With 11 weeks left for the mid-term congressional elections in the US, the latest opinion polls are not encouraging for President Barack Obama and his Democratic Party. If the polls remain unchanged until the election, the Democrats could actually lose control of both the House of Representatives and the Senate, and this would inevitably put on hold a good part of Obama’s legislative agenda.
In the Senate, for example, a number of Republican challengers are now taking the lead in opinion polls over previously safe Democratic incumbent senators, such as Barbara Boxer in California and Russ Feingold in Wisconsin.
It is also possible that the Republicans could win the Senate seats previously held by Obama in Illinois and Vice-President Joe Biden in Delaware.
Worse news for the Democrats is that they could also lose in Nevada, where the Senate seat of their majority leader, Harry Reid, faces a serious challenge from Sharon Angle, a right-wing supporter of the populist Tea Party movement.
The President’s approval rating has hovered around an average low of 44 per cent over the past few weeks, and according to an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll released recently, almost two-thirds of Americans believe the economy will worsen before it gets better, up from 53 per cent who felt that way in January. This is bad news for the Obama administration.
Although Obama’s various stimulus packages, in effect, saved the American economy from collapsing, the fact remains that the US jobless rate is still unacceptably high, which is, no doubt, a major cause of the President’s unpopularity. The country’s economic recovery is proving to be more fragile than previously thought and voters are understandably feeling somewhat frustrated with their President.
It is true that Obama inherited a very weak economy and took office during the worst economic crisis since the Depression, but he has been President for 18 months now, and voters are no longer content to blame all their ills on former President George Bush.
Bill Galston, former adviser to President Bill Clinton, has long argued that the Democrats will lose a number of seats in November’s mid-term elections, and also believes the unemployment rate to be the main factor.
He said recently: “Just as BP’s failure to cap the well has been so damaging, Obama’s failure to cap unemployment will be his undoing. There is nothing he can do to affect the jobless rate before November.”
There is no doubt that Obama’s legislative accomplishments since becoming President have been major, and he deserves credit for this.
His main achievements include healthcare reform, which extended insurance coverage to 32 million Americans, an economic stimulus plan which brought the country out of a severe recession, a rewriting of the regulations governing the country’s financial system, better protection for credit card consumers and extended healthcare coverage for needy children.
Despite these landmark legislative achievements, however, polls show once again it is the economy most people care about, especially the fact that unemployment is still too high.
Furthermore, polls show that a majority of the US electorate regards Obama as being “too liberal”. According to Democracy Corps, a liberal think-tank, 55 per cent of citizens think Obama is a “socialist”, which may seem strange to Europeans, but is not particularly surprising given the conservative nature of American voters.
I have always argued that America is basically a centre-right country which likes consensus. Unlike Bill Clinton, who was a convinced centrist, and could appeal to moderate conservatives, Obama is basically a liberal, and this sometimes alienates large chunks of the electorate.
It is true that the President has – rightly so – often ignored many of the demands of his party’s liberal wing, such as on free trade and other issues.
However, when he first tackled health reform, for example, he gave the Democratic-controlled Congress too much of a free hand in drawing up the legislation, and the result was that the initial proposals were far too liberal for the electorate.
He then agreed to a more centrist framework, giving the impression that this compromise was forced on him by the Republicans and conservative Democrats. Had Obama himself proposed a more balanced reform Bill in the first place, instead of leaving the initiative to the liberals in Congress, this would have gone down better with the average voter.
Should the Republicans take control of Congress in November, this will not necessarily spell the end of the Obama presidency. After all, Bill Clinton lost heavily to the Republicans in his first mid-term election, yet he managed to work well with a Republican-controlled Congress and was comfortably re-elected President.
The centrist Clinton had no qualms about stealing the Republicans’ clothes, and this kept him in the White House for another four years. Will the liberal Obama feel comfortable doing the same?