President Obama consistently polls ahead of every Republican candidate for president, except for Mitt Romney, who he only leads most of the time. But according to an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal by Douglas Schoen and Patrick Caddell, two pollsters who formerly worked for Democratic presidents Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter, respectively, Obama should do the right thing and “step aside for the one candidate who would become, by acclamation, the nominee of the Democratic Party: Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.”
Because, the authors insist, once Obama is no longer running for reelection, the partisan gridlock that plagues Congress would magically dissipate. Republicans would “come to the table and negotiate,” their fervent anti-taxation, anti-spending dogma suddenly nonexistent, for some reason. The authors claim to propose this detached-from-reality theory “for the good of the party and most of all for the good of the country,” but we think a more plausible explanation for the op-ed is that they have simply run out of ideas for op-eds: They wrote essentially the same one last November for the Washington Post.
