The Evolution of President Obama
Vice President Joe Biden has warned that Obama is better than Bush. Yes, I agree, but as a campaign slogan "Better Than Bush" isn't real inspiring.
The following article by Doug Gibson is so excellent I have copied it intact:
“The centre cannot hold” is a from a William Butler Yeats poem, “The Second Coming” that’s in about every anthology of Western poetry. Although it deals with weightier subjects than a pol’s popularity, I think of “the centre cannot hold” when I mull President Obama’s slow slide from 60-plus approval ratings to the current low to mid 40s. In retrospect, it was naive to think that the president’s early high approval ratings would hold. Obama’s “centre,” or promise, meant distinct things to different people. Liberals, or the left, saw Obama as a leader who would restore legitimacy to populist, progressive, government-engineered programs to reform health care, the environment, the financial systems, infrastructure, education, job opportunities. They saw a Keynesian-inspired effort to transfer the United States into a conservative version of a European semi-socialist state, one that would offer security and a dignified standard of living to citizens yet require higher taxes, a loss of some previous options and a government headed largely by technocrats. It would be a mix of liberal Paul Krugman and conservative Bruce Bartlett.
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Independents, or moderates — the group that has mostly abandoned the president — anticipated an Obama who would end the reckless spending — military and domestic — that the Bush administration had created over 8 years. They also saw Obama as a president who would demonstrate managerial competence that the Bush administration had lacked, in the war and in natural disasters such as Katrina. They also expected a Democratic president and Democratic Congress that was veto proof to smoothly pass legislation. … Those conservatives who supported Obama believed his election would usher in managerial competence and a more prudent budget.
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The president has accomplished several goals — health care, financial reform, some success in the War on Terror — but in the real world, that involved deals with Congress and constant pressure from lobbyists (the financial industry spent ungodly amounts to water down financial reform) — but the finished accomplishments cannot match the campaign rhetoric that caused so many to swoon in 2008. Health care without a public option, no environmental reform, lukewarm financial services reform, and a stimulus deal that many Keynesians say isn’t big enough to dent a troubled economy has liberals in the dumps. Ironically, the cost of all these programs and projected trillion-dollar deficits have turned independents away from the president.
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Obama’s political inexperience has also cost him. Thoughtless remarks regarding race — in the Henry Louis Gates incident — and waffling over the New York City mosque proposal has made him more unpopular. What seemed like great oratory and depth of understanding two years ago looks to more of us as condescension and arrogance. On social issues, the president’s smartest move is to stay silent.
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In fairness to the president, it was never going to be easy to hold the centre in today’s political environment, which manufactures “issues” that last anywhere from an hour to a couple of weeks on the cable TV networks (anyone remember the New Black Panthers?). This has resulted in a more corrosive political era, one in which a partisan feels that he or she must defend a subject, rather than a circumstance. One must always be opposed to tax cuts, one must always support a pro-choice-approved position. We seek our news from the outlets we feel most comfortable with. As a result, the party out of power controls the debate.
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Democrats, who had Republicans flailing during the years 2005 to 2008, must be amazed, and shocked, that the Republicans are so easily controlling the debates today on most issues, particularly high-interest ones such as immigration and the mosque near Ground Zero. But that is politics today; if the Republicans take control of Congress in the elections this fall, they will encounter a more hostile media, and public, in 2011.
LINK TO ARTICLE: http://blogs.standard.net/2010/08/president-obama-discovers-that-the-centre-cannot-hold/
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