This is the most important week of President Obama’s bid for a second term in November.
Consider:
Chris Cillizza
Chris Cillizza is founder and editor of The Fix, a leading blog on state and national politics. He is the author of The Gospel According to the Fix: An Insider’s Guide to a Less than Holy World of Politics and an MSNBC contributor and political analyst. He also regularly appears on NBC and NPR’s The Diane Rehm Show. He joined The Post in 2005 and was named one of the top 50 journalists by Washingtonian in 2009.
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Full text of President Obama’s speech on national security
“We must define the nature and scope of this struggle, or else it will define us,” the president said.
●The Supreme Court will rule not only on the constitutionality of Obama’s landmark health-care law, but the highest court in the country also will hand down judgment on Arizona’s stringent illegal immigration law.
●Congress will be forced into action (or inaction) on federal student loans and highway projects — both of which will expire within the next week.
●The House will vote on whether to hold Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt of Congress due to his refusal to turn over some documents related to the “Fast and Furious” gunrunning operation.
Any one of those issues — in isolation — would be a major political event with resultant consequences on the presidential race. Combined them all in the space of a week and we may well look back at this coming seven days as where/when Obama’s second term bid was made/broken.
“We are in a short period right now where the candidates and the terms of the presidential debate will be defined, with several critical issues coming to a head and voters’ perceptions of the economy, and who will best deal with it, clarifying,” said Steve Rosenthal, a longtime Democratic strategist.
First among equals when it comes to its impact on the dialogue of the presidential race is the Supreme Court’s ruling on the Affordable Care Act, which is set to be handed down either Monday or Thursday.
The administration and Democrats spent the better part of a year wrestling the bill through Congress amid unified Republican opposition and worries within their party that they were doing too much too fast. When he signed the legislation into law, Obama touted it as a historic moment — insisting he had done something that seven presidents had tried and failed to do — and telling ABC’s Charlie Gibson in December 2009 that “this will be the single most important piece of domestic legislation passed since Social Security.”
Given that proclamation, if the Court rules against the law it’s hard not to see it as a repudiation of a major part of Obama’s first term in office.
“The health-care decision alone makes this the most important week of the campaign,” said Dan Schnur, the director of the Jesse M. Unruh Institute of Politics at the University of Southern California and communications director for the 2000 presidential bid of Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz). “No one really knows how the court decision will motivate or discourage the two sides of the debate, but it’s hard to see any other real-world event between now and the election that carries such a large emotional impact for so many voters.”
Andy Stern, the former head of the Service Employees International Union, said he was focusing most of his attention on health care, too — due to what’s at stake from a policy and political perspective.
If the Court upholds the law, it will “fire the passion of [the] anti-Obamacare base” while also “incentivizing supporters about how without an [Obama] reelection health care is doomed.”
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