Filibuster Cartoons
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While I still stand firm in my belief that President Obama will be able to eke out a second term next November, there’s nothing to say his victory will be particularly grand or inspiring. Certainly when contrasted to his decisive win in 2008, Obama’s return to office in 2012 seems likely to unfold as a far gloomier, narrower sort of “default victory,” spawned not by any particular sense of optimism or enthusiasm for the man and his vision, but simply a lack of viable opponents and the rigid, fearful partisanship of the Democratic voting base.
Accoring to an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll released Tuesday, the President’s disapproval rating has now climbed to 51%, a number that increases even further when we get into more specific realms, such as his handling of the economy (59% hate it) and the general on-the-wrong-track-ness of the nation in general (73% say it’s going to hell). A striking 30% flat-out declare they have a “very negative” view of Obama, a figure that has risen more than 500% since his 2009 inauguration.
Until recently, it was conventional wisdom that no president with a disapproval rating of over 50% could ever win re-election, but George W. Bush bucked that trend in 2004. Through the cynical politicking of Karl Rove, the Bush presidency ended up proving quite definitively that in a nation where only half of the country’s population even bothers to vote, elections can be won in open spite of the majority preference — so long as the winning candidate can cobble together an uber-loyal base of minorities. For Bush, that winning coalition consisted of Americans who were, by and large, far more religious, rural, southern, and elderly than the national average, while Obama, as I’ve noted before, has a base that’s disproportionately young, urban, wealthy, and nonwhite.
Both men were also aided by weak partisan opponents; expert practitioners of the “anything you can do, I can do better” school of unpopularity. In Obama’s case, the President’s slipping numbers don’t seem to be occurring in any sort tandem with rising right-wing fortunes. Despite breathless media coverage of the GOP primary and Tea Party antics, both groups are actually polling almost identically to President Obama at the moment. Which is to say, badly. The same NBC/Post poll mentioned above has the Republican Party’s favorable/unfavorable rating at 32/46%, and the Tea Party at 28/43%.
The latter numbers are particularly galling for violating what is supposedly the established narrative of the last year, namely that disillusionment with both mainstream parties is spawning the rise of some dynamic new movement capable of proving a more legitimate political voice to the previously voiceless. Yet as studies like this recent one in the New York Times begin to pile up, and the Tea Party is revealed to be little more than an always-there faction of hardcore Republicans, those same activists who so self-righteously considered themselves beyond the taint of partisanship aren’t winding up particularly immune to the country’s disgust for politics-as-usual.
The degree to which conservatives have failed to fill Obama’s inspirational vacuum is on particularly stark display when one considers that Congress, where Republicans and the Tea Party have been flexing a lot of muscle lately, has an approval rating of only 13%. It’s a number so pitifully small that the Daily Show was able to run quite a funny segment the other day highlighting just how hard it’s become to find a single, random American willing to praise the work of his elected officials.
Last week, I was interviewed for a story in the Toronto-based Globe and Mail where I, as a stalwartly pro-American Canadian, was asked to comment on some recent numbers indicating Canadians were more likely than ever to consider the United States broken, ungovernable, and teetering on the precipice of finical ruin. My distaste for chauvinistic schadenfreude aside, I told the reporter it’s hard to blame Canadians for being particularly anti-American at a time when Americans have never been more anti-American themselves.
In the mid-1970s, in the aftermath of Watergate, stagflation, widespread unemployment, and international chaos, President Carter warned Americans not to wallow in malaise — and was promptly turfed from office in favor of the sunny Ronald Reagan. Presiding over an unprecedented era of joblessness, war, and debt, Obama may very well be the Carter of our time, but the emergence of a new Reagan still seems supremely unlikely. For all his eventual faults, Reagan at least had a novel set of ideas and a jolly disposition, while his modern-day heirs possess neither.
The apathy and disillusion that has driven the President into such a dark hole, may, ironically, be the very same forces that wind up awarding him a second term. If things aren’t going to get much better either way, then why not stick with the loser you know?
September 8th, 2011 at 10:20 am
Canadian Netflix lost to Jehovah's Witnesses? What's so bad about Canadian Netflix?
September 8th, 2011 at 10:41 am
It has like four movies and is AWFUL.
September 8th, 2011 at 10:52 am
American politics has turned into a game of You Should See the Other Guy.
September 8th, 2011 at 11:00 am
It's ALWAYS been that. You should see some of the early campaign propaganda.
September 8th, 2011 at 11:11 am
The lack of anything made in the last 3 years. :P With the exception of some CBC shows, every time one of my American friends mentions something on netflix, I go see if it's on mine and… nope it isn't. No Disney stuff on Canadian Netflix. Lack of HD Mythbusters or anything after the 5th season. iTunes choices are equally as bad, so can't really say much except that Canadians pay more for less.
I'm surprised AT&T or Verizon isn't on that list.
September 8th, 2011 at 11:29 am
1) I think referring to Obama's "highly disapprove" numbers as having risen 500% is a bit misleading (/all/ leaders tend to start out with low disapproval numbers, even if their approval numbers are milquetoast).
2) The studies I've seen show that the Tea Party is just a louder version of the Perot coalition: About half nominally Republican, half nominally independent, and a few irritated Democrats thrown in for good measure. The key is that of the independents, probably a third voted GOP before ("leaning" independents are often some of a party's biggest supporters), a third were actually independent, and a third were apolitical and engaged by things.
3) I think the tea party being more and more GOP doesn't mean that it isn't a result of disgust with DC politics…it just got co-opted into the GOP and the GOP got enough power in DC to make sure that it dropped a fair share of the non-GOP folks. The disgust is still there…but increasingly, it is disgust with both parties at the same time. I'm wondering if we might get some bizarre electoral whiplash out of this.
September 8th, 2011 at 1:33 pm
Obama ranks below Battlefield Earth? I find this hard to believe.
September 8th, 2011 at 6:11 pm
The narrative about builing a minority coalition is completely bogus and a pundit who peddles it has to be ashamed of his critical thinking facilities. The real reason why Bush won was that Democrats ran John Kerry against him. No matter how much public disapproves of President X, if Challenger Y is worse, the X wins. It was not cynical politicking of Karl Rove that won Bush his re-election, it was the cynical politicking of DNC. That, and their stupidity. For crying out loud, they admitted that they ran Kerry in part because they thought that his military service would innoculate him against the charge of being unpatriotic, while half of the living Americans still remember his testimony to Congress in 1973, and you cannot find anything more UNpatriotic even if you tried. What were they thinking?!
September 8th, 2011 at 7:22 pm
LOL, I like how Ron Paul Supporters made the list. Be careful, JJ, you may be stirring up something of Savage-level proportions.
September 8th, 2011 at 10:35 pm
Doubtful.
September 8th, 2011 at 11:07 pm
When you say "they admitted," who is they? Of the tens or hundreds of thousands who pick the candidates from straw polls, caucuses, and primaries, what handful of voices are you imagining speak for the Democratic Party? I doubt any specific reason mattered so much to so many as to deserve to be treated as uniquely relevant.
Also, Kerry's military record did protect him from a lot of the "unpatriotic" rhetoric, if for no other reason than because every claim that he was unpatriotic was softened by an asterisk mentioning his three Purple Hearts. Everyone knew his military record wasn't enough to exonerate him of the anti-patriotic sins of his past, but it also crippled the accusation enough that it couldn't make him lose without help. Luckily for Bush, there were about fifty other reasons not to vote for Kerry. My personal favorite was "I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it."
September 12th, 2011 at 9:18 am
Snooki got ranked WAY too high on this list.
September 12th, 2011 at 9:29 pm
Honestly, I just feel sorry for the poor man and how much he is being stone-walled…
September 19th, 2011 at 5:36 am
I've actually compared current politics to the state of the country in the past (between the founding fathers era and the civil war). Where we have a lot of rich gas bags talking and nothing generally getting done. Oddly enough I'd like to see not another Reagan, but a modern Calvin Coolidge. Someone like that would probably run a landslide.
October 5th, 2011 at 11:52 am
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November 29th, 2011 at 7:16 am
Ditto. Obama hasnt really had much opertunity to do anything – good or bad. Doesnt matter what he wants to do, he will opposed before he even says what it is.
Of course, that does make him bad at playing the political game, and possibly pretty nieve. Doesnt nesscerly mean his idea's are bad though.
Its particularly clear when it comes to the debt ceiling – almost every other President including Bush has raised it without any issue whatsoever. When it comes to Obama, its a much bigger deal.