Saturday, Sep 27, 2014 05:30 AM CST
Obama loses the left: Why his low approval rating may be here to stay
For many liberals, it's Sen. Elizabeth
Warren's party now. After six years, here's why they're ready for a
change
Except
for the brief interregnum that separated the Republican Party’s George
W. Bush era from its current Tea Party incarnation, President Obama has
never enjoyed the kind of high approval ratings that used to accompany
most two-term presidents. Whether it’s due to his race, our growing
ideological polarization, the poor economy, or a combination of all of
the above, Obama’s rarely known what it feels like to be a president of
whom more than half of Americans approve. According to
the Huffington Post, it only took until the tenth month of his first year before his number dipped below 50 percent.
Fighting as he is now to keep his approval rating
north of 40 percent,
November 2009 probably looks to Obama like the good old days. And
mindful, perhaps, of how he’s previously looked on the verge of
irrevocably losing the people’s faith, only to bounce back to his usual
place in the mid- to high 40s, Obama may also believe that this current
spate of bad polling will eventually pass. Anything’s possible; the
economy could start booming. Unemployment could drop. Wages could rise.
Obama could recover.
But I’m starting to think this time may be
different, and that when it comes to Obama’s relationship with millions
of former supporters, there’s no going back.
What’s got me
thinking this way is a raft of new polls showing not only that the
president is unpopular, but that he’s becoming increasingly so in the
very places, and among the very people, he could usually count on for
support. A release from Field Poll
earlier this month,
for example, found the president to have only a 45 percent approval
rating in über-blue California. Most strikingly, the pollster reported
that California Dems’ support for Obama dropped 8 percent during just
this summer and was down 11 percent in Los Angeles alone.
The Field Poll wasn’t an outlier, either. This past week,
Marist College released a poll
from that other bedrock of the Democratic Party, the state of New York.
No good news there, either: Only 39 percent of registered New York
voters are happy with Obama’s performance, the lowest score he’s
registered in the state throughout his entire presidency. As was the
case with the California poll, Marist found a big drop in the number of
New York Obama supporters in the past few months. He was at a passable
45 percent as recently as July.
advertisement
It’s
easy to see, then, that a good number of one-time supporters of the
president are profoundly unhappy, and that their unhappiness has
increased dramatically of late. It’s also fair to guess that unhappiness
over the crisis in Ukraine, the new war in the Middle East and the
decision to kick the can on a deportations-related executive order are
all playing a role. But although these developments are recent, they’re
not exactly new — liberals have been
uncomfortable with targeted drone strikes and
record-setting levels of deportation
for years. Why only now do these disagreements represent White House
failures so egregious that they justify withdrawing support?
Obviously,
I can’t give you a definitive answer to that question, at least not
yet. Polls aren’t predictions so much as snapshots of a particular
moment in time — and they’re blurry ones, at that. We may find out in
the future that this summer was a bad one for the U.S. economy, which
could explain the president’s troubles more persuasively than a decision
about
U.S.I.C.E. bureaucracy or the
international status of Donetsk. But assuming this summer swoon is no
mere blip, and instead represents a permanent change in liberals’
judgment, I think timing may be the reason why.
Put simply, my
guess is that a growing number of liberals have decided that after
nearly six years, and with no reason to believe a Democratic congress is
on the horizon, Obama’s done nearly all he’ll ever do and the verdict
is in. And although Obamacare seems to be
a policy success, and
Dodd-Frank is reportedly working
better than many expected, many liberals have concluded that these
balms are not enough to soothe the lingering pain of their unmet
expectations. Not so much on policy — which most people, including those
who’d describe themselves as politically informed, don’t think much
about — but on politics, where the contrast between Obama and other
professional politicians used to be much clearer.
When Obama first
ran for president in 2008, much of the reason he inspired such
enthusiasm was because he was willing, at times, to push the boundaries
of what was considered acceptable in a mainstream presidential campaign.
He didn’t run away from his past; he
refused to wear a flag pin; he gave long, smart, dense speeches about history and race. In retrospect, that bravery looks a little thin — he’d end up
donning a flag pin and
disowning his former reverend
— but it wasn’t a complete fabrication, either. Liberals hoping he’d
change some of the dumbest norms of American politics were not insane.
Yet
throughout his presidency, Obama’s been more cautious, less willing to
fight a losing battle in the hopes of winning the war by changing the
terrain. During the first four years, many liberals found this
frustrating but cut him some slack, remembering how all presidents make
compromises for reelection — and, more importantly, witnessing an often
baldly racist opposition
seeking to delegitimize him at every turn.
We’re nearly halfway through the second term now, however, and as
evidenced by his immigration decision and his acquiescence in the face
of
the U.S. war machine, he’s still acting the same. He remains not nearly as timid as circa 2000 Al Gore, but he’s no Elizabeth Warren, either.
At
this point, I think many liberals who once waited for the president to
shed his centrist camouflage have given up hope that they’ll once again
see the guy they swooned for during the campaign. As president, at
least, he is who he is; and there’s little reason to think he’ll change.
For a man who so reveres Abraham Lincoln — whose greatest trait,
according to the
celebrated historian Eric Foner, was his “capacity to grow and change and evolve” — it’s hard not to agree that Obama’s consistency is a shame.
Elizabeth Warren, Barack Obama (Credit: Reuters/Kevin Lamarque/Yuri Gripas/photo montage by Salon)
No comments:
Post a Comment