Collision 2012: Obama vs. Romney and the Future of Elections in America by Dan Balz Page A

ways, dealt with the challenges of defining or redefining themselves and reconnecting with the voters helped to decide the outcome of the 2012 election. But as the campaign cycle began, that general election contest was still far in the future. It may have been predictable, as Axelrod said, that Obama and Romney would face each other, but before they could do that, they had other battles to fight and win.

CHAPTER 3
    Under Siege
    B arack Obama’s road to reelection began inauspiciously. Just after 1 p.m. on November 3, 2010, the president stood impassively in the White House East Room. The day before, his party had absorbed the worst midterm election defeat in more than half a century. Democrats lost sixty-three seats in the House, the biggest midterm loss by a party since 1938. They lost six seats in the Senate—a number that easily could have been worse were it not for the deeply flawed GOP candidacies of Delaware’s Christine O’Donnell (the wackiest of all the candidates, who ran an ad declaring she was not a witch), Nevada’s Sharron Angle, and Colorado’s Ken Buck. All three were products of the Tea Party movement that had shaken up the Republican Party before concentrating its anger on the president and his Democratic majorities in Congress. In the states, the wreckage was even greater as the conservative tidal wave swept aside years of Democratic advances. Republicans captured a majority of the governorships, and Democrats were lucky not to have lost more. Republicans picked up nearly seven hundred state legislative seats and now controlled legislatures in twenty-six states. In twenty-one states, Republicans held both the governor’s mansion and the legislature. The reflexive rejection of Obama and his party was so powerful that in the days after, Democrats privately lamented that it could take a decade to recover in some states.
    Obama met the press that afternoon for a familiar post-election ritual. In these circumstances, the embattled leader is expected to show humility and contrition, all to demonstrate that he has gotten the message of the voters. Other recent presidents had been there. Ronald Reagan had seen his party stumble in 1982 during the deep recession of that decade. Bill Clinton saw Democrats lose control of Congress in 1994 after forty years in power in the House. What Obama had experienced was as bad as that, if not worse. Two years after his historic victory he was asked to explain a historic defeat. He repeated shopworn lines from his campaign appearances that fall, while showing little emotion. He blamed the economy, not himself or his policies, for the public’s frustrations. He had some grounds to do so. The unemployment ratestood at 9.6 percent, more than a point and a half higher than his economic advisers unadvisedly had said would be the ceiling if Congress enacted the president’s $800 billion stimulus package in the spring of 2009. Whatever Obama had promised for restoring the economy had not come to pass. In all other ways, Obama resisted interpretations that suggested shortcomings on his part. Not the big health care initiative that had divided the country. Not the government spending that so many independents objected to. Not the distance that now existed between the country and a young leader whom so many Americans had embraced with such passion just two years earlier.
    Only in the final moments did the stoic façade begin to crack. “I’m not recommending for every future president that they take a shellacking like I did last night,” he said to laughter from reporters. “I’m sure there are easier ways to learn these lessons.” Finally TV had its sound bite and the press its headline. He called the election part of a process of growth and evolution. “The relationship that I’ve had with the American people is one that built slowly, peaked at this incredible high, and then during the course of the last two years, as we’ve together gone through some very difficult