Friday, October 29, 2010
Like presidential predecessors from Franklin Roosevelt to George W. Bush, Barack Obama has been barnstorming the country, seeking to head off a mid-term Democratic drubbing that will complicate the final two years of his term.
Like most of them, he’ll probably fail.
In part, that reflects the limits to what a campaigning president can say or do to undo the events of the preceding two years. He can raise money and encourage his political base to turn out, but the state of the economy and its impact on voters inevitably are more influential.
In part, it represents the failure of Obama and his top aides to persuade voters, especially independents, that his policies in fact have had a positive impact in preventing the recession from becoming a depression and beginning the long-term solution to the inequities in the country’s health care system.
Outside events
And in part, it’s because most mid-term elections represent some sort of reaction to the previous presidential election.
Despite such historical realities, it’s inevitable that much of the post-election analysis, especially from Republicans, will interpret the results as a repudiation of Obama and a signal to reverse his course.
But that almost certainly would be an exaggeration. After all, public support for Obama, as measured by his job approval in polls, has never dipped below the low-to-mid 40s and is roughly the same as Ronald Reagan’s and Bill Clinton’s when their parties suffered mid-term defeats.
Indeed, a Pew Research Center poll this week showed more support for an Obama re-election bid than for Reagan’s at a comparable time.
And the reality is that even many Republicans realize that Obama’s course is far less likely to be reversed as modified in the next two years.
Over recent months, Republicans have argued that voters are rejecting Obama’s remedies for the economic mess he inherited because the prescriptions have not only failed to fix the problem but made it worse.
Obama’s $787 billion stimulus bill “has created not only unemployment but the big circumstance with the debt that we’re dealing with,” Dallas Rep. Pete Sessions, chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, said in an online interview with ABC News.
In fact, many economists agree with the administration that, while helpful, Obama’s remedies haven’t fully succeeded because the situation was so dire that it will take longer to have maximum impact. Far more of the explosion in the deficit stems from the economic collapse and such Bush-era initiatives as the war in Iraq and the unfunded Medicare prescription drug benefit.
Still, Tuesday’s likely results will limit Obama’s ability to pass additional governmental measures to revive the economy. He’ll have to shift his focus to preserving what has been done and finding areas to cooperate with the GOP.
Legislative battles
A new book on FDR’s unsuccessful 1938 effort to eliminate some conservative Democratic opponents of his New Deal legislation, Susan Dunn’s “Roosevelt’s Purge,” serves to remind how long this pattern has persisted. Despite enormous Democratic congressional majorities, and his unprecedented landslide victory in 1936, Roosevelt lost far more legislative battles after that than he won.
Subsequent presidents have encountered a similar pattern.
The enormous burst of legislation following Lyndon Johnson’s 1964 landslide began to dissipate before the Congress elected that year ended its two-year run.
In the early 1980s, Reagan’s major legislative achievements were largely completed in his first year, though bipartisan cooperation in his second term helped enact a major tax simplification and some spending curbs.
In Obama’s case, the lack of an economic recovery remains the prime reason for public resistance to the renewed governmental activism his election launched, though the White House has exacerbated that with an inept sales job.
And the extent to which an upswing finally comes will determine whether this year’s results are a temporary pause or a more permanent reversal of the nation’s 2008 verdict.
Carl P. Leubsdorf is the former Washington bureau chief of the Dallas Morning News. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.
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