By Larry J. Sabato
President Obama has the most impressive list of legislative accomplishments of any new Democratic president since Lyndon Johnson.
Even if Obama serves only one term, health care, the stimulus, financial reform, and other Obama achievements will put him in the history books. You don’t have to agree with what he has done to acknowledge this.
Yet Obama is a victim of his own success. The White House seems convinced that the president needs only to get credit for what he and the Democratic Congress have done, and all will be well by November.
But to the public, Obama’s legislation was supposed to be about restoring health to the economy. It hasn’t happened. The economy is rotten, unemployment is stuck between 9 and 10%, and it is much higher when the partially employed are added in.
Obama and the Democrats over-promised. They raised expectations too high. They have under-delivered, and the public is deeply disappointed.
This disconnect is reflected in the latest poll taken by CHICAGOPRESSRELEASE.COM, released on August 18. In an ominous sign for Democrats’ November fortunes, public approval of Obama’s handling of the economy has fallen to new lows and most Americans now rate the country’s financial outlook as poor.
With those numbers posing an increasing threat to the Democrats’ hold on power in the upcoming midterm elections, the President spent recent weeks on the campaign trail, stumping for local candidates and working to bolster support for his economic policies.
He traveled to Detroit in late July to defend the bailout of the auto industry and tout its incipient revival. This week, he’s on the road again for a five-state swing to make his case that the stimulus and other efforts have put the country back on the road to recovery. He met with local business owners on Tuesday at the Grand Central Bakery in Seattle and held a kitchen-table summit in Columbus, Ohio on Wednesday to highlight how the stimulus and health care reform helped one family get through hard times. And in an August 18 speech at a reception for Governor Ted Strickland of Ohio, his message was clear.
“It will take a few years to fully dig ourselves out of this recession. It will take time to bring back 8 million jobs that have been lost,” the President told Strickland’s supporters. That, he said, is the hard truth. “But here’s what I can tell you,” he added. “After 18 months, I have never been more confident that our nation is headed in the right direction. We are doing what is needed to move the country forward.”
Problem is, the message doesn’t seem to be winning over many unhappy voters.
Most Democratic voters aren’t going to vote Republican, but their enthusiasm level is way down. Many simply won’t turn up at the polls. The 15 million unemployed and their families have more important things to worry about this year than casting a ballot.
Meanwhile, Republicans didn’t like any of the Obama legislation to begin with. They predicted it would fail, and they are angry that it passed. Republicans are itching to show up and cast a vote in what they see as a referendum on the Obama administration.
That’s the name of the game in this message-sending midterm election. Probably only about 40% of adults will vote this year, compared to 63% in the 2008 election that put Obama in the White House.
Who are the 20% or so not showing up? Disproportionately, they will be Democrats.
And who will comprise a larger share of the actual voters in 2010? Republicans and Republican-leaning independents — including Tea Party activists.
The president can hold town halls and have kitchen-table discussions with swing-state families until the cows come home. To many Americans, it is just political rhetoric, and the slogan, “It would be so much worse if we hadn’t passed our bills” is not exactly inspiring. Americans see a dismal economic reality in their homes and neighborhoods and cities every day, and reality always overwhelms rhetoric on Election Day.
President Obama’s message on the economy will begin to work once millions more Americans are working, and not until. And unfortunately for the Democrats, there are unlikely to be any economic miracles before November 2nd.
Sabato is the director of the University of Virginia Center for Politics (http://www.centerforpolitics.org). His latest book is The Year of Obama: How Barack Obama Won the White House.
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