The End of Obama? By Alan W. Dowd
Obama won 52 percent of independents in 2008, an impressive feat given John McCain’s maverick credentials and cultivation of independent support over the previous two decades. But today, independent voters say they are more likely to vote for the Republican candidate in congressional elections by 37-31 percent. In the generic ballot for congressional elections, Gallup reports that Republicans lead Democrats 49-43 percent. And in a two-way race for president, “independents are more likely to back the Republican nominee (38 percent) over Obama (28 percent).”
In short, the independents are gone and will not be coming back.
Why did they bolt? From health care to cap and trade, from the gargantuan stimulus to the global apology tour, they see in Obama a revolutionary—not a reformer—and that’s not what they wanted.
This incongruence between how Candidate Obama marketed himself and how President Obama governs is a real problem—for the latter right now and the former two years from now. Take Obama’s slow-motion reaction to the oil spill as an example. When juxtaposed with his super-sized stimulus, centralized healthcare plan and cap-and-tax energy program, Obama’s oil-spill response paints on odd picture for voters of all stripes: He is laissez-faire when he should be interventionist (see the oil spill) and interventionist when he should trust the creativity of the American people (see the economy and healthcare reform).
But don’t take my word for it. As The Rolling Stone’s Tim Dickinson observes, the president’s initial defense for his inaction and aloofness to the spill—that he had no authority to intervene—was “a curious line of argument from an administration that has reserved the right to assassinate American citizens abroad and has nationalized much of the auto industry.”
That leads us to the stubborn reality that some of Obama’s supporters are disappointed because he hasn’t been interventionist or revolutionary enough. After all, he hasn’t nationalized the banks or withdrawn from Iraq. He hasn’t closed Gitmo or quit Afghanistan. And he actually proposed expanding offshore oil drilling. But a month later, the Gulf oil disaster smothered those plans.
In other words, the anti-war left and environmental left can find plenty wrong with their president. Yet another bloc in Obama’s short-lived realignment is falling away because they are realizing what most of us always knew: Barack Obama is just another president forced to react and respond to events beyond his control, whether it’s an oil spill, unemployment rates, Iranian intransigence or the euro crisis.
Obama has only himself to blame for raising expectations of the true-believers. This is, after all, the man who said his presidency would mark the moment “when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal…when we ended a war and secured our nation…when we came together to remake this great nation.”
Obama’s failure to deliver has forced his followers/believers/supporters to come to what I suspect is a crushing realization for them: Neither he nor his government can do everything—or perhaps anything, as Frank Rich of the New York Times observed last month. “The very notion that government can accomplish anything,” according to Rich, is “being tarred daily” by the Obama White House’s “record of incompletes.”
This is not to say that center-left and hard-left voters will support Republicans, of course, but rather that many of them will just sit out the election. Along with the loss of independents, that will make for a long election night for the president and his congressional allies.
Alan Dowd writes on politics and public policy.
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