It is undeniable that the faltering economy and high unemployment have imposed some difficult messaging challenges for Democratic strategists and press secretaries.
However, the party has also been given some good material to work with in recent weeks, that it has largely failed to exploit.
1) Osama Been Gotten. If George W. Bush had captured Osama bin Laden, do you really think his Administration would have stopped talking about it after a week or two? More likely, they would have created an environment -- through talking heads, validators, surrogates, and spokespeople -- where questioning or challenging a commander-in-chief who is busy capturing terrorists, would have been patriotically questionable.
I'm not suggesting the White House should go to that length, but the DNC and Obama press teams have allowed this signature achievement to fall completely off the radar. It is rarely raised by surrogates on political shows, as a sign of the President's strength and effectiveness. It is rarely mentioned on progressive media programs. To launch a Rove-like campaign to question the patriotism of Republicans would be inauthentic and puerile, but to keep the achievement a topic of prominent discussion, to maximize the President's stature, framing, and positioning, is reasonable and appropriate.
Stated simply, the notion that the President's competence could be questioned weeks after capturing bin Laden where his predecessor could not, or that he could enter debt ceiling talks at this time from a position of only moderate strength, speaks to a lack of aggressiveness and savvy on the part of his press team.
2) McConnell Gives Away the Store. The highest-ranking Republican in the US Senate (Mitch McConnell) saying that making Barack Obama a one-term President is his single most important political goal, is a political gift that the Democrats have squandered to date. Exploiting accidental gaffes for political gain is irritating and a waste of time in my view, regardless of whether it's done by Democrats or Republicans. But this is not a gaffe, but rather an honest (and repeated) admission by a political leader that he is willing to place political gain over the success of the country.
It explains why his party has refused to vote for measures that it previously supported, simply because the President introduced or supported them this time. McConnell's statement sends precisely the kind of message that the bipartisanship-fetishizing press hates, and would therefore redound to the great political benefit of the Democrats. But it is not being repeated in unison by every member of the caucus, the White House, every surrogate on TV and radio, and every progressive media host.
The result is that to date, Democrats have failed to capitalize.