TIPPING OBAMA
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TIPPING OBAMA
The Obama Presidency is at its Tipping Point – far earlier than expected
I am one of those people who (a) did not vote for Mr. Obama but (b) WHO STILL wants this administration to succeed.
But success in governance is possible only when our new president learns to govern from the center.
The junior Senator from Illinois arrived at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue with high hopes, the wind at his back and – as we now know – an agenda far to the left of the majority of all Americans.
Whenever a US President attempts to “do good” (defined, always, in terms of a particular ideology that is out of sync with the American political center), he or she must expend “political capital”. This means that POTUS is willing to leverage the immediate post-victory glow into certain policy accomplishments. Typically these are measures that in any other setting just could not be delivered, except under duress. This exercise of “political capital” is usually sold as “fighting the special interests”. In fact, the uphill struggles that take the most political capital are those that track against the popular will. Whenever POTUS presses for something about which MOST people are not in accord, the arsenal of political weapons tends to include personal popularity, policy stealth and the exploitation of lingering good will.
We are now witnessing a disappearing act worthy of Harry Potter. Mr. Obama's political capital is vanishing before our very eyes faster than in any presidential term of recent memory. Why? Because the new president appears to have misrepresented himself during the campaign. He was sold to the left as the long awaited savior, but marketed to the center as a post-partisan healing figure, someone who could, by engaging in a thoughtful and reasonable dialogue, bring us all together in favor of those obviously necessary measures, the things that “everybody knows” needed getting done.
In fact, the President's immediate measures ran against dominant public opinion. Most voters strongly opposed the bankruptcy-linked multi-billion dollar payments to GM and Chrysler (seen as taxpayer subsidized gifts) and they immediately suffered buyers remorse about the “stimulus” package that was rammed through congress. As the unemployment numbers grow, the stimulus package is increasingly exposed as a batch of payback dollars to partisan constituencies, sprinkled with public works projects, supplying little or no effective growth stimulus.
When the President took some “cost-free” symbolic opportunities, like taking the world stage to apologize for America's flaws, he was again deeply out of touch with a majority of American voters.
As of today Mr. Obama has expended all his available US monetary capital, measured against the current Domestic Product. The current deficit, now about 12 Trillion dollars, is a dramatically increasing toxin in the national economy ( See http://www.brillig.com/debt_clock/ ) and it already amounts to roughly 85% of the annual GDP in 2008. [Visit the GDP Graph at http://www.bea.gov/newsreleases/national/gdp/gdp_glance.htm .] Our federal government's debt was 14.2 trillion in 2008,. [See https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/us.html ].
If current trends continue without a political and economic correction, the national debt will outstrip the national annual income from all domestic transactions before the end of Mr. Obama's first term in office.
All new federal spending this year is from borrowed funds. And the administration is proposing even more.
The wind at Mr. Obama's back wind has changed to a headwind.
The Rasmussen polling organization tracks popular presidential approval changes daily, including a measure that I call the “passion index”, achieved by subtracting the percentage of those who strongly disapprove of presidential performance from those who strongly approve.
That number has been negative for months.
Today, I reviewed that last 30 days of Rasmussen's data. From September 16th through today, October 15th, the raw numbers polled reached a 50-50 tie (approve vs disapprove) only twice. Mr. Obama's presidential performance was approved by more than half of those surveyed only twice during the same period.
For 24 of the last thirty days, an absolute majority of those polled disapproved of this president's performance.
Today's numbers were not atypical: Disapprove: 51%. Approve: 48%. The “passion gap”: Minus 8%.
The full report is at http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/obama_administration/obama_approval_index_history .
Rasmussen has a strong track record. I know that his numbers are privately credited by professional democratic politicians.
This does not mean that “it's over” for the new administration. It does mean that, in the rush to achieve too much, too left, too soon, the new president has sucked all of the left wing oxygen out of the system.
Mr. Obama's most fervent ideological supporters now risk turning a difficult presidency into a failed one.
Our new president has very little time to “recalibrate” as he puts it.
But nuance won't work any more. Nothing short of a resolute turn to the center (as defined by the American people, not by the partisan left) can restore this presidency.
JBG
