THE DOG THAT DIDN’T BARK

Labor Day traditionally marks the start of the fall election campaign.  Vice President Joe Biden spent it marching in a Labor Day parade in Toledo.
 
“Dennis Duffer, a member of the local bricklayers union who marched in Monday’s parade, said there seems to be less interest in the election this time around compared with two years ago when Obama was on his way to become the nation’s first black president,” the Associated Press said.
 
Perhaps that’s in part because Mr. Biden’s prediction of 500,000 new jobs being created each month in what he had dubbed “Recovery Summer” fell about 500,000 jobs a month short.
 
Anyone in office is in trouble this year, Mr. Duffer told the AP.  That’s certainly true of Ohio’s Democratic governor, Ted Strickland, whose campaign Mr. Biden had come to Toledo to help.  A poll last week for the Columbus Dispatch found Mr. Strickland trailing his GOP rival, former Rep. John Kasich, by 12 percentage points.
 
Curiously for an “anti-incumbent” year, the only Republican incumbent who seems to be having trouble is Louisiana Rep. Anh “Joseph” Cao, who represents a heavily Democratic district in New Orleans.  Mr. Cao had been elected in a multi-candidate special election to replace Rep. William “cold cash” Jefferson, who was sentenced to 13 years in prison after the FBI found $90,000 in bribe money in the refrigerator of his home.
 
President Barack Obama spent Labor Day in the home state of Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis, a three term incumbent who  narrowly trails businessman Ron Johnson in polls.
 
The president spoke to about 7,000 at Laborfest in Milwaukee.  The crowd was friendly, but was much smaller than Mr. Obama had drawn at the same event when he was a candidate for president in 2008.
 
The most interesting people who weren’t there were Sen. Feingold and Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, who is running for governor.
 
“A Democratic pol explained to me that Feingold is reluctant to appear near a president who is to his left,” said Patrick McIlheran, an editorial writer for the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel.
 
If so, this is rich, Mr. McIlheran said, because Russ Feingold is, arguably, the most liberal senator in Washington. 
 
Barack Obama carried Wisconsin by 14 percentage points in 2008.  If Democrats in tight races there are afraid to appear with him in public, where is he an asset?
 
“Blue Dog” Democratic Rep. Marion Berry of Arkansas decided to retire rather than face constituents angry over big deficits and Obamacare. 
 
Mr. Berry said in an interview with the Arkansas Democrat Gazette in January he and other moderates had warned the president his agenda was putting them in a difficult position.
 
“The president himself, when that was brought up in one group, said: ‘Well the difference here and in ’94 (when Republicans won 54 seats to take control of the House) was you’ve got me.”
 
Indeed they do.  And that seems to be the chief reason why post Labor Day polls by ABC and NBC suggest the Republicans will take the House this year – and maybe the Senate, too.
 
“With just two months to go before the November elections, pollsters and political scientists are predicting a blow-out loss for Democrats,” said the Politico’s Mike Allen, who described what’s forming as a “tsunami.” 
 
“We’re finding that Democratic candidates are doing only as well as the president’s approval numbers,” said Public Policy Polling, a Democratic firm.  “And with a majority of voters disapproving of Obama in most states, that’s a really really big problem for the party this fall.”
 
The White House was hoping to use First Lady Michelle Obama on the stump this fall, but adverse reaction to her $75,000 a day vacation in Spain last month appears to have put the kibosh on that.
 
This may explain a strange remark the president made at Laborfest Monday.  “They talk about me like a dog,” he said of Republicans.
 
Some think this was a reference to a song by Jimi Hendrix, the guitarist who died of apparent drug and alcohol overdose in 1970. 
 
Others speculate it was a botched effort to emulate Franklin Roosevelt’s rejoinder when Republicans criticized him for sending a warship to pick up his dog, Fala, who had accidentally been left behind on a presidential visit to the Aleutians.
 
But it may simply have been recognition that their dog, Bo, polls better than Barack or Michelle.