OBAMA´S FAINT RECOVERY HOPES / THE FINANCIAL TIMES COMMENTARY & ANALYSIS ( HIGHLY RECOMMENDED READING )

Obama’s faint recovery hopes

By Christopher Caldwell

Published: September 10 2010 22:27

After promising a “recovery summer”, President Barack Obama has made no significant progress in getting the country’s 15 million unemployed back to work. Republicans look likely to pick up dozens of seats and take over the House in November’s midterm elections. So this week Mr Obama gave speeches in Milwaukee and Cleveland, meant to produce a “recovery autumn” for his party.

In both he evoked, nostalgically, the 2008 presidential campaign. He took a populist – even protectionist – line, accusing bygone Republican administrations of having “cut trade deals even if they didn’t benefit our workers.” He threw in some ideas that many Republicans have backed in the past (such as credits for research and development), along with plans to modernise infrastructure. The president’s supporters think he has the old campaigning élan back. They are right. But the circumstances under which that élan worked magic on the electorate have vanished.

The main thing the president is trying to do is to put a Republican face on the opposition to him. Republicans have rightly raised concerns about Mr Obama’s budgetary profligacy, but they have an even longer record of the same. The next big argument will be over the tax cuts enacted under George W. Bush almost a decade ago and scheduled soon to expire. Republicans want to retain them; Mr Obama would eliminate them for those making more than $250,000 a year. “They would have us borrow $700 billion over the next 10 years,” Mr Obama says, “to give a tax cut of about $100,000 to folks who are already millionaires.”

Since any Republican majority will eventually need to raise taxes — assuming they do not propose budget cuts that would make them a short-lived majority indeed — Mr Obama should easily win this issue. Yet it is unlikely he will. While the president is correct on the numbers, Republicans imply he will use any tax revenues not to shrink the deficit but to expand the government. Mr Obama set out early to dismiss the Republicans as a “party of no”. Bad idea. Against unpopular policies, “no” is the best word. Mr Obama has driven this point home, in his speeches: “If I said the sky was blue, they’d say no,” he said. “If I said fish live in the sea, they’d say no.” But there are two ways to say “no”. You can say “no” to a factual proposition and you can say “no” to a request or a demand. To say “no, two plus two doesn’t not equal five” is false. To say “no, I will not iron your shirts” is a matter of self-respect. In conflating the two, Mr Obama seems unable to distinguish between legitimate democratic opposition and contemptible stupidity.

Whether one thinks of it as messianic (“If I fail, they win,” he said in Cleveland), or condescending (literally wagging his finger at his audience), there is a high-handed side to Mr Obama. Candidates are running away from him. Wisconsin senator Russ Feingold, locked in a tight race, did not appear with him in Milwaukee. The journalist Michael Barone reported this week that “no Democrat has run an ad bragging about the healthcare bill [Mr Obama’s signature achievement] since Senate majority leader Harry Reid did in April”. Mr Obama did not call his $100bn infrastructure programme a “stimulus”, so unpopular is the word.

It is worth remembering what, apart from the calamitous record of the Bush administration, permitted Mr Obama to become president. Non-partisanship was his most consistent campaign promise, and his most important. He established it in the “no red America, no blue America” speech he gave at the Democratic convention in Boston in 2004. He even lauded Ronald Reagan, something he did again (although less credibly) this week.

People believed Mr Obama because it was in his own interest to govern this way. Strong partisans cannot retain popularity as US presidents. Mistrust of both parties is too high. According to pollster Scott Rasmussen, Americans are 35 per cent Democratic, 34 per cent Republican, and 31 per cent independent. The independents lean Republican. It was they who made Mr Obama president and they who are unmaking him.

Mr Obama won 53 per cent of the vote, a higher take than most electoral analysts deemed mathematically possible for a Democrat. This is another way of saying that Mr Obama came into office as dependent on the good will of moderates and conservatives as it is possible for a Democrat to be. And from the moment of his arrival, Mr Obama has been the most partisan president since the second world war.

Why would a president govern in such a way as to cut his voter base in half? Perhaps, incapable of generating on his own an agenda commensurate with the country’s problems, he chose action over perfection, and pushed the programmes that had been gathering dust on the shelves of the Democratic congressional committee chairmen. A more likely explanation is that he misrepresented himself to the public in a profound way.

There is no evidence that Mr Obama is less honest than others of his profession – but the thing he has chosen to misrepresent is of towering importance. Other presidents have broken campaign promises, whether explicit (such as George H.W. Bush’s promise of no new taxes) or implicit (Mr Reagan’s promise to fight abortion). Mr Obama’s misrepresentation was of a graver kind. It is not that he did not do the things he said he would. It is that he is not the person he said he was. This has left the middle of the electorate feeling jilted and, like most jilted lovers, inclined out of self-protection to close its ears to all blandishments.

The writer is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2010.