In the days after the 2012 election the Democrats bragged about their technological genius and how it turned the election. They told the world about what they'd done—the data mining, the social networking, that allowed them to zero in on Mrs. Humperdink in Ward 5 and get her to the polls. It was quite impressive and changed national politics forever. But I suspect their bragging hurt their president. In 2008 Mr. Obama won by 9.5 million votes. Four years later, with all the whizbang and money, he won by less than five million. When people talk about 2012 they don't say the president won because the American people endorsed his wonderful leadership, they say he won because his team outcomputerized the laggard Republicans.
This has left him and his people looking more like cold technocrats who know how to campaign than leaders who know how to govern. And it has diminished claims of a popular mandate. The president's position would be stronger now if more people believed he had one.They try all sorts of things to deny that they got beat in an election by a sitting President with a 7.8% unemployment rate, but this is the first time I've seen one of them try and tell me that Joe Blow of Middletown has been retroactively demoralized by the cold technocracy of the 2012 Democratic campaign. Wait till someone tells him about Karl Rove!
Noonan's other weakening point -- about how Obama thinks he can't make deals with Republicans just because they keep saying they don't want to make them but he should know better -- is merely the sort of bald-faced denial of reality that we've learned to expect from her. But the one about how Obama doesn't have a mandate because he's too good at politics is something special; it's so self-refuting it's almost a Zen riddle.
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