He's Setting the stage for feeling good about the DNC being "just" a failure.
I expect David Axelrod is a pretty good judge of these things. After all, the Alinsky method is to trivialize and marginalize, to the degree possible, everything your opponent does, so to attach the adjective “terrible” to anything is immediately to dismiss its importance and effect.
Trouble is, Mr. Axelrod doesn’t have much leverage here. He is way on the short end of the stick, and though he strives mightily, he cannot shift much of anything. The now failing obama regime has begun to founder, as its last days draw nearer and nearer.
Like Nixon in 1974, it becomes impossible for the Current Occupant to assert believable authority, and without this aura of respectability, people begin to openly sneer and make disparaging remarks, becoming less and less guarded in their speech, and generally behaving like they want to get on to the next big thing.
In Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar”, Brutus speaks,
“There is a tide in the affairs of men.
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat,
And we must take the current when it serves,
Or lose our ventures.”
Obama may have missed the timing in assuring his place in history as being much more positive than the future historians shall see it.