Obama's 2016 plan

Sanders reshapes Obama's 2016 plans

Despite his rising approval ratings, the president's role in the campaign is on hold — possibly for months.

By Edward-Isaac Dovere

Bernie Sanders is keeping Barack Obama locked in limbo.

Despite his steadily rising popularity, the president’s expected role in 2016 as the Democratic Party unifier is on hold for another three-and-a-half months, if Sanders keeps his campaign going through the July convention.

Aides had expected the primary race to be wrapping up by this point, according to White House sources, and for Obama to be gearing up for a series of big unity rallies to urge Sanders supporters to get excited about Hillary Clinton.

Instead, Sanders is expected to win Wisconsin on Tuesday, and has the money and support to keep going as long as he wants and no Democratic Party loyalty or elder statesman to urge him to step back. That’s forcing the White House to recalibrate its political plans, delaying the opportunity for Obama to hit the campaign trail and capitalize on public approval levels unseen since his re-election campaign.

“At the appropriate time, the president will play a role,” said one person familiar with the thinking. “Obviously we couldn’t predict exactly when that would be. We still can’t predict that right now.”

Much of the movement in public opinion about Obama appears to be due to contrasts in everything—biography, policies, temperament—with Donald Trump, evoking the old Joe Biden line, via legendary Boston Mayor Kevin White, “Don’t compare me to the almighty, compare me to the alternative.”

“What you’re seeing is a reaction to an economy that continues to improve and people are beginning to feel it in a way they haven’t in the past. I also think that it’s a reaction to what people are seeing from a real alternative, both manifested on the campaign trail with Republicans as well as what you’re seeing on Capitol Hill,” argued White House political director David Simas.

Obama hit 53 percent in Gallup last week, a three-year high, and his RealClearPolitics polling average shows an almost identical flipping of his approval and disapproval numbers in the last few months as it did leading up to the 2012 race.

“It wasn’t that long ago when the president’s numbers were in a place where there was some doubt about Democrats holding onto the White House for a third term. The improvement in his rating has given Democrats a much better chance of holding the White House four more years,” said Democratic pollster Geoff Garin, who’s been studying the various polls coming in.

For that reason and others, top Democrats (many, though not all of them, longtime Clinton supporters) are getting increasingly frustrated with Sanders, annoyed that he’s gotten rougher on their expected nominee just at the moment when delegate math and traditional realities of running an issue candidacy might point to his exiting the race.

People close to the president gloat about the irony: two years after midterms marked by Democrats running far and fast away from a president who was about as popular on the trail as a hangnail, Democrats are suddenly eager to see more of him.

They won’t—at least not on the campaign trail, until the Democratic nomination is settled. Obama’s headed to California on Thursday for another swing of fundraisers, and people around the president expect these and other events to produce encore performances like the ones in Texas three weeks ago when he Don Rickles’d his way through the Republican Party’s vicious primary and Trump’s campaign antics, with the cameras rolling throughout.

Obama will still swing at every pitch he gets, like at Friday’s press conference when he said the Republican front-runner’s proposal to nuclearize Japan “tell us the person who made the statements doesn't know much about foreign policy, or nuclear policy, or the Korean Peninsula or the world generally.”

And if, say, more opportunities arise like Monday when he called in reporters to the Oval Office to hear him praise the NATO secretary general for doing precisely what Trump thinks the treaty alliance doesn’t do—well, he’ll leap at them.

Nor is it quite a coincidence that a lot of the places where Obama’s been traveling domestically happen to be in swing states.

White House aides believe that with the Republican field being led by a candidate many Americans say isn’t up to the job, this actually is a time when having Obama just do his job might be the most politically potent thing they can do.

They’re just going to be looking for every way they can find to showcase just how much of that job he’s doing, every chance they get.

The White House views Trump and Ted Cruz, in many ways, as ideal Republican candidates for Obama to take on.

“When people are seeing a Republican contest where you see both of the leading candidates going into a contested convention, where one of them says there’s going to be a revolt and the other one says there’s going to be a riot, and then they look at the president’s steady, consistent leadership,” Simas said. “I think it’s a pretty strong contrast.”

A significant element of the plan will be pressing the Supreme Court fight, which Obama is committed to for his own sake, but can also use as a way of beating up on Republicans and their control in Washington without making it explicitly about the 2016 campaign.

White House aides are eager for the president to get out and show off what he can do on the trail. But Obama, who wasn’t eager to turn over attention to the next Democratic nominee and settle in to a lame duck glide path, isn’t exactly complaining about the delay.

“It’s lengthening the period of time when he can be president,” the person familiar with the Obama thinking explained. “There is an unplanned benefit.”

Clinton allies wish Obama could be out more, though many say they understand the box he’s in—and for the first time in basically Obama’s entire presidency, party leaders are endorsing the White House’s political strategy.

“Maybe it would be nice if he could be more partisan, but quite frankly, he’s doing a lot of good for us Democrats just by his presence. His value is increased against this set of Republican candidates,” said Connecticut Gov. Dan Malloy, chairman of the Democratic Governors Association.

Part of that value is in cold, hard campaign cash. Obama’s been fundraising for this cycle since last year, and has now committed to doing an equal number of events for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee as for the more likely chamber-flipping Democratic Senate Campaign Committee, on top of kicking with a steady stream of House and Senate race endorsements, including in several Democratic primaries.

Donors, said DCCC executive director Kelly Ward, “want to be part of his last year. They want to see him before they don’t see him anymore.”

For all the Trump-infused Democratic chest-thumping, their chances of taking the House remain slim. But to win in any of their marginal districts, Democrats will need turnout at levels that only an excited base can produce.

“Connection to the party, feeling very unified behind the party and behind the nominee is a very important part of that,” Ward said. “He can create that.”

Clinton, whose historically high negative numbers would be poison in a race against anyone other than Trump, already needed all the help she could get with the Obama coalition, even before Sanders sucked up the excitement among the young and otherwise politically disengaged.

“This is still very much of a change electorate, but less and less it’s becoming a partisan change electorate,” Garin said. “That’s due to the president’s rising approval ratings.”

Those numbers will be essential to pulling off a nearly impossible political feat (and one that Democrats never have accomplished): keeping the presidency in the party for a third consecutive term after a two term president elected in his own right.

Democrats are counting down the days until Obama’s let loose—at the convention, or perhaps if some Democratic dreams come true in that long period between the last primaries on June 7 and Philadelphia, if Sanders is far enough behind Clinton to make winning the nomination officially impossible.

“Whether [Sanders] officially suspends his campaign or not, I don’t think this president is going to wait until we get to the convention,” Malloy said. “And I would urge him not to wait.”

And, Democrats say, there’s something in it for Obama too.

“That’s where he’s most effective: looking presidential and reminding voters of the way he handled the job and the way some of the Republican presidential candidates look,” said former South Carolina Democratic Gov. Jim Hodges. “It makes him look better, and it helps Democrats.”