Dems to Obama: Gut Your Team

Pressure is mounting on President Obama to gut his inner circle, which House Democrats blame for crafting a losing 2010 strategy. In recent weeks, David Axelrod has held strategy sessions with a series of senior Democratic strategists and lawmakers, but many participants walked away so frustrated that they quit and started their own competing gatherings, the Wall Street Journal reports.

Angry strategists complain that Obama lacked an overall strategy and didn't effectively convey what Dems would do between now and 2012 if they retained power, and say that attacks on conservative attack-ad groups—an issue that doesn't touch on voters real-world problems—didn’t work. "They just had so much faith in the president's ability to navigate all this and that no matter what the right threw at him, the president would have this force field of trust that would protect him," said one disgruntled House strategist. And many are looking for an overhaul of that "force field": Axelrod, Valerie Jarrett, Robert Gibbs, and David Plouffe. (More Barack Obama stories.)