It’s official: President Obama is the people’s choice for the worst president since WWII. And his popularity is dropping faster than runoff in the Dead Sea.1
The first part is easy to explain. Any Democratic president is going to be picked as the “worst” president because Republicans hate Democratic presidents so much. Some fringe Republicans actually do hate Obama because he is black. He presided over the worst economic conditions in living memory and there’s been plenty of turmoil abroad, some of it (i.e., Libya) Barack’s own doing. Yet Bill Clinton, a white guy who presided over the best of economic times at home and peace abroad, was hated and despised by the great mass of Republicans with equal fervor. The Republican base just hates those goddamn hippies the Democrats keep running for president.
But Obama has lost a chunk of the moderates as well. To understand why, it’s important to remember that government by Nobel Prize winner didn’t work out nearly as well as the president expected when he took office. His genius staff, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner in particular, were blindsided by the Great Recession, which wasn’t supposed to happen. Just make the bankers happy, and they’ll make everyone happy!
Obama’s fealty to Wall Street made him a lightning rod for the Republican base at the same time that it prevented him from doing anything substantial to aid the millions drowning in their underwater mortgages. The massive slump in tax revenues, coupled with huge expenditures for unemployment insurance, food stamps, Medicaid, and other countercyclical programs prevented the president from putting into effect the panoply of “green power” programs that floated like sugar plums in his head. (The president still doesn’t know it, but this was a blessing in disguise.)
Having surged right to do Wall Street’s bidding, the president next surged left on health care, deeply alienating the old folks when he insisted on paying for universal coverage by cutting back (modestly) on Medicare. The president was deadly serious about taming entitlements, something both the Democratic and the Republican bases detested.
Domestic policy liberals were embittered, over and over again, by the long succession of failed budget deals, during each of which the president, ever faithful to Wall Street’s bidding, labored earnestly to give away the store, only to be stonewalled by Republicans who wanted an issue far more than they wanted a deal (because when they looked at the actual terms of any real deal—involving, inevitably, significant cuts to Social Security and Medicare—they ran away from the table).
Obama also proved a vast disappointment to the labor movement. It’s difficult to recall the euphoria that prevailed in the labor movement when Obama was elected in 2008. Happy days are here again! Well, not so much. Andy Stern, head of the Service Employees International Union, and symbol of resurgent union power, poured $60 million into Obama’s campaign, buying himself a very large seat at the table. But scarcely had Obama been elected when the SEIU was hit by devastating internal strife, and Stern resigned as president in April 2010. In the meantime, the administration had first irritated and then enraged the teachers’ unions by giving persistent and aggressive support to both charter schools and teacher evaluation, reforms detested by the teachers unions. Public support for unions, particularly public sector unions, has been declining throughout the Obama years, which makes it easier for Democrats to neglect the unions, and which increases the unions’ alienation from the party.
The president also alienated the handful of liberals who actually cared about civil liberties, while the Dick Cheneys of the world would never have supported unless he agreed to perform waterboarding himself. In Iraq and Afghanistan, the president shrewdly/cynically gave the Pentagon and the CIA enough rope to hang themselves, to the point that they were willing to let him end wars they realized were no longer worth fighting.2 When he stupidly pursued a “liberal” intervention policy in Libya, it blew up in his face3 The picture is muddier in Ukraine, but again if the president hadn’t pursued a “forward” policy, striving to bring a former part of the Soviet Union into the western sphere of influence, maybe life would be more peaceful For whatever reason, the president keeps pursuing “heroic” policies abroad, the price for which is too often paid in blood by foreigners about whom Americans care very little.
Obama regained momentum with his solid win over Romney in 2012, made all the more satisfying by the fact that Mitt, and a lot of other Republicans, thought he was going to win. Obama further strengthened his hand by outlasting the Republicans in the 2015 budget battles, but the Obamacare website disaster cost him all he had won. Obama’s repeated promise that “if you like your health care plan you can keep it,” a statement he knew wasn’t true, provided the perfect icing for the Republicans’ cake.
Except for the VA—an old-fashioned case of senior bureaucrats playing games to boost their own bonuses—the various bureaucratic scandals pushed so fiercely by Darryl Issa and other Republican liars, well, I’m obviously not impressed. On immigration, I’m even less impressed. This is simply Obama hatred all over again, probably the hottest single issue in the ongoing culture war that makes the populist right-wing feel like outcasts in their own country. I sympathize with them a little, but only a little.
Could Obama have done a little better? A little tougher on Wall Street, a little more ahead of the game when the downturn hit, a little more incremental on health care, a little better on civil liberties (a lot better on civil liberties), a lot less enthusiastic on the environment (clearly, his favorite issue), and lot more cautious abroad. Yes, I think he could have done all those things, and I wish he had. But being a Democratic president whose term coincided with the Great Recession more or less guaranteed a low rating.
