Email: About the House

Sean,

You had an emailer from Minnesota wonder why Obama isn’t campaigning against the House. Campaigning against Congress is a risky move this election season for a few reasons. The first is that Republicans control the House because many voters were angry about Obama’s agenda in his first two years. He doesn’t want those voters thinking about what made them so mad in 2009 and 2010. The second is that Obama’s budgets and spending initiatives have been shut out of Congress by unanimous or highly lopsided votes, i.e. they are wildly unpopular across the political spectrum. It’s not usually a good idea to campaign on things even your own party’s caucus doesn’t like. The third is that if Obama focuses on the House, the election becomes about who to blame for the dismal performance of the last four years. That’s an argument that the incumbent can’t win, not cleanly. You can’t build a memorable message around “Blame someone else.” Hence the Obama’s campaign to try to make this about the fearful, miserable, Dickensian future we will all endure if Romney wins.The ‘campaign against Congress’ is a story about Truman running for reelection. If you’re read the MASSIVE Cullough biography for Truman (Cullough wrote the John Adams biography), there are many interesting nuggets in it. Truman went to Hollywood for support and the biggest supporter was Ronald Reagan. On the campaign trail, there were huge crowds that met Truman which reporters wrote off as irrelevant as they wrote ‘few have ever seen a living president’. Truman and his wife lived at her parents house. The first house they had to themselves was the White House… which was full of rats (White House was then renovated).  Truman had a ton of energy compared to FDR who was wheelchair bound that the Secret Service kept losing him because he moved around too fast. After Truman won, the press had a dinner where they ate crow.

But one nugget was that no one believed Truman could win against Dewey except one person in Truman’s inner circle. He said the reason why was because the economy was good, and Americans don’t vote out presidents when the economy is good.

I don’t think Truman got re-elected because he ran against Congress, he got re-elected because of a booming post WWII economy.