Today we caught a glimpse of a story that gave my mom a new round of nausea and drove me nuts, not a long trip to begin with. Surprisingly, this afternoon's cable outrage wasn't about misguided tea baggers or a certain sub-mental former governor. But it may have been worse: just over a year into his presidency, the network said, only 48% of Americans polled believe Barack Obama deserves to be re-elected.
Naturally, I think this is moronic and ultimately meaningless. But putting aside my own personal political bias - wherein I believe that despite some absolutely fair criticisms of the White House, anyone who doesn't treasure Obama's seriousness, competence and certifiable sanity is a hopeless jackass - let's just put this poll into some quasi-objective perspective.
At the equivalent juncture in his presidency, only 45% of respondents in a similar poll believed that Bill Clinton ought to be re-elected. And despite the fact that he lost the popular vote, was installed by the Supreme Court after a protracted court battle, and did nothing of note in his first nine months, a whopping 70% of those queried believed George W. Bush deserved re-election in February of his second year.
So the question is begged: Holy God, why? From where I sit, it goes something like this:
After four years of George H.W. Bush, we were in a recession. Bill Clinton came into office and was forced to pass a stimulus bill to grease the country's economic wheels and get things moving again. The stimulus passed without a single Republican vote. The GOP spent the next year hammering Clinton for his spending despite the fact that we were in the nascent stages of what would be an economic renaissance. By the time the mid-terms came along, Clinton had squandered a lot of capital on a failed attempt at health care reform, and minority GOP obstructionism - compounded by a self-defeating majority and truly insane anti-Clinton rhetoric from the opposition - led to voters dropping the hammer on Democrats. (As we now know, of course, Clinton won a resounding re-election despite the early skepticism).
After two terms of Clinton, W. takes over, inheriting a terrific economy and an enormous budget surplus. He is forced to do nothing when he takes office but sit back, concentrate on his party's corporate priorities (like passing gift legislation for credit card companies, making it harder for average Joe plumbers to file for bankruptcy protection) and enjoy the fruits of his predecessor's labors. In mid-August of 2001, his approval rating is a relatively high 57%, but that's no surprise. The world is at peace, the economy is humming and the opposition, while by no means in love, is not wholly intractable. None of this has anything to do with Bush, of course, he just hasn't screwed anything up yet. And what the hell, he seems like a nice guy to have a beer with. Even so, by September 10th of that first year, according to Gallup, he has slipped to 51%. (Barack Obama's September 10th first year approval was exactly the same, 51%, and that was after the unpopular TARP extension and the controversial stimulus, actions for desperate times that early Bush had no need of).
Truth be told, by early September, Bush is on his way to becoming a one term footnote - the goofy, unprepared frat boy, surrounded by Cheneys and Roves, who the grown ups send out to read "My Pet Goat" to schoolchildren - when two planes strike the Twin Towers. Stunned Americans - indeed the world - coalesce behind the president. Mere days after being at 51% approval, he's now at 86%. Five months later, 70% of respondents apparently gush he should be re-elected. Had that poll been taken in the absence of 9/11, you can be sure the results would have been profoundly different. Context is everything. Sadly, though, this so-called "popularity" affords him the political cover to ram through an extremist agenda, both at home and abroad, with very little resistance. Resistance, in fact, was futile; worse, it was "un-American".
By the time W. leaves office, we are most certainly not at peace and the economy is not just in a shambles, it's almost completely shattered. Not only does 9/11 happen on Bush's watch, but he cynically uses it as a pretext to fulfill a long-standing neo-conservative goal of re-invading Iraq and deposing Saddam Hussein. Despite plunging us into this wholly elective war, and another more justifiable conflict in Afghanistan, he asks for no sacrifice from Americans and instead passes outrageous, expensive tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, draining the country's coffers at the worst possible time. The war and the tax cuts are, of course, nothing less than a government spending spree, and if there's one thing that's worse than "tax and spend" it's "borrow and spend". Regardless, not only does Bush enjoy near uniform Republican support, but he manages to get some Democrats to go along as well (if there is one thing Republicans do far better than Democrats, it's obstructionism. Dems don't seem to have the stomach for it). When Bush flies back to Texas for good, he leaves behind a squandered surplus, enormous new debt, a depleted military fighting two wars, a world in whose collective eyes America has lost huge amounts of respect, the first of the much maligned TARP bailouts, and - having put the finishing touches on a twenty four year masterpiece of rampant government de-regulation - the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. Whew.
In comes Obama, on a wave of good will and public desperation for the kind of leader with whom you'd eat an arugula salad. He is immediately forced to take drastic measures to pull us from the economic brink. He signs a massive stimulus bill to grease the country's economic wheels and get things moving again. The stimulus passes without a single Republican vote. The GOP spends the next year hammering Obama for his spending, despite the fact that we are in the nascent stages of... is any of this sounding familiar? If not, I refer you back to paragraph six. But what the hell, let's keep going: by the time the mid-terms come along, Obama will have squandered a lot of capital on a failed attempt at health care reform, and GOP obstructionism - compounded by a self defeating majority and truly insane anti-Obama rhetoric from the opposition - is seemingly leading voters toward dropping the hammer on Democrats.
So this is the cycle we're stuck in, folks. Republicans destroy the economy and Democrats get punished for acting like grown ups and fixing it. And the only ones truly to blame for this maddening circumgyration are the shockingly myopic voters who don't see the forest for the trees.
I am sanguine that Obama's troubling numbers are fleeting. Despite a 2001 approval rating that topped out at 90%, a massive outpouring of war time support, epic fear-mongering, and a fairly weak opponent, Bush won re-election by a mere 2.4 points. Conversely, the initially under-appreciated Clinton did so by a whopping 9. If history is truly repeating itself, then Obama will be re-elected, and convincingly. It would help if the GOP were to offer up a Bob Dole in 2012 (Palin, anyone?), essentially just token opposition that Obama will bulldoze right over. But nothing can be taken for granted, especially in this absurdist political climate; a climate in which every outlandish claim or silly "movement", no matter how comical or demonstrably false, receives the full, crushing weight of the media's obsessive, 24 hour attention without much attendant critical scrutiny. And, of course, it's all about the economy, stupid. And jobs, stupid.
Whatever. Here's the only moral of the story as far as I'm concerned: if these poll numbers are an accurate snapshot - which is far from a given - then the average voter is short-sighted, stupid, and amnesiac, with not even a tenuous grasp on the rudimentary concept of cause and effect.
Now if I could only get my mom to stop watching CNN. Oh well, at least she has decent health insurance.
