Jobless numbers bad news for Dems

By DOYLE McMANUS

President Barack Obama didn’t get much time last week to savor the gauzy one-year-after retrospectives of his 2008 election victory, with its 53 percent of the popular vote and 365 electoral votes. He had other numbers to think about.

Friday, the Labor Department announced that unemployment hit a 26-year high of 10.2 percent in October. Earlier last week, in Virginia and New Jersey — states that were Obama’s in 2008 — Republicans won gubernatorial seats by margins of about 17 percent and 5 percent, respectively.

And the president’s own approval rating, a dizzying 78 percent when he was inaugurated, has fallen to a prosaic 50 percent.

State and local elections often turn on local circumstances, and there were plenty of those to muddy the message from Tuesday’s election. But there’s nothing complicated about the mood in the rest of the nation. Voters in 50 states are unhappy about the economy, angry about partisanship in Washington and disappointed in Obama’s failure to live up to their inflated expectations.

Alarming numbers

For Democrats, the unemployment number was the week’s most alarming. It now becomes the Republicans’ chief argument that Obama’s policies have failed — nevermind that their own alternative, a smaller economic stimulus, would have done no better.

“Tell me what the unemployment rate is in 2010 and I’ll tell you how that election turns out,” Republican strategist David Winston said. “When unemployment hits a certain level, it’s the only domestic issue that matters.”

In the first months of his presidency, Winston noted, Obama focused like a laser on the economy, and his approval ratings were high. But during the last six months, his agenda has been more fragmented as he’s tackled health care, climate change and Afghanistan.

Some White House aides say that there’s nothing here that a couple million new jobs won’t fix. But Obama didn’t run for president only to fix the economy. Candidate Obama’s promise was to move American politics beyond its normal limits.

On that count, two more numbers should give the president pause.

When the Gallup Poll asked voters in October if Obama had kept “the promises he made during his presidential campaign,” only 48 percent said yes. And when the pollsters asked whether voters considered Obama a liberal or a moderate, 54 percent called him a liberal — a big jump from the 43 percent who gave that answer on Election Day 2008.

Many of those disillusioned voters are moderates and independents, people who voted for Obama not because they supported liberal programs but because they responded to his call for a post-partisan politics. To be sure, Republicans in Congress haven’t given Obama many chances to pass bipartisan legislation; they have opted instead for drawing sharp contrasts. At least in the short run, that strategy appears to be working.

Instead of a new centrist consensus, Obama’s first year has produced backlash — and not only among zealots of the Republican right. Polls show conservative views up across the entire electorate.

On election day last week, those trends were reflected in an “intensity gap” that brought Republican voters to the polls — the inverse of the 2008 intensity gap that brought young voters and blacks out for Obama. In Virginia, most of last week’s voters said they voted for John McCain in 2008; Obama voters stayed home.

What does all this mean for the next 12 months?

Skittish Democrats

In the debate over health care, it means moderate Democrats from swing districts ... will be even more skittish.

Obama also needs to reassure voters in the coming weeks that he hasn’t forgotten about jobs. Expect to hear the president talk up not only the original stimulus plan — whose effects have been real but disappointing — but also new measures that add up to a stealth “second stimulus” package: last week’s extension of unemployment benefits, the expansion of home buyers’ tax credits and a $250 bonus for Social Security recipients.

Last week’s numbers just mean that American politics have returned to normal. That doesn’t mean Obama’s presidency has failed; far from it. But it does mean his ambitions, which once seemed limitless, will now be trimmed.

X McManus is a Times columnist.