Barack Obama is receiving unprecedented mounds of advice on how he can save his Democratic Congressional classes of 2006 and '08 from the dunderheaded "Don't Know Much About History" crowd. And when it comes from heavy hitters like Bill Clinton, it makes above-the-fold news and partisans listen up with great intensity and reverberations of "Hear hear!" are heard across the land, in print, friendly broadcasts and blogs.
Yet most of that advice is superfluous, or irreconcilable with perceived political reality in the trenches, or both.
Case in point: Clinton's vastly sensible exhortation, in an interview with Politico, that Obama & Co. should nationalize the midterm elections. Gingrich proved its feasibility 16 years ago, the former president reminded us; Obama can replicate the experiment.
The interview appeared on Thursday of this week. Four days earlier, in the NY Times, there was this:
"President Obama’s political advisers ... are considering a range of ideas, including national advertisements, to cast the Republican Party as all but taken over by Tea Party extremists...."
That takes care of the superfluity. Its twin complication -- irreconcilability -- soon followed:
"[The Democratic Party's] House and Senate campaign committees are resistant, not wanting to do anything that smacks of nationalizing the midterm elections when high unemployment and the drop in Mr. Obama’s popularity have made the climate so hostile to Democrats. Endangered Congressional candidates want any available money to go to their localized campaigns."
The far deeper but generally uncited complication resting behind Clinton's sound advice and Obama's unrequited intentions is that "endangered Congressional" Dems are unfrankly indifferent to a Democratic majority. Sure, membership in another majority would be nice, each is thinking, but protecting his or her own seat is Job One; they'd much rather secure their salaries and augmenting pensions and fawning staffs as members of a minority rather than risk looking for work in January.
The irony, of course, is that their insuperable self-preservationism will likely produce both a Democratic minority and their own emeritus status.
My perplexity, however, arises when advice such as Clinton's is greeted as somehow revolutionary, creatively unorthodox, or just plain fresh. Obama already knew that nationalizing the midterm elections is the sounder strategic route to take, but he's saddled with Rahm Emanuel's unnatural, Blue Dog marginal majority which individually is far more worried about job security than the nation's fate.