaps, is that, while higher approval ratings for the president might still mean more votes for Democrats in the midterm elections, every point up or down could have less of an impact than it has in the past.

Obama seems to exist on a separate plane from his party’s other elected leaders, somehow deflecting much of the anti-Washington fervor that threatens to dispatch the rest of them. This is probably not only because voters see him as a more inspiring leader than Harry Reid or Nancy Pelosi, but also because they don’t see him as a party leader at all, at least in the traditional sense. It’s not simply how Obama came to govern that creates this impression. It’s also a simple matter of who he is. Whatever you may think of Obama’s policies or his politics, after all, his brand represents — by the very nature of his age, his life story and the color of his skin — a subversive force inside the governing establishment, and that’s his advantage in this tea-party moment. Washington is, in fact, broken — or at least most people believe it is, even if Obama stops saying so in his speeches. Voters may yet see Obama, in the years ahead, as disappointing or transformative or neither. But the one thing he will never really embody is the status quo.

Matt Bai is a national political columnist for The Times and a regular contributor to the magazine.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Page 34 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: DEMOCRAT IN CHIEF?. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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