Obama administration slaps together a sloppy political office, just in time for 2016.

Because I hope that nobody’s expecting it to be ready for 2014.

Democratic campaign operatives have been getting worried that the White House wasn’t doing enough to help them in the midterms, and that President Barack Obama didn’t care enough to change that.

Friday, Obama responded: David Simas, a longtime aide who returned to the White House after running polling and focus groups for the reelection campaign, was named director of a new Office of Political Strategy and Outreach.

He’s also apparently the only person at that office. That’s right, ladies and gentlemen: it’s more or less nine months before Election Day, the Democrats are increasingly looking likely to lose their majority in the Senate, the House is almost officially a lost cause, and the number of likely flips in the governors’ races is quietly dropping… and the White House has not yet set up a group that can actually coordinate between the President and the various groups for the mutual benefit of both.  Instead, they have a guy, and a letterhead.

You would have to have a heart of stone not to laugh at that*.

Seriously, this should have been set up in December of 2012.  Back when Obama could still get his hands on the staff – not just the big names, but the people who actually run things – and make sure that the ones that didn’t get hired by him were properly set up in the other stars in the Democratic party’s campaign constellation. Anyone who wasn’t an utter fool could have told the man that 2014 would be a perilous year for Senate Democrats: a large freshman class in a midterm year, coupled with the inevitable retirements, meant that the Democrats would be playing a heavily defensive game. And that’s not even bringing Obamacare into the mix. But instead of hitting the ground running, the White House just… figured that somebody else would do all of that, I guess.  And it’s taken this long for them to notice the screaming.

Not that I mind President Barack Obama choosing… unwisely.

Moe Lane

PS: It does not bother me that I have lost to these people.  They have a budget, a staff, and an infrastructure; I have a reasonably nice desktop, a functional camera, and an iPad. It does bother me a little that nobody on our side ever tries to hire some of us to properly smack these people down a few notches.  But that’s practically the tagline of the blogosphere, both Left AND Right.

PPS: What should alarm Democrats is the possibility that Barack Obama might think that he’s done his part with this, and thus go off and do… whatever it is that he does all day.

*Oscar Wilde, I think.