Kevin Lamarque/Reuters/ Jason Henry/The New York Times
When he strode into office in the middle of two wars and the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, the question was whether Barack Obama could rally the nation behind him and emerge as a historic leader, or whether the crisis would destroy him altogether. The answer is becoming clearer. While he can take credit for steering the country away from a full-fledged depression, he hasn’t emerged a greater figure for it. He’s been more like an incredible shrinking president.
“I can’t stop the war / I can’t save the sons and daughters / I can’t change the world and make things fair,” crooned Kid Rock and Sheryl Crow in a downbeat anthem at the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear, the satirical gathering by comedians Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert that drew hundreds of thousands of Democrats to Washington’s National Mall on Oct. 30. It was hardly “Hope and Change.”
Indeed, “hopeless” might be a more fitting term after the stunning but expected defeat suffered by the Democrats in Tuesday’s mid-term elections. Obama’s party had previously held the House of Representatives by 255 seats to the Republicans’ 178. By the time Maclean’s went to press on Tuesday night, the GOP had decisively won control of the House. In the Senate, Democrats appeared to have held on to a shrunken majority, but one far short of the 60 votes needed to overcome Republicans’ use of filibusters to block votes on legislation and nominees. And across the United States, Republicans made huge gains in gubernatorial races, all the while raising the spectre of the 2012 general election—and that the United States might be witnessing its first one-term presidency since George Bush Sr.’s two decades ago.
In retrospect, it may have been all over for the Democrats by mid-2009. For the first six months of Obama’s administration, polls showed his party was ahead in the match-up with Republicans. But by the “Tea Party summer” of angry town halls and debates over “death panels,” support for the Republicans had surged, while the Democrats limped along, bleeding public support. It was clear last January how much of an upswing the GOP was on when Republican candidate Scott Brown won the late Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat in Massachusetts.
While Republicans became more energized, Democrats became increasingly demoralized. A clear sign of the coming mid-term disaster for Obama’s party could be heard in the comments of some of the voters who descended on Washington for the rally four days before the vote. “I don’t think Obama was ready. I don’t think he was experienced enough,” said Karen Harshman. A 54-year-old retired school teacher from Hagerstown, Md., she carried a sign that said: “We have nothing to fear but fear itself—and spiders.” She said she was “very, very disappointed” in Obama, and was not sure she would vote for him again when he comes up for re-election in 2012. “He made promises that were nearly impossible to keep, and then the people were not satisfied,” she observed.
Another Obama voter, consultant Levi Kronberg from Kensington, Md., agreed. “From campaigning on hope and change, he had nowhere to go but down,” Kronberg, 23, said. He was disappointed that Obama gave the health care bill to Congress to design. “I don’t think he was competent enough. He was too trusting of people in Congress.”
Tom Dowd, a 48-year-old land surveyor from Maryland’s eastern shore, was a registered Independent voter who had voted for Obama and attended his inauguration. He was also unsure about voting for the President again. “I’m not sure his focus on health care was the best idea at a time when the economic situation takes precedence,” he said.
Obama’s personal style didn’t help his party. As he pushed his health care reforms in the middle of an economic meltdown, his cool, Spock-like demeanour, which once made him seem so “cool under pressure,” increasingly looked cold and out of touch. In a recent New York Times interview, Obama said of financially pressed Americans, “They started feeling like: ‘Gosh, here we are tightening our belts, we’re cutting out restaurants, we’re cutting out our gym membership, in some cases we’re not buying new clothes for the kids.’ ” Gym memberships? Indeed. Millions of Americans have lost their homes. The unemployment rate is stuck at 9.6 per cent. And a record number of people are relying on food stamps.
Out of this sea of economic anxiety, voters were ready to punish incumbent lawmakers of both stripes for joblessness, rising deficits and government spending, and the Wall Street bailout that began under Bush. But the rise of the Tea Party candidates, for all their personal foibles and far-right ideas, played an important role. It allowed conservative voters to punish incumbent Republicans in the party’s primary elections by replacing them with outsider candidates. They could then still vote Republican, albeit a new kind of Republican, on Nov. 2.
The result of the GOP wave is that Obama’s agenda for the second half of his term is mostly a non-starter. He has pledged to move forward on issues such as climate change and immigration reform, but he’ll find few takers among Republicans in Congress. Instead, they plan to put him on the defensive by trying to repeal, or deny funding to, his legislation on health care and financial regulation, among other things—in spite of the President’s statement on Election Day that he wants to “co-operate” with Republicans.
Obama’s aides have mentioned areas where the two sides could potentially reach some accommodation: passing pending trade agreements, expanding nuclear energy production, and education reform. But Republican leaders have made it clear they do not intend to give him any sort of legislative victory that he could tout when running for re-election. “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president,” the Republican leader in the Senate, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, said ahead of the election. “Our single biggest goal is to give our nominee for president the maximum opportunity to be successful.”
John Boehner, the 10-term Ohio congressman who is expected to become House Speaker when the newly elected lawmakers take their seats in January, will be the public face of the Republicans in Congress. Boehner has criticized most of Obama’s moves, calling for his economic team to resign, and opposing the President’s pledge to shut down the detention facility at Guantánamo Bay, which Boehner portrays as “a fabulous facility in Cuba” and “state of the art.” Boehner, who worked with Newt Gingrich on the Republican takeover of Congress in 1994 during the Clinton administration, when the Republicans ran on a “Contract with America” platform, helped craft a similar national GOP message this time: a “Pledge to America” in which Republicans promised to cut taxes, repeal health care reform, and cut spending.
Pages: 1 2
