英语访谈节目:奥巴马新任期总统选举之路

GWEN IFILL: As the midterm elections head to at least a dozen critical toss-ups, one prominent Democrat has been largely missing from the campaign trail, but President Obama is on the road again in carefully selected friendly territory.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: You can tell I’m out of practice. I’m losing my voice.

GWEN IFILL: Only a week before Election Day, President Obama is finally hitting the trail in earnest.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: It’s good to be back in Wisconsin.

GWEN IFILL: Last night, he rallied support for Wisconsin Democrat candidate Mary Burke, the businesswoman challenging Republican Governor Scott Walker.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: You have a chance to choose a governor who doesn’t put political ideology first, who’s not thinking partisan first. She’s going to put you first.

GWEN IFILL: Until now, the president has more often than not put fund-raising first, appearing at private events, instead of at big public rallies.

Many Democrats, mindful of his sagging popularity, have largely kept their distance. But now the president is pitching in, focusing on states he’s won twice, Maine, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

Whether for lack of invitation or lack of interest, he’s largely avoided states where Democrats are locked in competitive Senate races. Those candidates have opted instead for surrogates like Hillary Clinton and Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren.

HILLARY RODHAM CLINTON, Former U.S. Secretary of State: Make sure you get out to vote for the kind of North Carolina and America you want.

(CHEERING AND APPLAUSE)

GWEN IFILL: Clinton has stumped in North Carolina over the weekend, and heads to Iowa, Kentucky and Louisiana this week, while Warren has toured New Hampshire, Iowa, Colorado, and Kentucky.

Lame-duck midterm elections are not typically friendly territory for sitting presidents. On average, past presidents have lost 26 seats in the House and about seven seats in the Senate.

Dan Balz of The Washington Post and presidential historian Michael Beschloss are here to explain why.

So how does the White House make these kind of decisions about what to do with a president in these kinds of complicated times?

DAN BALZ, The Washington Post: Well, they make them in concert with the campaigns and the — particularly at this point the Senate Campaign Committee and the others who are directly involved in the races.

He’s going places where’s he’s welcome. He’s not going place where’s he’s not welcome. And I think one of the interesting things is, he is campaigning mostly on behalf of gubernatorial candidates. There are a lot of competitive gubernatorial races, as we know, but not in key Senate battlegrounds.

I think the only state he’s going into with an even modestly competitive Senate campaign is in Michigan, and that one looks pretty strong for the Democrats at this point. He’s avoiding all the real battlegrounds in the Senate races.

GWEN IFILL: By design.

DAN BALZ: By design.

GWEN IFILL: How unusual is that, Michael?

MICHAEL BESCHLOSS, Presidential Historian: Not very unusual at all.

And the record really is that even a popular president usually don’t help that much. Ronald Reagan in 1986, Gallup poll approval rating was 63 percent. It was considered a pretty successful presidency. He had won reelection by a landslide. And he went to around 13 states around this time of October that year. Yet the result was, the Republicans lost control of the Senate, lost five seats in the House.

So, if that’s sort of the acid test of what a popular president can do, the less popular presidents have a harder time.

GWEN IFILL: Well, let’s go back to more recently to George W. Bush, the second term of his — the second — the midterm of his second term. Did the same thing happen to him?

MICHAEL BESCHLOSS: Yes.

His Gallup poll approval rating was about 38 percent, not very different from President Obama’s, lost both houses of Congress. There was great anger because the war in Iraq was going very unwell. There were other reasons for dissatisfaction with George Bush, and the voters tended to take it out on his party.

DAN BALZ: Gwen, I went back yesterday and looked through some old clips from 2006, and found a piece I did almost literally this week eight years ago about George W. Bush not being welcome on the campaign trail and the limited number of places he could go.

MICHAEL BESCHLOSS: And that could have been written almost exactly yesterday about President Obama.

(LAUGHTER)

GWEN IFILL: Everything old is new again.

MICHAEL BESCHLOSS: Indeed.

GWEN IFILL: But here is what seems different to me. And maybe it’s just where the competitive seats happen to be. But I think Louisiana and I think North Carolina and Georgia and Arkansas, Southern states. Is he also less welcome in Southern states?

DAN BALZ: Well, he’s very less welcome in Southern states.

Those are states, with the exception of North Carolina, he didn’t win at all, and he only won North Carolina once. Now, in a number of those states, the African-American vote is very important. And I think they are looking for ways under the radar or without a presidential visit for him to speak directly to African-American voters. They’re very…

GWEN IFILL: Like radio. I have heard radio.

DAN BALZ: There’s radio. You could do direct mail. I mean, there are a variety of ways you can do it.

MICHAEL BESCHLOSS: Or robo-calls.

DAN BALZ: Robo-calls, you could do that.

I — Gwen, I think what is more interesting is not that he’s not going into Arkansas. That’s — that’s not terribly surprising. But if you look at other places that he’s not going in with competitive races, Colorado, for example. He accepted the nomination in Denver in the summer of 2008. He was very popular there.

He is very unpopular there, particularly with undecided voters. Iowa, the state that launched him in the caucuses by beating Hillary Clinton and John Edwards, he’s not welcome there in one of the most crucial battleground Senate races in the country.

GWEN IFILL: Where does an incumbent president help?

MICHAEL BESCHLOSS: Money. And that’s the difference between these times and most of American history, because money is now so cardinally important that I think the White House now and, in 2006, George W. Bush did argue that perhaps the best thing a president can do to help is not appear at rallies, which they found, at least in ’06, helped some, had no effect in some other places, and hurt some, but better for them, the president then and I think would be said this year for the president to raise a lot of money from the base of his party.

That’s what President Obama is doing.

GWEN IFILL: Well, before we get to the — I do want to ask you about the base, but I also want to ask you about very interesting, the thing that is going on.

Judy is going to Kentucky this weekend to do a piece about that Senate race. The Democratic nominee there could barely be convinced to say she even voted for the president, which one would be surprised if she hadn’t, right?

DAN BALZ: Well, of course one would be surprised. And I think everybody in the aftermath thought that was a mistake, and assumed that when she got into a debate with Mitch McConnell right after that, that she would kind of clean up that and clarify and say, yes, I did.

And, instead, she said, you know, we have a secret ballot in this country. Now, she was quite willing to say she had voted for Hillary Clinton against Barack Obama in the 2008 primaries, but she wouldn’t say that she had voted for the president.

GWEN IFILL: Yes.

DAN BALZ: It was — it was a very odd set of circumstances and surprising.

GWEN IFILL: It was very odd.

I am very curious, though, in the end here, which is to what extent does running away from the president for Democrats in this case, or even for Republicans in other years, to what extent does that hurt in getting turnout, in getting the base out?

MICHAEL BESCHLOSS: Oh, sure it does, because people feel that this is something that, if a president doesn’t come in, there isn’t a connection with burning national issues that oftentimes energize a campaign.

And the other thing is that any lame-duck president is trying to make himself relevant for these last two years. This is one reason why there is some pressure on the president to get out there, at least to some extent, so that whoever comes into Congress this time, he can say, well, I helped you. I was relevant in this election. You and I still can do things together these last two years.

GWEN IFILL: Is there backlash possible among people who would normally show up and vote for a Democrat, but now who feel a little insulted?

DAN BALZ: There are — I talked to a Democrat recently who thinks it has been a big mistake for the president not to go into these competitive states.

The argument made to me was the people who are going to vote against the president’s party are going to vote against the president’s party.

MICHAEL BESCHLOSS: They know who is president.

DAN BALZ: They know who is president. And it is difficult for the Democratic candidates to distance themselves when they have voted with the president most of the time.

This argument was, we need our base energized, and President Obama may be uniquely capable of doing that, at least in part of the communities of his coalition.

GWEN IFILL: Well, when I asked Kay Hagan about that this weekend, she said she’s for North Carolina, not necessarily…

(LAUGHTER)

GWEN IFILL: We will see how this works. There will be exit polls you will be reading on election night.

Dan Balz, Michael Beschloss…

MICHAEL BESCHLOSS: Can’t wait. Thank you, Gwen.

GWEN IFILL: … thanks, both, very much.

DAN BALZ: Thanks, Gwen.