U.S. News & World Report
The Incredible Deflation of Barack Obama
By _Mortimer B. Zuckerman_
(http://www.usnews.com/Topics/tag/Author/m/mortimer_zuckerman/index.html)
Posted January 21, 2010
The air is seeping out of the Obama balloon. He has fallen to below 50
percent in the poll approval ratings, a decline punctuated by his party’s
shocking loss in the Massachusetts special election.
Why?
Barack Obama was undoubtedly sincere in what he promised, even if his
promises were within the normal range of political exaggeration. The first
trouble is that his gift for inspiration aroused expectations, stoked to
unprecedented heights by his own staff, that he would solve the climate
crisis on
Monday, the jobs crisis on Tuesday, the financial crisis on Wednesday, the
education crisis on Thursday, Afghanistan on Friday, Iraq on Saturday, and
rest on Sunday. His oratorical skills were highlighted by the contrast
with President Bush, who mangled words so much that his incoherence
became, as
Tina Brown wrote, “a metaphor for incompetence.” Expectations were
spurred, too, by Obama’s recognition that Americans yearned for a new kind of
politics, a rejection, as he put it, of “politics as usual.”
Perhaps the inevitable outcome was disappointment—and on this Obama has
not disappointed. Alas, he has accelerated the deflation of hope with his
extraordinary volume of public appearances. In his first six months, he gave
three times as many interviews as George W. Bush, four times as many
prime-time news conferences as Bill Clinton, and more interviews than both
combined: 93 for Obama and 61 for his two immediate predecessors. He
appeared on
five Sunday talk shows on the same morning, followed the next day by David
Letterman, the first-ever presidential appearance on a nighttime comedy
show. In another week, he squeezed in addresses to the U.S. Climate Change
Summit, the U.N. General Assembly, the U.N. Security Council, and a
variety of
press conferences.
His promiscuity on TV has made him seem as if he is still a candidate
instead of president and commander in chief. He—and his advisers—have
failed
to appreciate that national TV speeches are best reserved for those moments
when the country faces a major crisis or a war. Now he faces the iron law
of diminishing novelty.
Despite this apparent accessibility, Obama’s reliance on a teleprompter
for flawless delivery made for boring and unemotional TV, compounding his
cerebral and unemotional style. He has seemed not close but distant, not
engaged but detached. Is it any wonder that the mystique of his
presidency has
eroded so that fewer people have listened to each successive foray? The
columnist Richard Cohen wryly observed that he won the Pulitzer Prize for
being
the only syndicated columnist who did not have an exclusive interview with
the president.
Poor results. But Obama’s problems are more than a question of style.
There is doubt aroused on substance. He sets deadlines and then lets too
many
pass. He announces a strategic review of Afghanistan, describing it as “a
war of necessity,” only to become less sure to the point that he didn’t even
seem committed to the policy that he finally announced. As for changing
politics in Washington, he assigned the drafting of central legislative
programs not to cabinet departments or White House staff but to the
Democratic
congressional leadership of Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, the very people so
mistrusted by the public. Who could be surprised that the critical
bills—the
stimulus program and healthcare—degenerated under a welter of pork and
earmarks that had so outraged the American public in the past?
Pelosi benefited from $54 million to relocate a Bay Area wine train, not
to speak of a secret deal with the drug industry lobby to preclude
negotiations on Medicaid drug prices and exclude drug imports from Canada,
concessions that had previously been strongly rejected by Obama. Reid
favored the
gambling industry by arranging an earmark for a Los Angeles-to-Las Vegas
high-speed monorail, even though it won’t be built for years. Some
components
of the stimulus did help soften the recession, yet only roughly a third of
the $787 billion stimulus has been spent, and too much was spent on programs
supported by liberal Democrats, which explains why so much of the stimulus
_money_
(http://www.usnews.com/articles/opinion/mzuckerman/2010/01/21/mort-zuckerman-the-incredible-deflation-of-barack-obama_print.htm#)
went toward
education, health, energy conservation, and other activities, mostly worthy
but not geared to achieving recovery and getting people back to work.
Taxpayers have thus come to see politics as usual masquerading as economic
recovery. Indeed, both the stimulus and _healthcare plans_
(http://www.usnews.com/articles/opinion/mzuckerman/2010/01/21/mort-zuckerman-the-incredible-d
eflation-of-barack-obama_print.htm#) were voted on so quickly that the
lawmakers had no time to read the bills. In both cases, the White House
created the impression it was interested in passing anything, no matter how
ineffectual. This was epitomized by Obama’s chief of staff essentially
asserting
that a healthcare bill would be passed even if all it consisted of was two
Band-Aids and an aspirin.
Most critically, Obama misjudged the locus of the country’s anxiety: the
economy. Instead of concentrating on jobs, jobs, jobs, he made the decision
to “boil the ocean” and go for everything, from comprehensive health reform
to global warming to a world without nuclear weapons … and the beat goes
on.
This was more than the Congress could absorb and more than the country
could understand. Obama, the theoretician in a hurry, made no allowance for
the normal resistance to dramatic change and the public’s distaste for big
government, big spending, and big deficits. He didn’t seem to realize that
Americans understand in the most personal terms that excessive debt has real
consequences, given how many have mortgages that exceed the value of a home
and credit lines that are too much to carry. Yet this was what the
president seemed to be getting us into. Over 60 percent of the country
believes
that government spending is excessive; Obama’s lowest approval ratings come
from his mishandling of the present and future deficits.
Delayed stimulus. It is not as if the limited stimulus program has done
the job either, since unemployment rates soared over 10 percent (compared
with the 8 percent ceiling that was promised). Shelby Steele asked a good
question in the Wall Street Journal: “Where is the economic logic behind a
stimu­lus package that doesn’t fully click in for a number of years?”
Yes,
we might have just escaped a depression, but as the Econo­mist
magazine observes, voters will not thank the president for averting a
depression
that did not come but are “more likely to blame him for the recession that
did.” On top of all this, and not all Obama’s fault, a financial crisis
usually produces weak recoveries in jobs, so a good number of Americans are
likely to remain furious at the spectacle of the financial world doing well
while so many ordinary folks lose their jobs and their savings. This anger
will not subside while households see net worth slump to where it was 20
years ago and debt reach close to record highs at about 130 percent of
disposable _income_
(http://www.usnews.com/articles/opinion/mzuckerman/2010/01/21/mort-zuckerman-the-incredible-deflation-of-barack-obama_print.htm#)
, and
while the residential real estate crisis continues unabated and the official
jobless rate doesn’t come close to reflecting the true extent of
unemployment
and … and … and ….
The White House might have at least demonstrated that it cares about
fiscal restraint and independence from the leadership in Congress, but
consistently Obama has failed to veto spending while centralizing power.
A majority
of Americans think it a mistake at this time of economic distress to embark
on a costly healthcare program. As it was, the program’s apparently
stalled trip through Congress turned out to be another fiasco of political
corruption, with millions of dollars allocated to buy votes, such as
those of
Louisiana Sen. Mary Landrieu and Nebraska Sen. Ben Nelson. Anger with that
process and the bill it produced helped fuel the stunning election of
Republican Scott Brown in Massachusetts.
The result is a widespread concern that progressive _taxation_
(http://www.usnews.com/articles/opinion/mzuckerman/2010/01/21/mort-zuckerman-the-incredi
ble-deflation-of-barack-obama_print.htm#) to pay for the “nanny state”
will snuff out future opportunities that Americans believe they deserve for
themselves and their children. Obama misjudged the public’s appetite for
taxpayer-funded solutions; most people believe all the government does is
waste
money. In a recent NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, only 23 percent said
they “trusted the government just about always or most of the time”—the
smallest proportion in 12 years, and the all-important independent swing
voters
who decide elections now favor Republicans by 52 percent, up from 30
percent.
Unfortunately, there is not much solace in international affairs either,
where, again, expectations were so pumped up. America’s image is better, no
doubt, but uncertainty and procrastination prevail. One major international
political leader recently put it well: “Not only does the leadership of
this region not think that Obama is strong enough to confront his enemies;
they aren’t sure he is strong enough to support his friends.” The
administration seems “hopelessly naive,” according to one Arab foreign
minister, and
unable to face the full truth about Islamic terrorism. The public
frustration over the administration’s mismanagement of the latest
jihadist attempt to
blow up a plane with all its innocent travelers (on Christmas Day) was
captured in the New York Daily News headline “Mr. President, it’s time to
get
a grip!”
The consequence is that there isn’t a single critical problem on which the
president has a positive public rating. Only a minority of Americans now
believe the president will make the right decisions for the country. Nor can
he any longer take refuge in the rejoinder that “we inherited a terrible
situation.” Or blame it on fat-cat bankers and insurance companies. Blaming
others, including Bush, for the country’s predicament is less and less
persuasive. “At some point you own your presidency,” wrote Peggy Noonan
in the
Wall Street Journal. “At some point the American people tell you it’s
yours.”
More worrying for the administration is that while Obama gets the approval
of 76 percent of non-whites, his approval among whites is down to 41
percent, according to Gallup. This is a huge change that literally puts the
Democratic control of Congress at risk. The Republicans have hardly been
stellar either, but there is now a renewed openness in the country to
hear what
they have to say. Obama’s political realignment of America is over. We no
longer believe that he will “change the world” and “transform the country.”
This brings to mind why an adviser to President Roosevelt in the 1930s,
Bernard Baruch, told electors to vote for the person who promised them less.
In this way, he said, “you would be less disappointed.” There is still time
for Obama to change and turn things around. But the first year is the
critical year, one in which the public defines the president, and it has
to be
said that broad swaths of the country are deeply disappointed.
