Can President Obama color Colorado blue again in 2012?
The president last week officially, but quietly, launched his re-election campaign. If he wants to avoid the fate of one-termers like Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush, he’ll likely need to pick up a few key states in the West — namely Colorado, New Mexico and Nevada.
But at one point after his historic 2008 electoral victory, as stimulus spending and unemployment soared, Obama’s approval ratings were lower in Colorado than in any other state that he won in 2008.
Can he get his mojo back here in moderately purple Colorado?
He has time, but he needs to recast his presidency. He needs to continue the slide to the political middle that he’s been trying since the mid-term drubbings. The left won’t leave Obama for a Republican challenger, but the murky middle might.
Colorado’s evenly divided electorate is independent and centrist. When Democrats win statewide, they do so by campaigning on moderate or even conservative themes.
Obama needs to move away from his administration’s first two years when the economy was in a historic crisis. His attempts to resuscitate it didn’t resonate here.
The nearly $1 trillion in stimulus provided only a blip of a recovery, while further saddling the nation with an unsustainable debt load.
Tackling that debt, and the deficit, is the biggest fight he has on his hands. Obama can no longer afford to continue to criticize the plans of others (Paul Ryan) or ignore them (Simpson-Bowles deficit commission) without coming up with his own plan. He can’t say “no” all the time to serious deficit reduction. Voters won’t accept it, a fact Republicans learned the hard way in the years before 2010.
Obama the moderate also needs to be more of a friend to business. His first two years were marked by taking over some businesses — they were mostly, admittedly, in crisis — which many found unnerving.
He can tap into our domestic worries by acknowledging our energy policy failures and promising to look West for clean coal and responsible domestic drilling.
Politically, it’s not hard to imagine that Obama’s campaign here could mirror Sen. Michael Bennet’s close victory over Republican Ken Buck. For example, he could paint the Planned Parenthood prohibitions that congressional Republicans have proposed in their short-term budget as too extreme for Colorado as he targets moderate suburban women.
Of course, a great deal depends on who the GOP nominee turns out to be, and whether he or she has the background and image to appeal to the middle as well. If the Republican doesn’t, it could be fairly easy for Obama to persuade enough voters — and particularly seniors dependent on Medicare and Social Security — to stick with him.
Obama has room to move to the center. Only time will tell if he’s comfortable there.
