Consultores demócratas: Team Obama necesita una intervención

Bloomberg nos cuenta que muchos consultores demócratas se quejan de que en Team Obama viven demasiado aislados y no aceptan consejos de fuera:

For Democrats, June has been the cruelest month; there has been discouraging economic news; the re-election candidate has made mistakes and seems out of his comfort zone. The supposedly superior Obama campaign looks amateurish, and complaints about the operation’s insularity have reached a fever pitch.

Private conversations with a half-dozen of the smartest Democratic political thinkers -- all of whom have played at the highest levels of national campaigns, are genuine Obama backers, and almost never are consulted by the campaign -- reveal a consensus of advice for the president: Stop trying to tell voters they’re doing better, offer an optimistic sense of how, if re-elected, you would lead America to more prosperous times, and challenge Republicans with specifics.

(...) “The challenge for the president is not the current conditions, but the huge expectations he set that have not been met,” said Peter Hart, a leading Democratic pollster. “There is no road map, no program, no conviction of where the president wants to lead the country.”

(...) The central challenge, the other Democratic consultants say, is a compelling narrative from the president and campaign, which they describe as unusually insular and arrogant.

The campaign has an almost mystical confidence in sophisticated technology and in its organization, assets that only matter in a razor-tight race. Further, these other strategists say, the Obama camp is no more justified in its belief that this campaign is like a rerun -- with the uniforms changed -- of 2004, when a shakily popular Republican president won re-election, than it would be to believe that 2012 is a reprise of 1980, when an incumbent president was thrown out for non-performance.

Any outreach by Obama’s Chicago acolytes to hear out these arguments is limited and superficial.

A longtime Democratic strategist predicts defeat unless there is some boldness. He offers an idea: Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, as popular as any American figure, has said she plans to resign after the election. Obama should persuade her to leave her post a month or so early and campaign for him. She might add some electricity and she wouldn’t be likely to commit the same occasional discipline lapses as her husband.

The secretary probably would reject such a suggestion, and team Obama wouldn’t ask. They don’t believe they need help. More than a few Democrats disagree.