Pyrrhic Victory, or, Dead Cats Don’t Bounce

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30 April 2010

Remember back when Obama got health care through both houses of Congress? Everyone from Joe Biden on down agreed that it was a big deal of some description. Yet has the comeback kid narrative that briefly burbled up around that time held true? Not so much.

In fact, it turns out that – despite the wild-eyed predictions of Bill Clinton who said the passage would give Obama a ten-point rise in the polls – passing an expensive piece of legislation most Americans did not want did nothing to improve the President’s popularity. According to Democracy Corps, “Health care’s passage did not produce even a point rise in the president’s approval rating or affection for the Democratic Congress. Virtually every key tracking measure in April’s poll has remained unchanged, including the Democrats’ continued weakness on handling of the economy.”

For the uninitiated or suspicious, this is no right-wing front group – it’s run by James Carville and Stanley Greenberg, Bill Clinton’s old pollster. And while Carville and Greenberg’s analysis also suggests anti-incumbent sentiment will take its toll on Republicans in the mid-term elections as well as on Democrats, the fact is, Barack Obama remains dead in the water. And Americans remain unconvinced by health care reform that, as they suspected, will turn out to cost far more than promised. Note Congressman Henry Waxman’s embarrassing cancellation of hearings during which he hoped to publicly touch up corporations for committing lese majeste in suggesting that Obama’s reforms might hurt their bottom line.

So what next for Obama? Certainly not climate change.

As my colleague Tom Switzer points out in the Wall Street Journal, the defection of Sen Lindsey Graham all but killed the prospect of near-term climate change legislation in the US. Which, for an economy that is still reeling from the Global Financial Crisis and which will spend many decades paying off the empty sugar hits of Obama’s so-called “stimulus” plans, is all to the good. Even better, the political climate around the world has changed with hysteria over man-made climate change starting to recede as voters realise that sloppy science and economic suicide pacts don’t mix.

Immigration reform? Possibly more likely: certainly after the passage of Arizona’s controversial anti-illegals measure this week, the Left is looking to goad the more extreme ends of the Right into embarrassing over-reach. But again the President, who came to power with virtually no experience in the mechanics of legislation, has less and less power to make the machinery of Capitol Hill do its will.

Finally, Jonathan is of course right in looking at the big picture that it is easier to oppose than to propose. Left-of-centre governments have a built-in advantage in that they pick others' pockets on the behalf of voters, and offer a warm fuzzy feeling of moral virtue in the process. It is an infantalising approach to be sur and is an in-built failing of a system that allows people to, as PJ O’Rourke famously put it, “vote themselves rich”. It is also at least a partial explanation of why young people tend to grow more conservative as they mature, and why so many wealthy people supported Obama. It’s easy to be generous with other peoples’ money, or when self-regarding virtue is just another luxury good.

But Obama is not offering much in the way of the positive, either. The man who came to power on a mantra of hope and change lately seems more the man of demonise and destroy. In personally taking on everyone from Glenn Beck to bloggers, bankers to Sarah Palin, he is not only being unpresidential and divisive, but damaging his own tarnished brand in the process.

UPDATE: Immigration reform? Fugghedaboudit!