Obama Aide: 'He Doesn't Feel Repudiated'

In the wake of historic congressional midterm losses that cost Democrats control of the U.S. Senate, President Barack Obama’s inner circle says he remains defiant and unwilling to face the seismic post-election reality. 

“He doesn’t feel repudiated,” an Obama aide told the New York Times’ Peter Baker.  

Yet despite Obama’s desire to inoculate himself from blame, even progressive MSNBC analyst and Huffington Post editor Howard Fineman declared on Wednesday that “the Obama era is over.” 

Obama’s unwillingness to interpret the Republican rout as divorced from his unpopularity runs the risk of further angering Democrats who have felt betrayed by an intransigent Obama White House they believe unnecessarily put Democrats in a perilous political position. 

Whether Democrats can convince Obama to back off his threats to go it alone in enacting executive amnesty in the wake of Democrats’ Tuesday night election debacle remains to be seen. But for now, Obama insiders say he remains fixed on maintaining the status quo. Indeed, even before Tuesday night’s results rolled in, Obama blamed the looming losses, not on his unpopularity dragging down Democrats, but on the electoral map. 

“This is probably the worst possible group of states for Democrats since Dwight Eisenhower,” said Obama. “There are a lot of states that are being contested where they tend to tilt Republican.”