John Cole over at Balloon Juice says that primarying Obama in 2012 should be, and I quote: “unthinkable”.

In context:

Another day, another suggestion to primary Obama in 2012. It’s almost like 1980 never happened.

I simply can not express in words strong enough that it would be an absolute disaster for the Democratic party if they actively attempt to primary a sitting President. You think the liberal blogs are at each other’s throats now? My word.

Why don’t we start with primarying all the blue dogs and all the intransigent Democratic Senators? That would seem to make more sense, and it might bring about a touch of party discipline. But to primary Obama? Disaster. It really should be unthinkable.

Actually, what *should* be unthinkable is supporting, let alone voting for, a man who seeks the power to murder American citizens without due process, deny prisoners of war their fundamental rights, aid, abet, cover up and continue torture around the globe, collude with giant multinationals to destroy our oceans, hand our civil liberties over to the insurance lobby for next-to-nothing in return while actively working to worsen the economy while it’s still in freefall with almost comically bad ‘Free’ trade deals.

THAT should be unthinkable. Instead, the mere thought of challenging our Imperial Majesty, High Lord of Stress Positions and Master of Bagram, Royal Consort to British Petroleum is held to be anathema. Yikes.

Truly, Obama supporters have crossed the Moral Event Horizon.

Just a quick post to express my deep and undying thanks to the Obama administration for not just enabling but actively conspiring with the worst actors in the financial/corporate world to poison, dispossess and/or kill as many of us as possible out here in the real world.

1) BP, which the Administration actively conspired with in order to shield the American public from the truth about the damage they caused, is now trying to weasel out of the fines they owe for the mess they made. Gee, maybe lying to the voters to convince them it was all ok wasn’t such a good idea, huh, O-bots? Now when you have to fight BP in court to try and make them pay out, they can just point to your own statements about how most of the oil magically disappeared.

Only, it didn’t, of course. Instead, as the scientists tried to say when the Obama administration was spinning its Pollyanna nonsense about the oil being ‘gone’, it has settled to the bottom, forming a massive kill zone where nothing will live for decades.

And thanks to the various Administration organs stamping approval on it, we’re fishing on top of that oily mess and feeding the poisonous result to the public.

2) Not content to poison our food, the Administration is actively conspiring with the financial sector to take our jobs, money and homes too. Having successfully fended off the notion of a foreclosure moratorium, Obama’s predatory lending program HAMP continues to destroy countless lives, the Fed (run of course by Obama’s personal rubber stamp Ben Bernanke) is looking to strip out a key protection consumers have against predatory mortgage lending, while Obama flacks for a free trade deal with South Korea that will devastate what’s left of the unions and cost an estimated 159,000 American jobs and tries to institute a pay freeze on what’s left of the federal public sector to score cheap political points.

3) Not only has Obama’s health care ‘reform’ failed to date, research suggests that even with highly, err, hopeful projections it will utterly fail to contain costs, and premiums will soar over the next decade to even more unaffordable levels:

Even with optimistic projections, the new health care law would still see premiums growing faster than income, and we’d still have by far the most costly health care on earth. This means, even assuming health care reform works well, which I highly doubt, the ever-growing cost of our health care premiums will force it to remain a critical political issue for years. It has not be fully dealt with.

So, to recap: our so-called Democratic administration is serving us poisoned food from oily waters while helping the banks steal our homes and then it turns around and ships our jobs overseas and cuts the pay on anyone still good-natured enough to try and serve their country at the Federal level.

Heckuva job, Hopey McChange.

The cynic in me is starting to seriously wonder whether President Obama wanted the recent Democratic rout so as to advance his own personal policy preferences.

The alternative is that he’s a blithering idiot.

Let’s look at the facts. Midterm elections are typically dominated by base turnout. In non-presidential years, most people tune out and the number who go to the polls is way, way below a majority of eligible voters. Thus, the election hinges upon, and is dominated by, those highly motivated individuals who turn out to elections regardless of the public mood. This leads to a long-held strategy of focusing, in such years, on the ideological base of your party, putting resources toward getting out their vote and dealing with their issues.

Obama, the DNC and his old personal organization OFA had other ideas this time around though. Their plan was to focus not on the reliable base voters but on the fringe voters who had turned out, often for the first time in their lives, to vote for Obama in 2008:

ABC News’ David Chalian reports: Democrats will be facing a restive and disgruntled electorate in six months as they attempt to hang on to their House and Senate majorities on Capitol Hill, but that isn’t stopping Barack Obama’s DNC and his hand-picked party chairman from keeping their ultimate goal, the president’s 2012 reelection effort, in sight as they roll out the party’s 2010 battle plan.

…

Many Democrats on Capitol Hill have privately expressed concern about this strategy because it is not centered on turning out the tried-and-true midterm election voters the party will need at the polls in November to significantly mitigate the anticipated large number of losses in key congressional races around the country.

Chairman Kaine claimed that the campaigns are already positioned to reach those voters and that the DNC will assist in that effort, but that is not where the committee sees itself adding most value. The previously announced $50 million investment in the midterm races will be greatly focused on cultivating these first-time voters from 2008 who are more likely to be engaged in the next presidential election with Barack Obama’s name expected to be on the ballot than they are to be in this year’s midterm contests.

In a nutshell, the Obama faction wanted to spend precious resources in a tight election year not on voters likely to turn out, but on maintaining Obama’s relationship with sunshine voters who he’ll need in 2012.

If that strikes you as dangerous and narcissistic, you’re not the only one, and as the election loomed many establishment Dems got panicky:

The White House strategy is focused on an unprecedented effort to turn out the voters who cast their first ballots for Obama in 2008. The Democratic National Committee has pledged $30 million in voter turnout efforts this year, largely geared toward those first-time voters through Organizing for America, the outgrowth of Obama’s political operation.

…

Old school Democrats, mostly affiliated with the labor movement and congressional campaigns, aren’t buying it. They don’t believe the DNC understands what the midterm electorate will really look like.

“The notion that first-time presidential voters will come out in an off year is limited,” said one veteran Democratic strategist closely aligned with labor unions. In 2006, massive efforts to turn out the Democratic base, coupled with a political wave, swept Democrats into power. “If only the party and operatives were focused on getting that turnout in hand before going for extra icing,” this strategist said, “they’d have a far tastier cake.”

…

Democrats critical of the DNC’s strategy believe the committee is focused more on Obama’s 2012 re-election bid than on the party’s success in the midterms. From the White House perspective, that may be an understandable act of self-preservation, given how dismal the landscape looks for Democrats. But it’s not something Capitol Hill Democrats appreciate.

So who was right? It might not surprise you to learn it wasn’t the Obama faction:

Core Democratic groups stayed away in droves Tuesday, costing Democratic House candidates dearly at the polls.

Hispanics, African Americans, union members and young people were among the many core Democratic groups that turned out in large numbers in the 2008 elections, propelling Mr. Obama and Democratic House candidates to sizable victories. In 2010, turnout among these groups dropped off substantially, even below their previous midterm levels.

Voters under the age of 30 comprised 18 percent of the electorate in 2008 and nearly 13 percent in 2006 but only made up 11 percent of the electorate in 2010. The share of voters from union households dropped from 23 percent in 2006 and 21 percent in 2008 to 17 percent in 2010. African Americans made up 13 percent of the electorate in 2008 but fell to 10 percent in 2010. Such apathy likely cost the Democrats House seats as voters in each of these groups cast ballots for Democratic House candidates by at least 15 point margins.

The strategy, as you can see, was a dismal failure, and it helped contribute to the slaughter the Dems faced in the House this week. So at first glance, Obama would seem to be a truly terrible tactician.

Or… would he?

It all depends on who he needs to advance his agenda. What is that agenda?

Over the last two years, President Obama’s administration has been handing out huge sacks of cash to large corporate interests in the health care and automotive sectors, while refusing to reign in the financial sector robber barons who brought about the recession. In order to do this he needed a certain coalition consisting of pro-Detroit, pro-bankster, pro-health lobby Democrats to pass his legislation.

Said coalition is utterly in ruin now, of course, but he doesn’t need them anymore, as he now has other plans.

First, ‘Free Trade’:

In addition to education, another area where you can see the President and the Republicans in Congress agreeing is on the issue of trade. One of the first international figures Obama talked to on Election Day was the President of South Korea, and he assured him that the US was working on passing a free trade agreement between the two countries.

Obama and a few Republicans may agree, but I’d be hard-pressed to find any Democrats to join them, including the Blue Dogs. For all his obvious faults, Heath Shuler is a fair trader. So was the majority of the 111th House of Representatives, as evidenced by the vote on the Chinese currency bill, which had the support of 99 Republicans, most of whom remain in the House. A new report from Public Citizen shows that 205 Democratic and Republican candidates used fair trade and anti-outsourcing messaging in their election campaigns. Only 37 candidates campaigned as pro-NAFTA free traders, and half of them lost.

Gee, it’s a shame that so many Democrats who would have been potential impediments to this big free trade pact are suddenly out of the picture, isn’t it?

Nice priorities there too, negotiating a free trade pact on the day your hand-picked electoral strategy destroys your own political party.

What else is on the schedule? Gutting Social Security comes to mind:

With Republicans in no mood to launch a legislative attack on Social Security, there was nobody for Obama to make one of his grand comprises with. So, in February of this year, he issued an executive order creating his own anti-entitlement missile, the panel that quickly became known as the “cat food” commission, harkening back to the pre-Social Security days when many of the elderly where reduced to eating cat food.

Obama’s trick was to conjure up a political demand for the gutting of entitlements when no serious movement in that direction existed in the Congress. The commission route allowed him to concoct a majority right-wing constituency in a bottle, so to speak, by weighting the membership with pro-corporate players.

No one doubts that the panel is rigged to recommend cuts that Democrats (and a few Republicans) would be prepared to fight tooth and nail if proposed by the GOP. Blood would flow in the halls of the House and Senate, and in the end the assailants would likely lose. But by packaging the poison in a commission, Obama is allowed to behave as if the entitlement debate has oozed from the ether, demanding to be made manifest.

The only thing I’d add to that excellent synopsis is that, after the election, Congress now has a slew of crazy, fire-breathing anti-entitlement Republicans and Tea Party maniacs to back his play and aid the triangulation.

In review: over the last two years, Obama’s agenda has been tilted toward handing out giant sacks of cash to large corporate interests traditionally aligned with Democratic pols (autos and healthcare) or neutral to them (finance). Republicans could be expected to oppose said efforts on simple zero-sum game grounds, and so he required a Dem coalition to pass his bailouts.

Now he wants to move on to handing huge sacks of cash to traditionally Republican interests (free traders) while gutting entitlements, which Dems would at least half-heartedly oppose (and who successfully blocked the 2005 gutting of Social Security).

Isn’t it convenient, therefore, that OFA and the DNC implemented a ludicrously stupid election plan that contributed to massive Democratic losses, changing the constitutency of the House to one that just happens to align more closely to his desired policy goals?

As I said above: President Obama, Tim Kaine and the like are either blithering idiots… or they’re actively working against the Democratic Party, seeing it as an obstacle to future plans.

The next few months should be interesting. My bet: Obama triangulates against Social Security, using his personally crafted Catfood Commission to justify gutting the signature New Deal program and legacy of actual progressivism. He’ll also ram this South Korean free trade deal through, further damaging both the Democratic Party and the Unions it relies on to survive.

Ian Welsh is right; it’s long past time to work toward primarying Obama in 2012.