Under these circumstances, Obama has the opportunity to seize the high ground and the imagination of the nation once again, and to galvanize the public for the hard decisions that must be made. The only way he can do so, though, is by putting national interests ahead of personal or political ones.

To that end, we believe Obama should announce immediately that he will not be a candidate for reelection in 2012. ~Doug Schoen and Patrick Caddell

This is extremely bad advice for all the reasons James Joyner lays out here. Common sense tells us that an incumbent President making such an announcement has already resigned himself to irrelevance and failure. Schoen and Caddell take for granted that the public has already judged Obama such a failure that they have supposedly passed a vote of no-confidence in his leadership in the midterm election. Like most other things Doug Schoen says about politics in America, this is not true, but he and Caddell are claiming that accepting the no-confidence vote is Obama’s key to success. Of course, just the opposite would occur.

Instead of being liberated to govern “effectively,” Obama would see whatever political capital he still has drain away. The public would not be galvanized for decisions of any kind. On the contrary, whatever residual respect Obama’s supporters may have had for him would largely evaporate, and he would become a near-universal target for mockery. Everywhere he went, Obama would have his own rhetoric thrown back in his face even more often than he does now. The Democrats would be consumed by the battle for the succession, which would in turn be a poisoned chalice for the politician emerging as the next nominee, and he would all but guarantee the election of a Republican and secure his reputation as a political disaster for the Democrats. In Congress, the leadership of both parties would bide their time and wait out the remaining years of Obama’s term.

The most comical part of the op-ed comes when the discussion turns to foreign policy:

On foreign policy, Obama could better make hard decisions about Iran, North Korea and Afghanistan based on what is reasonable and responsible for the United States, without the political constraints of a looming election. He would be able to deal with a Democratic constituency that wants to get out of Afghanistan immediately and a Republican constituency that is committed to the war, forging a course that responds not to the electoral calendar but to the facts on the ground.

If Obama doesn’t have to face the voters again, maybe he would decide to give antiwar activists what they want, order the rapid withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan, and leave the consequences to his Republican successor. It is possible that the “political constraints of a looming election” have made Obama’s policies more hawkish than they might have otherwise been.

One assumes that “what is reasonable and responsible for the United States” is whatever Schoen and Caddell believe should be done. Let me just say that I very much hope Obama still has the “political constraints of a looming election” when it comes to making decisions on these questions. Bush needlessly prolonged and intensified large-scale American involvement in Iraq once he was freed of such “political constraints.” His lame-duck status was certainly liberating. It allowed him to ignore the midterm election results in 2006 and continue a war that the overwhelming majority of Americans wanted brought to an end. What appear to Beltway creatures as hindrances on the government’s “effectiveness” are what the rest of us call mechanisms of accountability and self-government. We don’t have very many of them, and the last thing we need right now is to have a President who is not bound by them.