It was the largest protest march, so far, of Obama’s presidency. They came from around the country on Sept. 12, tens of thousands of people filling Pennsylvania Avenue en route to the White House, where only months earlier an ecstatic crowd had celebrated the election of the first black president of the United States and the end of the Bush era.
Now they came in anger, with signs declaring “Tax Slave Revolt” and “Stop Spending our Grandkids’ Futures,” and chanting “No Obamacare.” One sign read, “National health care doesn’t work. Just ask Canada.” Some aimed personally at the President. “Let’s see your records! Let’s see your birth certificate!” shouted one man into a megaphone. Others chanted simply, “U.S.A.! U.S.A.!”
Unlike the young and racially mixed crowds that poured out for the inauguration, this crowd was overwhelmingly white, and mostly older. These were the people Obama was supposed to reach, to soothe, to win over with his “post-partisan” politics and his stirring campaign slogan of uniting “Red and Blue America into a United States of America.” Instead, Red America was not greeting him with flowers. “We came unarmed—this time!” read one placard. During the hard-fought Democratic primary contest against Hillary Rodham Clinton, part of Obama’s argument was that he was going to move past rigid divides between the political left and right, that he offered a generational turning of the page on the ideological battles of the 1960s that had moulded Clinton’s generation. But now this promise seems to ring as hollow as candidate George W. Bush’s pledge in the 2000 campaign to be “a uniter, not a divider.”
Over the summer, town halls discussing Obama’s health care reform turned into shouting matches, with some attendees showing up with weapons. When the President prepared a motivational back-to-school speech to schoolchildren, some parents pulled their kids from class to escape what they feared would be liberal brainwashing. (A prepared lesson plan would have asked kids what they can do to “help the President.” It was scrapped.) When he stood up to give a speech to a joint session of Congress about health care reform, a Republican from South Carolina took the unprecedented step of shouting, “You lie!” Congressional Democrats censured him, but some in the Washington protest crowd carried signs that read, “Joe Wilson is my hero.” Former president Jimmy Carter concluded that the backlash had to do with Obama’s race. “I think an overwhelming portion of the intensely demonstrated animosity toward President Barack Obama is based on the fact that he is a black man,” Carter said on Sept. 15. When comedian David Letterman asked Obama if he agreed with Carter, Obama joked, “I think it’s important to realize that I was actually black before the election.” A White House spokesman portrayed the turmoil as merely a policy “disagreement.”
It is more than that.
Since March, a yawning gap in approval ratings for Obama has opened up between Republicans and Democrats—even bigger than George W. Bush’s. It has led critics to call him not only a polarizing figure, but the most polarizing president in history. Obama’s election win was respectable, but close: 53 per cent of the vote, compared to John McCain’s 46. Still, he entered office on a wave of popularity. His approval ratings were a much stronger 64 per cent prior to his inauguration in January, according to a poll by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press; some polls had him in the 70s. Now he has dropped to 52 per cent approval, with only 18 per cent of Republicans approving of him, a drop from 30 per cent in April. Obama’s partisan gap is bigger than Bush’s because more Democrats still back him—82 per cent, down from 92 per cent in the spring. “When a president’s job approval is higher than the vote in the election, that suggests there are people who voted against him giving him the benefit of the doubt,” says Michael Dimock, a pollster at Pew, which does extensive presidential polling. “He started from a very high point in February and March, but his approval ratings have fallen substantially.”
Indeed. The proverbial honeymoon ended quickly: the seeds of division were planted with the massive US$787-billion economic stimulus bill—which drew plenty of criticism and not a single vote from Republicans in the House (and only three GOP votes in the Senate) when it passed in February—and the ballooning deficit. A Pew poll this month found that 61 per cent of Republicans consider Obama “not trustworthy,” up from 35 per cent in February. The President has also lost support among moderate and conservative Democrats. And his support among independents is down too.
The story of Obama’s current decline can be boiled down to three parts. One involves an underlying cultural shift in America, one is Obama’s aggressive policy agenda and some missteps in how he is implementing it, and the third is the largely overlooked role of George W. Bush.
There is a significant amount of personal animosity to Obama—some 10 per cent of Americans falsely believe he was born in Kenya, not in the U.S., and is not legally entitled to be president. But the loud conservative backlash brewing in the country is bigger than Obama, and started in the waning days of the Bush administration. There had long been a drumbeat of criticism on the right over the “un-conservative” things Bush did: from his plans for amnesty for illegal aliens to his massive deficits, and passing the largest new entitlement since Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs of the 1960s—a Medicare prescription drug benefit for seniors—without finding the money for it. But a watershed moment came in September 2008 when the financial crisis began to unfold and the Bush administration swiftly moved in. There was the US$700-billion Wall Street bailout (followed by revelations that top executives still received lucrative bonuses while taxpayers footed the bill for the survival of their companies), and then Washington’s expansion into a dizzying number of companies. The government now accounts for 26 per cent of the American economy, the most since the Second World War. It owns the lion’s share of insurer AIG, has a majority stake in General Motors, and finances most consumer credit card and mortgage lending in the country.
The Obama administration insists the measures are temporary, but a large number of Americans are bewildered at the massive, rapid changes they have witnessed. Many of the protesters who came to Washington on Sept. 12 carried signs denouncing Obama or Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic Speaker of the House of Representatives, but just as many were raising their voice against “big government” and the debt being left to their children and grandchildren. They were mostly Republicans, but they were not shy about denouncing Bush or congressional GOPers either. “When Bush said we need to abandon free market principles to save the free market, that’s when I almost went blind!” said Jim Wilford, a 33-year-old Republican entrepreneur from Mays Landing, N.J., who carried a sign comparing members of Congress to space aliens. What brought him into the streets? “Everything,” he said, “The whole government is jacked up—Republicans and Democrats. The common people have to make their voices heard.” He listed as his concerns out-of-control government spending, health care reform, the auto bailout, and “the socialistic and Marxist ideologies invading the consciousness of the government.”
