It’s all in one article in the Times today.  For House Democrats, Support for Obama Agenda Came at a Cost. Yes, Dems lost a lot of seats in 2010 and 2014 and it’s because they supported Obama, or so the article starts of stating. But oddly enough, there’s not one interview with a Democrat that says that.

Based on that headline you’d think they would have gotten some Blue Dog who lost their cushy, phony baloney, gold encrusted House gig to say it was his support for avoiding an economic depression that hurt him.

Some Democrats hold Mr. Obama responsible for that, saying their party’s lawmakers took the blame for the president’s aggressive and often unpopular agenda to revive the economy and adopt sweeping health care legislation during his first two years in office.

Ah, some Democrats say what?  Hm, whoooooo?  The ones who voted for saving the economy and expanding healthcare and then ran away from it and got creamed by Tea Party wackos?  Or the ones who voted against it and got creamed by Tea Party wackos anyway? Option A or Option B?

Nobody who vociferously defended doing the right thing lost. Which the article goes on to show.  If you’re going to blame Obama for the decline of the Dems in the House from 2009s 257 to the present 188, you can but not for his over aggressive agenda. For this:

“The main Democrat nationally, and the only one who could be heard, was silent on the huge structural issues that more and more Americans were facing,” said Stanley Greenberg, a veteran Democratic pollster who blames Mr. Obama for Democratic House losses in 2010 and 2014. “His silence on those things left the voters without much motivation to vote.”

And that I agree with.  What you can blame on Obama is his lack of effort to make sure that the people who voted for change in 2008 and 2012 got to the polls in 2010 and 2014. Maybe there was no way to stop the wave, but if there was a way, it was on the shoulders of the popularly elected President to make the full-throated, loud and clear appeal that all the change was going to stop dead if Democrats didn’t come out to keep the House and Senate. That you can pin on Obama. And I do.

You can’t blame him for not listening to the Republicans that would have let the banks and auto-industry fail and would never vote to provide economic stimulus even while 800,000 people a month were losing their jobs.

In a lunchtime speech here, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. told the Democratic lawmakers he believed that they could win back the House if they drew a sharper contrast with Republicans.

“I think we can win; I think the House we can win,” Mr. Biden said. “I think we have to focus — and we didn’t do it enough the last time in my view. The best way to win is to run on what we have done and what we stand for, and run on what more we are trying to do, making clear what we think we have to do to finish the agenda and then contrast that to what they are for and what they oppose.”

Exactly. Be loud and proud for responsible governing and a progressive agenda. It’s worth a try, no?