Let the Pre-Postmortems Begin

Back in 2006, Glenn Reynolds wrote his rather prescient pre-postmortem of the GOP and its long odds in the midterms, in mid-October of that year. This time around, Howard Fineman returns the favor for his party a month earlier in the election cycle, in the latest Newsweek.

Here’s a representative sample:

Obama misread his mandate. “Obama’s 2008 victory was a personal one,” says Bill Galston, an adviser to President Clinton. “It wasn’t a vote for a more expansive view of the role and reach of government.” The stimulus, on its own, wasn’t the problem. It was the thousands of easy-to-caricature pages of new legislation that came on top of it, all of which revived the Republicans’ “big government” narrative.

Gosh, how on earth Obama could have reached such a conclusion in early 2009?

Too bad Newsweek, its soon-to-be former owners, and the rest of the MSM didn’t take Howard’s advice in the pre-postmortem he wrote for his own industry, at the start of 2005.