At the Six-Month Mark: A Tale of Two Julys

posted at 9:38 am on July 21, 2009 by CK MacLeod
[ Obama ]   

At the six-month mark of the presidency of Barack Obama, the focus on the right has been on the downturn in his fortunes as measured in falling approval numbers across the board, and as conveyed in widespread doubts about his program and indeed about his political future.

Rasmussen’s likely voter robocalls have been registering severe slippage for weeks, with all the passion heavily on the disapproving side, though it’s only in the last days that they’ve shown overall presidential approval reaching statistical dead center. Most startling was a separate Rasmussen poll assessing hypothetical 2012 match-ups showing Obama tied with Mitt Romney, and a mere 6 points ahead of Sarah Palin – even with the latter just having been declared politically D.O.A. by most of the political establishment.

Meanwhile, at the Contentions blog, O-watchers Jennifer Rubin and Peter Wehner had a Monday field day, with three separate posts on “Obama’s Summer of Discontent.” On Fox, Dick Morris spoke of Waterloo and Stalingrad. In the Wall Street Journal, Fred Barnes cast his analytical net a bit closer to shore, focusing on Obama’s legislative agenda. Barnes offered a detailed analysis, but his summary statements will suffice for us here:

Mr. Obama’s top initiatives — health-care reform and “cap and trade” energy legislation — are in serious jeopardy and he has himself and his congressional allies to blame.

Their high-pressure tactics in promoting and passing legislation, most notably the economic “stimulus” enacted in February, have backfired.

and

For Mr. Obama, this is all a potentially disastrous turn of events.

and

Mr. Obama’s health-care and energy initiatives, the core of his far-reaching agenda, were bound to face serious opposition in Congress in any case. Hardball tactics and false promises have only made the hill he has to climb steeper. Now he may lose on both. The president and his congressional allies should have known better.

Though an opponent of the President, Barnes has not in the past been averse to delivering bad news to Republicans. If he now has ill tidings for the other side, he delivers them with little evident glee, perhaps because he has seen a failed presidency or two, and knows how much damage they can do even to those who eventually benefit politically.

Can Obama stop the slide or even turn it around, or is he destined (as he already appeared to be at the 100-day mark) to emulate those princes whom Machiavelli criticized for indulging in “liberality” early on, at risk of inevitably becoming either “poor and despised” or “rapacious and hated” during the straitened financial circumstances that inevitably follow?

Repeatedly telling anyone who’s still listening that “we’re out of money, ” as again last week during All-Star Game chit-chat, seems like a better start on the “poor and despised” alternative, especially when you’ve also been all over the place taking credit for spending as much as you could as fast as you could. On the other hand, talking up taxes night and day in the context of health care and energy overhauls and budget shortfalls is a good way to work on “rapacious and hated.”

Or maybe Obama will defy Machiavelli – by managing to become both despised and hated. On many days, his and his Administration’s contradictory messages – “Fiscal Responsibility Summit” and jaw dropping debt, “misread the situation” and “wouldn’t change a thing,” and so on – seem intended to bring about just such a political catastrophe. If he appeared to some as a “sort of God” only a few weeks ago, increasingly he and he alone will appear responsible for every leaf that falls and every babe that cries from sea to shining sea, and a lot of leaves are falling and a lot of babes are crying.

Of course, it’s never over til it’s over in politics. A cynic might, for instance, advise Obama’s people to go find a lunatic: Martin and Annelise Anderson, in their recent, highly sympathetic book Reagan’s Secret War, attribute Reagan’s early success in no small part to his handling of the attempt on his life and the subsequent outpouring of public respect and sympathy. Of course, no one in this universe can tell us what happened in the one where John Hinckley found some other way to impress Jodie Foster: For all we know, Reagan would have had to have gone slower and fought even harder, and managed to do a few important things better.

The point remains that unexpected opportunities will come, perhaps in disguise. In a way, that was the story of Reagan’s presidency, from before it even began. He came into office already greeted by opinion leaders as, in Clark Clifford’s phrase, an “amiable dunce.” He was forced by legislative arithmetic to negotiate with the opposite party, which controlled the House under a speaker who originally question Reagan’s ability to play “in the big leagues.” There was even some question at the time, after a succession of failed administrations stretching back 20 years, whether the presidency itself was an outmoded institution.

In short, Reagan had ‘em right where he wanted ‘em. By late July, after passing the capstone on his domestic program with strong support in the House and an overwhelming vote in the Senate, he recorded the following note to himself in his private diary:

This on top of the budget victory is the greatest pol. win in half a century.

On present evidence, if President Obama is keeping a diary, and is in touch with reality at all, he won’t likely be writing notes like that to himself anytime soon. Politically, he may have to look for something more on the Clintonian “comeback kid” model – which begins with deeply diminished expectations of the sort Reagan never had to generate, having started out with them.

Those, at least, seem to be well within Obama’s reach.

Cross-posted at Zombie Contentions.

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