Byron York makes the following prediction for the Washington Examiner: The president will start playing the blame game:
Will Barack Obama interpret the vote as a repudiation of much of his agenda, or will he conclude that he made a few tactical errors but was still right on the big issues?
Bet on the latter. All indications coming out of the White House suggest that if Democrats suffer major losses, the president and his top aides will resolutely refuse to reconsider the policies — national health care, stimulus, runaway spending — that led to their defeat. Instead, they will point fingers in virtually every direction other than their own.
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1. Obama will blame voters, not himself. At a small fundraiser in Massachusetts Saturday, Obama suggested Democrats are in trouble because recession-weary Americans simply aren’t thinking clearly. “Part of the reason that our politics seems so tough right now, and facts and science and argument do not seem to be winning the day all the time, is because we’re hard-wired not to always think clearly when we’re scared,” Obama said. “And the country is scared.” If Democrats lose, Obama is likely to fault voters’ irrationality, and not anything he has done.
2. Obama will spin the outcome as an illegitimate GOP victory. In recent weeks, the president and top administration officials have accused the Chamber of Commerce of illegally using foreign contributions to fund ads critical of Democrats. There’s no evidence to support the charge, but Obama has laid the foundation for a simple explanation of Democratic defeat: Republicans cheated.
3. Obama will blame a broken process. In a recent New York Times article, reporter Peter Baker asked a number of White House aides about mistakes Obama has made in office. “The biggest miscalculation in the minds of most Obama advisers,” Baker writes, “was the assumption that he could bridge a polarized capital and forge genuinely bipartisan coalitions.”
