GOP's best hope: Obama overreaches or underachieves [View All]

GOP's best hope: Obama overreaches or underachieves

Barack Obama speaks at the National Archives

Charles Dharapak / AP

By Steven Thomma | McClatchy Newspapers


WASHINGTON — If history's any guide, the Republican Party's best hope for winning back power is a public backlash against Barack Obama.

That's how Republicans came back from the edge of a political abyss in 1966, as voters started to turn against Lyndon Johnson two years after his landslide election.

That's what helped unify them in the late 1970s, when a wholesale rejection of Jimmy Carter set the stage for Ronald Reagan's sweeping victory of 1980.

It worked again in 1994, when the public turned thumbs down on the first two years of Bill Clinton's presidency and turned the Congress over to Republicans for the first time in four decades.

Whether the American people will turn against Obama is an open question. Even if they do, it could take years, well beyond the 2010 midterm elections or Obama's likely run for re-election in 2012.

However, at a dark hour for the Republican Party — when polls show voters abandoning the brand and prominent members such as Dick Cheney and Colin Powell are feuding over who's a better Republican — influential party leaders outside Washington are growing more confident that Obama has planted the seeds of his own demise — and of their resurgence.

"We are getting ready for a comeback," said Saul Anuzis, a former chairman of the Grand Old Party in Michigan. "The Obama administration and the Democrats will overstep their bounds in terms of their election mandate."

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