After more than a year in the White House, President Barack Obama’s high rate of popularity has fallen, perhaps enough to result in serious losses for the Democrats in the November Congressional elections. His 68% approval rating when he entered office fell to 47% by the end of his first year, the lowest first-year-end ranking since that of President Gerald Ford in 1975.
Many independents who voted Democratic in the last election are pulling away. A number of working class voters are looking askance at what they consider the Obama Administration’s inattention to their decades of wage and benefit stagnation, now exacerbated by the Great Recession.
During the campaign many poor and working class families, who are suffering the worst in the recession, evidently took Obama at what appeared to be his word about moving quickly to alleviate their plight. Patience is strained when a worker is jobless or fears foreclosure or must feed a family with the help of a food kitchen. This, too, reduces popular appeal.
A sector of liberal and progressive voters — many of whom were among President Barack Obama’s strongest supporters — are expressing disappointment about his presidency, and consternation regarding the seeming inability of the large Democratic majority in Congress to pass centrist legislation, much less the center-left changes required by the American people.
Columnist Katha Pollitt declared in The Nation March 8 that the liberal base of Obama’s constituency, “pro-choice women, labor, civil rights activists, opponents of war, progressives, leftists, civil libertarians — is demoralized.”
There are several reasons for these developments. One of the most important stems from the 2008 election campaign itself when a not insubstantial portion of the electorate seemed convinced that the first-term Illinois senator would be able to perform the equivalent of political miracles once elevated to the White House.
This is understandable, though it imposes a staggering burden on the anointed miracle-maker, not least when confronted with an utterly destructive Republican opposition in Congress.
After eight years of Bush Administration pandering to the rich, denying climate change, attempting to destroy Social Security, launching wars on false pretenses, justifying torture, and creating conditions for the worst recession since the Great Depression, the majority of the American people were desperate for change.
It seems, however, the changes the people desired went beyond Obama’s cautious, middle-of-the road agenda, and we believe it is a serious factor in the decline of presidential popularity.
Though not clearly articulated, masses of people were demanding change of a transformative nature, not simply replacing Republicans with Democrats, but with new policies to correct old and now staggering problems.
The changes many sought were rational, significant and often progressive:
• Reducing the power of the Wall St. gamblers and the greedy banking system with stronger regulations.
• Reversing the steep decline of better-paying manufacturing jobs.
• Ending the deterioration of Main St. in a program to revive American cities and rural towns.
• Halting the three-decade attack on working class and lower middle class income and living standards.
• Overhauling the educational system to bring American children up to international standards.
• Stopping America’s incessant wars, including the war in Afghanistan.
• Closing the expanding gap between rich and poor by taxing away a large portion of the disproportionate wealth and assets of the top 5% of the population.
• Legislating a single-payer healthcare system, which Obama at one time supported until his presidential ambitions dictated otherwise.
• Strengthening civil liberties after the Patriot Act and other erosions of democratic freedoms under the Bush Administration.
The election-year recession with its high unemployment and housing foreclosures compounded the popular desire for substantive solutions from the post-Bush White House.
Candidate Obama was more than obliging to multitudes of Democrats and independents seeking change, adopting the concept of “change” as his principal campaign pledge to the voters, encouraging ever-increasing crowds of supporters in their repeated chants for “Change We Can Believe In,” and “Yes We Can,” meaning Obama can bring about the changes America needs.
At the same time, though he explained some of the programs he sought, Obama never defined the “change” he would deliver or commit himself and the Democratic Party to the visions of change in the minds of many millions of voters. The campaign did little to discourage Democratic and independent voters from thinking that their extensive hopes for change, for turning an historic corner in America, would be fought for and attained when the party dominated the White House and Congress.
Actually, the Democratic Party and Obama had no intention of governing other than from the political center/center-right, and well understood that many of the changes sought by the electorate were of a center-left orientation that would be sidelined after the party assumed power. Obama views himself as a non-ideological pragmatist, whose strategy for legislative success seems based on creating programmatic unity between the political center and the right — a methodology that usually succeeds, when it succeeds at all, in producing legislation that is right of center.
Most of the political left understood this from the beginning and entertained few illusions about the political goals and limitations of today’s Democratic Party. Of course the Democratic Party and the president are superior to the right/far-right Republican opposition, but that is not the issue. The issue is whether or not there will be progressive legislation in the next three or seven years. Judging by the performance of the Democratic-controlled Congress and White House so far the answer is negative.
Many liberals and progressives during the campaign had hopes Obama might govern, at minimum, from the center/center-left. Certain prominent progressives fostered this illusion by depicting Obama as a closet progressive, implying he might turn out to be the reincarnation of Franklin D. Roosevelt.
FDR was not a progressive in many ways but he understood what American capitalist society needed at a time of potentially existential economic and social crisis, and fought for it without concern that the right wing despised him. He wore their contempt like a merit badge, because he recognized that the Republican obstructionists of the time were placing their petty class interests ahead of the national interest, and with it the fate of the socioeconomic system to which they subscribed.
In a related issue, covert and less frequent overt racism is indeed a factor pertaining to Obama’s declining popularity, and must be condemned. The March 6-10 issue of The Economist suggests that “bigotry cannot explain, however, why Mr. Obama’s approval rating among white Americans has fallen since he took office, from roughly 60% to 40%. As the president pointed out in September: ‘I was actually black before the election.'” The publication continued:
Democrats have a Caucasian problem. It is not new: no Democratic presidential candidate has won the white vote since Lyndon Johnson [42 years ago]. Mr. Obama actually did better among whites than John Kerry did [in 2004]. But in the past year white voters have become grumpier, and this is especially true of white males. There is even talk of a repeat of 1994, when a surge of “angry white men” helped Republicans take over both chambers of Congress.
Sixteen years ago, it was blue-collar white men who were the angriest. This year, too, they are smarting…. Two-thirds of the jobs destroyed since it began belonged to blue-collar men. Black men have been worse affected than whites, but their loyalty to Mr. Obama and his party is unshakeable. Not so for white men, whose unemployment rate was a comfortable 3.9% in 2006 and still only 6.8% when Mr Obama was elected, but is now a painful 10.3%.
Although the two ruling parties remain ensconced in a conservative cocoon to one extent or another, much of the electorate that supported Obama in 2008, whether or not it identified as such, advocated a number of center-left survival programs. Even a number of rightists, as well as many other Americans, are angry at Wall St., the big banks, and the ultra-generous government bailouts to the millionaires primarily responsible for the recession.
The Obama Administration, which essentially turned its national economic policy over to the same “experts” who helped bring about the recession (Summers, Geithner, et al.), finally directed a few critical remarks to Wall St. and the bankers after — not before — the masses of people expressed their acute indignation about their huge bonuses and privileged treatment by the government. The White House criticism was tepid and largely for show.
As an example of the center-left views of a large sector of the American adult population I will quote a few paragraphs from an article by Paul Street, available on ZNet titled, “What’s the Matter With the Democrats”. Quoting a variety of public opinion polls he pointed out that:
• “71% of Americans think that taxes on corporations are too low, ((Gallup Poll, April 2007.)) 66% of Americans think taxes on upper-income people are too low ((Gallup Poll, April 2007.)) and 62% believe corporations make too much profit ((Pew Survey 2004. ))
• “77% of Americans think there is too much power concentrated in the hands of a few big companies (Pew Survey 2004), 84% think that big companies have too much power in Washington (Harris Poll 2007), and two-thirds think that ‘big business and big government work together against the people’s interests’ ((Rasmussen Reports, 2009. ))
•”A majority of American voters think that the United States’ ‘most urgent moral question’ is either ‘greed and materialism’ (33%) or ‘poverty and economic injustice’ (31%). Just 16% identify abortion and 12% pick gay marriage as the nation’s ‘most urgent moral question’ (Zogby, 2004). Thus, nearly two-thirds (64%) of the population think that injustice and inequality are the nation’s leading ‘moral issues’ ((Katherine Adams and Charles Derber, The New Feminized Majority (Paradigm, 2008): p.72.))
• “Just 29% of Americans support the expansion of government spending on ‘defense.’ By contrast, 79% support increased spending on health care, 69% support increased spending on education, and 69% support increased spending on Social Security ((Chicago Council on Foreign Relations, Global Views, 2004. ))
• “69% of Americans think it is the responsibility of the federal government to provide health coverage to all U.S. citizens (Gallup Poll, 2006) and 67% ‘think it’s a good idea [for government] to guarantee health care for all U.S. citizens, as Canada and Britain do, with just 27% dissenting’ ((Business Week, 2005. ))
• “59% of Americans support a single-payer health insurance system ((CBS/New York Times poll, January 2009.)) and 65% of Americans respond affirmatively to the following question: ‘Would you favor the government offering everyone a government-administered health insurance plan — something like the Medicare coverage that people 65 and over get – that would compete with private health insurance plans?'” ((CBS-New York Times, September 23, 2009.))
The center/center-right government of President Obama, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and Senate majority leader Harry Reid rejects these popular views as being too “left.”
(Continued in Part 2)