Ramesh Ponnuru: Obama’s Weakness Leading to Republican Overreach

Ramesh Ponnuru is a Bloomberg View columnist and a senior editor at National Review. The opinions expressed are his own

President Barack Obama has never looked more vulnerable. His poll numbers keep dropping. The economic news is still grim. And his team’s political sense often seems to be missing.

Take the recent report that White House senior staff were heartened by hearing historian Michael Beschloss tell them that Franklin D. Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan had each won re-election even though unemployment was high. If Obama’s aides really believe these precedents are auspicious, they are kidding themselves: Both the 1936 and 1984 elections followed very strong economic growth....

Even if Obama were doing better, the Republican primary would put a heavy weight on ideology. Whenever someone suggests that a candidate can’t win, many conservatives retort that people said that about Reagan, too. (What they forget is that people also said it about Barry Goldwater, and they were right.) And much of the Republican Party has convinced itself that Bush- era compromises bred political failure, a line of thought that makes concerns about electability seem beside the point. Combine these views with the natural inclination of people to think that their ideas are more widely shared than they are, and the result is a process where electability gets short shrift. Obama’s weakness only reinforces this tendency....