UPDATE: Yes, you're right, there's no actual evidence here but I can't think of a better word, at least not without self-mockery and there's enough in this diary already.
A few days ago, Commonmass wrote one of those "I've just about had it" diaries, thusly titled, which brought forth the by-now usual outpouring of Kossack exasperation with our party and our President. Why don't they stand up to Republicans? Why can't they do things with a majority, when Republicans somehow manage to do things with a minority? And so forth.
Suddenly, as if in a vision, or at least some kind of secular epiphany (like Buckminster Fuller came up with the geodesic dome, or someone probably came up with Belgium), it became clear to me. Maybe President Obama is planning to run for re-election as a third-party candidate, rather than as a Democrat, in 2012. Crazier things have happened--they've just been in other countries so far.
Note #1: For purposes of this diary, "third-party" and "independent" are pretty much the same thing.
Note #2: This isn't an anti-Obama diary!
There's not a whole lot tying Obama to the Democratic Party. Like many of us, he's a Democrat because the idea of being a Republican is just ridiculous, and because everything else is ineffectual when you're on the way up: it's a two-party system. He didn't come into politics with any affective ties to the Democrats, and his political successes have come from a wondrous combination of his own abilities and those of his advisers, the missteps of his adversaries, and plain old luck of the sort that (as Malcolm Gladwell has noted) usually gets pushed out of the narrative of how the super-successful got that way.
To his credit, and unlike many or most upwardly-mobile Democratic politicians, Obama has never invoked some made-up personal or family affinity to the Democrats. Nor did he appeal, even in the Democratic primaries (where you'd most expect to hear it), to some shared quasi-mystical notion of Democratic identity. Quite the contrary: he existed throughout the primaries in an ethereal realm, outside (above!) the Democratic Party, with free reign to discuss it with the same sense of detachment he applied (as do we all) to the Republicans. Heck, sometimes he took the Republicans' side, as when he correctly said that around 1980 the Democrats seemed stale and the Republicans were the party of ideas. Correctly, but a little weird to say as a Democratic candidate for anything above dog-catcher.
While many people around here (virtually) were condemning the Clintons as renegades from Democratic values/policies and embracing Obama as the real Democratic candidate, his appeal to voters was different: in that appeal Hillary Clinton was, in fact, the Democratic traditionalist and he was the antidote. In primary after primary, Obama won with a good share of new voters who hadn't traditionally participated as Democrats.
After Obama won the nomination it was strategically necessary for him to be more of the generic Democratic candidate (after all, he was the Democratic candidate!), in part to hold the allegiance of the Clinton supporters. And in 2008, the Democratic brand looked great compared to the Republican brand--I said at the time, and I still believe, that Obama and Clinton (and, earlier, Edwards) fought tooth-and-nail precisely because they knew the nomination was tantamount to election after eight years of Bush Republicanism. Even so, Obama ran a remarkably Third Way campaign, not so much in a DLC or triangulation sense (although his HCR ad was explicitly third-way, consigning the progressive program to one of the mocked extremes) but metapolitically. He appealed to voters who were disenchanted with politics-as-usual, defined not as the concrete reactionary outcomes of the last eight years but as partisanship, ad-hominem attacks, and insider vs. people power. To a degree unmatched since John Anderson in 1980 or Eugene McCarthy in 1968 (that's what we call "foreshadowing" in the diary business, by the way), Obama's campaign wasn't about policies, but about politics itself, and his critique implicated both parties more or less equally.
Since I believe that any of the top five Democratic candidates would have won in 2008 (my apologies to Gravel and Kucinich) I can't tell you with a straight face that Obama's appeal "worked," at least vs. some other kind of appeal, but I'm sure it was assessed a winning strategy after Election Day, and there's ample evidence that Obama tried to implement it as a governing strategy from the get-go. (Meet your Commerce Secretary, Judd Gregg!)
We all know how it has turned out so far, and most people who aren't Broderites or Blue Dogs or outright Republicans have scratched their heads at why Obama has stuck with a High Road, policy-over-politics approach even though it's well past the point of diminishing returns in terms of actual policy. One possibility is that he's just totally wedded to it philosophically, even if it goes down and takes him with it; another possibility is that he doesn't see it as unsuccessful, at least as compared to what he'd get with a more partisan and "political" (vs. technocratic) approach. But one other possibility is that he is building something for the future.
Before we characterize that something, lets look at the campaign strategy from the White House for 2010. No, seriously, look harder! We are prone (around here, and out there in the non-DKos world) to saying they had no strategy, but that's not possible: they're the White House, and there was an election, so how could they not have a strategy? Clearly the strategy wasn't to get out in front of issues, identifying their successful (or at least credible) resolution with the Democratic Party; candidates who ran on the health care or financial services reforms, or on the nominally successful bailouts (nominal="we're getting the money back and capitalism didn't collapse") had to do it more or less on their own. I can think of precisely three Obama campaign appearances this year: Seattle for Patty Murray, Cleveland for (Strickland? Brunner?), and Charlottesville for Periello. I'm sure I've missed a few, and I'm sure there's something to the idea that some Democrats didn't want Obama anywhere near them, but it looks to me like the White House took Democratic losses as a given and decided to pull back from any association with those losses or with Democrats.
This could be interpreted as simple hunkering-down: heavy losses were inevitable given the economy and given midterm dynamics, so let's just get through with a minimum of political capital expended. It could be interpreted as totally selfish: Obama and advisers only care about 2012 and they coldly determined that path would be easier if the toxin (!) of total Democratic ownership of the political process were purged now. But it could, just maybe, be seen as a continuation of the fabled 11-dimensional chess Obama, the one whose team saw possibilities where others didn't, the one who could make an outlandish plan to get to the presidency and follow through successfully.
If we take seriously the idea that Obama today is like Obama of yesteryear--that he's identified the political system itself as the obstacle to "common-sense" policies--then it's at least possible that, if not from the get-go in January 2009 then perhaps by a year into his administration, with the rise of the Tea Party and the consolidation of Republican obstructionism, he made the decision to abandon the Democratic Party to its fate and work instead towards the development of something new, taking advantage of the presumed fact that a great many Republicans can't be happy with the prominence that crazy people have recently achieved in their party. As a practical matter it's hard to bring those people over to the Democrats in a consistent way: even in our country, with its loose party affiliations, switching parties is kind of a big deal and it takes an extreme set of circumstances (as in 2008) for the Democrats to have a strong generic appeal. (Hell, most of us don't seem to like Democrats!) In that context, it's potentially attractive for Obama, a person of extraordinary personal gifts who can disarm almost anyone outside the context of a partisan dispute, to remove his re-election from that context, or more precisely, to set his re-election against it. Not just for himself in 2012, which would be vulgar and personalist, but as a foundation for some kind of New Party.
The fact that on many key issues Obama's substantive views are "centrist" lends further credibility (or, more modestly, not-total-craziness) to this possibility. He's in the middle on health care reform (between single payer and do-nothing), and financial services reform (between punish-the-wrongdoers and do-nothing), the so-called Global War on Terror (endless escalation vs. get the hell out), and a whole bunch of other things including "social issues." He didn't get bludgeoned or cowed into that centrism by Republicans: he was always this way. (This is where I'm fighting the "I told you so" urge. Must...fight...urge!) But leaving that aside, it's also the case that some actually progressive things he wants to do are to some extent dragged down by their, and his, identification with the Democratic Party because in the existing political structure its successes are inevitably the Republican Party's defeats. (And let's not imagine that we're above that kind of thinking.)
Obama wants to leave a legacy, that's for sure. Like all presidents who legitimately aspire to greatness, he is in it for the long haul, for what this country's going to look like not on January 20, 2017 but ten and fifty years past that. If he's determined that he can only do that, in terms of the right policies, by doing something totally novel in how he approaches politics starting with the concrete question of his re-election, why wouldn't he?
That's where we start getting into some purely pragmatic questions, which are perhaps best addressed in FAQ format--OK, they haven't been frequently asked yet, but the whole speculation is kind of new!
Everyone who's tried this before has failed. Why would he succeed?
Unlike the previous cases, he's the President already! And, unlike the previous cases (save for Teddy Roosevelt as a Bull Moose), who were personally "meh" (John Anderson) or problematic (Ross Perot) and held electoral interest only for what they represented, Obama is uniquely popular.
If he's thought about this with his advisers, why hasn't word leaked out?
Because he's got an amazingly loyal senior staff. He's a superb judge of people: no scandals, no mistakes, no nothing. (This, by the way, gets us back to the notion that he's made a political hash of the last 1 3/4 years...it's inconsistent with what we know of his talents, therefore the possibility that something else is at work!)
How would he finance his campaign, and how would it work without the Democratic Party?
Bloomberg, Soros, and Buffett like him. (Yes, Bloomberg has confided that he thinks Obama is an egotist, but that's probably not a bad thing in Bloomberg's estimation.) They're loaded. Bloomberg, despite the speculations, won't run for President because he is too smart to waste his money. This would create some cognitive dissonance vs. Citizens United which Obama dutifully decried, but he's a good enough politician to handle that: (1) you have to cope creatively with what the world hands you, and it's a post-CU world; (2) I'm working outside the usual political machinery so it's OK; (3) better to take money from disinterested billionaires who have been examples of philanthropy and an inclusive view of the public good, than from people and companies who give as a quid pro quo. Hell, even I handled it.
As for how it would work, maybe there's a reason OFA has stuck around even though it hasn't done a whole lot, and maybe there's a reason Obama hasn't put a great deal of emphasis on a revitalized DNC. 'Nuff said.
Could he govern this way?
Huge question. Let's worry about it only if this gets beyond a single diarist's musings.
Is this for real? The diary, that is.
I'm not 100% sure, to tell you the truth, but I kind of think it is. At least in the sense that he'd be remiss not to consider it, if only in long strolls along the beach with Michelle. He could do it, it would be huge, and it would be positive overall. I know that last point is strongly contestable, but so many progressives believe that the Democratic Party is hopeless as a sustainable vehicle for progressive policies, and they further believe that there's a majority out there for many progressive policies that nevertheless don't seem to get anywhere.
Isn't this a hit diary against Obama?
No, it's not. If he did this, I would probably vote for him.