Wait. Wasn’t Obama winning?

By Weekly Archive On Mar 14, 2012

By Ross Douthat

Why aren’t President Obama’s poll numbers higher? That’s the question unsettling the Washington conventional wisdom this week. Amid improving economic growth, a grim and grinding Republican primary campaign and the White House’s skillful exploitation of Rush Limbaugh’s boorishness, Obama’s reelection was being taken almost for granted in many political circles. But then came a pair of surveys – one from the Washington Post and ABC and one from the New York Times and CBS – that showed the president’s approval ratings sinking this month back toward the lower 40s after a steady winter climb.

Everyone has a theory. Maybe it’s rising gas prices. Maybe it’s anxieties over Iran and Afghanistan. Maybe it’s a backlash against the president’s overconfident selling of a still-weak recovery. Maybe it’s evidence that the White House’s claim that religious resistance to its contraception mandate represents a “war on women” isn’t finding as many takers as the media narrative suggested.

But maybe the specific “why” doesn’t really matter all that much. Whatever tugged the president’s numbers back downward is clearly a small issue (or issues), not something huge and earth-shattering – and it’s precisely that smallness that should have the White House worried.

The message of the latest polls isn’t that springtime gas prices and culture war debates will determine who wins the White House in November. Rather, it’s that Obama’s political position is tenuous enough that it doesn’t take all that much bad news – particularly on the economy — for his approval ratings to go negative.

The president’s essential problem today is the same as it was last summer, when brutal unemployment numbers and the specter of a debt crisis made his re-election look more doubtful. Obama was elected to be a domestic policy president, and his signature domestic policy achievements are all persistently unpopular.

The stimulus package’s economic effectiveness will be debated for as long as human beings read Keynes and Hayek, but as a political matter it was a flop. The White House overpromised and underdelivered, creating a widespread public perception that its central recession-fighting program had failed outright.

Liberals are confident that the president’s health care bill will become popular once its provisions are fully in effect. But that won’t happen until 2014 or beyond, and Americans are sharply divided over the bill today, with polls regularly showing pluralities favoring outright repeal and huge majorities opposing the mandate requiring individuals to buy insurance.

Then there’s the auto bailout, which the White House (joined by G.M. and Chrysler) has spent the last few months touting as a great success. Michiganders agree, but the country does not: By 51 to 44 percent, the most recent Gallup survey finds, Americans still disapprove of the decision to bail out automakers.

As of a month ago, Obama’s overall job approval numbers were positive only on foreign policy issues and the environment. They were in the 30s and 40s on every other domestic issue, from taxes and deficits to health care and jobs.

This is not a record that lends itself to an obvious re-election pitch. (Obama 2012: He championed legislation you don’t like— and delivered results that you like even less.) The president will have to evade his own record as often as he touts it, and his message will necessarily lack the clarity and coherence of Reagan’s “morning in America” or Clinton’s “bridge to the twenty-first century” – or even the George W. Bush’s campaign’s persistent 2004 theme, “he kept us safe.” And it will necessarily be more negative as well, since the best way to defend a relatively unpopular record is usually to argue that the other guy is a fanatic or a shill for plutocracy.

A themeless, defensive and pudding-like message — things are slowly getting better, and anyway they could have been worse, and you can’t trust the Republicans, and did we mention that Osama bin Laden is dead? — can still be a winning one. Against the backdrop of steady job growth, facing a weak nominee and an opposition party still tainted by the Bush era, the president still looks likes the favorite.

But while it will be hard for Republicans to beat him, the unpopularity of the Obama record ensures that it won’t be hard to sow doubts about his leadership. This means that more than many previous incumbents, the president’s poll numbers will probably be extremely vulnerable to whatever’s front-and-center in the news. The White House’s case for re-election is a relatively fragile thing, and it will be easy for short-term developments — a month or two of bad jobs numbers, an even sharper spike in gas prices, a failed strategic gambit or a rhetorical gaffe – to pluck a strand out or snip a hole in it. Even if President Obama ends up winning, in other words, he’ll have a lot of weeks like this one along the way.