The White Flag Presidency

posted at 11:51 pm on March 4, 2010 by Slublog

With all due respect, when the liberal president of the United States has to essentially beg his fellow liberals to vote for his proposal, it’s safe to say we have a weak executive.

President Obama’s message to progressives who are dissatisfied with the Senate health care bill is two fold: First: Don’t forget about the uninsured. Second: Don’t forget what failure to pass this bill would do to the party and my presidency…

…Obama reminded the assembled Democrats that doing nothing would be politically disastrous. “To maintain a strong presidency we need to pass this bill,” the President said, according to Grijalva.

What Obama doesn’t seem to realize is that his presidency is already damaged, no matter what happens with health care. If he manages to persuade enough Democrats to pass such a profoundly unpopular bill, the Democrats will pay in November. However, if he doesn’t pass it, the Democratic base will regard him as weak. Since those Democrats are basically all that are propping up his approval ratings, it’s hard to figure out which scenario is worse.

The true measure of how far Obama has fallen, though, is how Democrats regard him. Few seem to be asking him to campaign for them, and his approval ratings aren’t at record lows, but they are likely nowhere near where Obama thought he would be at this point in his presidency.

Of course, Obama has no one but himself to blame for this. He campaigned as a moderate who could bring the country together, but lurched toward hard liberalism almost as soon as he took office, and is now urging Democrats to embrace the very ideology that crushed his approval rating. Obama underestimated how angry voters who believed his campaign rhetoric would get once they realized he was lying to them.

Obama’s approval ratings fell because Americans don’t like being lied to, and for that reason, those ratings are unlikely to improve until the president shows a willingness to respond to popular opinion. Frankly, given how Obama has governed to this point, I am not optimistic. I hope the American people deliver a firm rebuke in November, but more importantly I hope Obama gets the message. If he doesn’t, then it may be time to start worrying about his ability to acknowledge political reality.

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