Obama Power E-Book

Jeffrey C. Alexander

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 288

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

What is the source of Obama's power? How is it that, after suffering a humiliating defeat in the 2010 mid-term elections, Obama was able to turn the situation around, deftly outmaneuvering his opponent and achieving a decisive victory in the November 2012 presidential election? In this short and brilliant book, Jeffrey Alexander and Bernadette Jaworsky argue that neither money nor demography can explain this dramatic turnaround. What made it possible, they show, was cultural reconstruction. Realizing he had failed to provide a compelling narrative of his power, the President began forging a new salvation story. It portrayed the Republican austerity budget as a sop to the wealthy, and Obama as a courageous hero fighting for plain folks against the rich. The reinvigorated cultural performance pushed the Tea Party off the political stage in 2011, and Mitt Romney became fodder for the script in 2012. Democrats painted their Republican opponent as a backward-looking elitist, a "Bain-capitalist" whose election would threaten the civil solidarity upon which democracy depends. Real world events can spoil even the most effective script. Obama faced monthly unemployment numbers, the daunting Bin Laden raid, three live debates, and Hurricane Sandy. The clumsiness of his opponent and his own good fortune helped the President, but it was the poise and felicity of his improvisations that allowed him to succeed a second time. Converting events into plot points, the President demonstrated the flair for the dramatic that has made him one of the most effective politicians of modern times. While persuasively explaining Obama's success, this book also demonstrates a fundamental but rarely appreciated truth about political power in modern democratic societies namely, that winning power and holding on to it have as much to do with the ability to use symbols effectively and tell good stories as anything else.

Leseprobe

OBAMA POWER

To the memory of Iwan and Nadja Jaworsky And the future memories of Ben and Kia, Aaron and Sylvia

OBAMA POWER

Jeffrey C. Alexander and Bernadette N. Jaworsky

polity

Copyright © Jeffrey C. Alexander & Bernadette N. Jaworsky, 2014

The right of Jeffrey C. Alexander and Bernadette N. Jaworsky to be identified as Authors of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2014 by Polity Press

Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Polity Press350 Main StreetMalden, MA 02148, USA

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-8421-5

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

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Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.

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Contents

Preface

Introduction

1  The Performance of Politics

2  Symbolic Deflation

3  Re-Inflation

4  Setting the Stage

5  Unfolding the Drama

6  Pulling Ahead

7  Harrowing Home Stretch

8  Demography, Money, and Social Media

Conclusion

Notes

Index

Preface

This book is not about the exercise of Obama power during the Democratic president’s second term in office, but about what gave him the opportunity to do so – his odds-defying victory in the 2012 presidential campaign. Obama’s party had suffered horrendous defeat in the mid-term elections just two years earlier, his poll ratings had tanked, and the bloom was off the Obama rose. If these downward trends had continued, the world, at least the American world, would look very different today. Mitt Romney would be president, tax cuts for the wealthy would have been deepened rather than reversed, conservative hegemony over the Supreme Court would have been set for another generation, and new wounds to the already fragile social welfare safety net would have been suffered. It is sometimes difficult to remember such “what ifs,” given the continuing paralysis and deeply frustrating polarizations that have thus far rained over Obama’s second reign. But it is not a bad thing to recall them, for they were just barely avoided. The “what ifs” (about Romney being elected) would have been replaced by the “what might have beens” (about an Obama second term).

To find out why Obama won, this book drills down to the bedrock of US politics and culture. We examine the texture of American life, employing a microscope instead of a telescope, taking a granular view. When it comes to electoral outcomes, long views and big pictures are really views from nowhere. Searching for the deep underlying causes of the Democratic victory is like reading tea leaves – it’s not much more than making things up. Was it the ebb and flow of the economy, the surging shifts of demography, the formation of a new progressive ideology? Did Obama’s victory crystallize a new electoral coalition? Did Romney’s defeat mark the end of right-wing conservatism and the reinvigoration of the welfare state? Has the 30-year neoconservative wave finally crested? Such grand issues were neither cause nor consequence of Obama’s victory and Romney’s defeat. They do not cut close enough to the bone. In what follows, we are interested not in structures but in processes. Not the why but the how. We offer a new interpretation of US politics in the critical four years from January 2009 to November 2012.

We are extraordinarily grateful to John Thompson, editor and publisher of Polity Press, for providing critical support and feedback for this project from its beginning as a series of public lectures through its various manuscript lives. We also thank Jason Mast, Roger Friedland, and Ballard Morton for editorial responses to the manuscript at critical points. Alexander wishes to express his gratitude to the University of Cambridge, where he was in residence during the writing of this book, as the 2012–13 Pitt Professor of American History and Institutions while on sabbatical from Yale University. Jaworsky thanks her colleagues and students at Masaryk University in Brno, the Czech Republic, where her research was supported under a grant for the Employment of Newly Graduated Doctors of Science for Scientific Excellence (CZ.1.07/2.3.00/30.0009), cofinanced from the European Social Fund and the state budget of the Czech Republic.

Epigraph reprinted by permission of the publisher from Judith N. Shklar’s Ordinary Vices, Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, p. 230. Copyright © 1984 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.

“The great intellectual advantage of telling stories is that it does not rationalize the irrationality of actual experience and of history.”

Judith N. Shklar, Ordinary Vices

Introduction

In 2008, Barack Obama not only became the first African American to be elected president of the United States but the most vivid symbol of America’s democratic aspirations in decades. These utopian hopes proved hard to fulfill. Despite some remarkable legislative achievements, Obama’s popularity soon went into free fall, and his Democratic Party was humiliated in the midterm elections of November 2010. Over the next two years, the tides reversed again, and President Obama won a sweeping re-election victory over the Republican Mitt Romney in November 2012.

This book is about the deflation and re-inflation of a political symbol – “Barack Obama” – from 2009, the beginning of Obama’s first term in office, to his re-election in 2012. The odds were strongly against the Democratic president’s re-election. It was not just that his popularity had sunk to dangerous depths. It was also that the Supreme Court had removed controls over corporate campaign donations and unemployment had soared to a height that had prevented any previous sitting president since FDR from being re-elected. Yet, while such material issues create high hurdles, they can be overcome. Whether Obama would be re-elected or shoved aside by Mitt Romney was an open question. It was decided neither by economy nor by demography, as important as both of these were. What was decisive was Obama’s ability to make meaning – to become a powerful political symbol – and Romney’s inability in turn.

Cultural symbols and dramatic performances determined the fate of Obama’s presidency. For political performances to be successful, they must connect, or “fuse,” with large segments of the citizenry that compose their audience. If this connection is effected, then what might be called the performative dimension of politics – not only the candidates’ feigning truthfulness, but the speech writers, advertisers, make-up artists, advance men, spinners, and fundraisers who devote themselves to molding their images – becomes invisible to the naked eye. The candidate seems natural. But when performance and reception are not welded together, the seams show; political action seems contrived and overtly “performative” – strategic, mechanical, inauthentic. The premise of this book is that citizens don’t rationally deliberate the “real” qualities of candidates so much as they experience emotionally their projected moral tone.

Political elections have a real, very objective goal. They are all about winning and taking control of the government. In democratic societies, however, struggles for state power must be played out in non-violent ways. Democratic politicians take great pains to demonstrate their civility even as they engage in the fiercest of competitions. The premise of civility is that we are all in this together, that we are members of a “civil sphere” and not just an economic or political sphere, a religious order or an ethnic regime. A broadly civil solidarity undergirds the democratic state – that, at least, is the utopian idea. That we are a moral and not only a legal community, that we feel solidarity and trust with one another despite our differences and conflicts – this is the conceit that makes democracy possible.

In electoral struggles, this civility and the moral community it makes possible are at issue. Candidates compete with one another over who can embody democratic morality and sustain solidarity, and who cannot. This is trickier than it seems, because political morality is Janus-faced. It’s about not only the civil good but also anti-civil evil. It aims to separate honesty from deceit and altruism from selfishness, and to protect free people from despotism. The performance of politics is about wrapping yourself in the bright canopy of democratic values and painting your opponent in darkly anti-democratic colors.

Political campaigning tells a story about purity and pollution, about who is qualified to protect and extend solidarity and who would narrow and endanger it. To be associated with “anti-civil” qualities is to be symbolically constructed as immoral. Electing such a polluted figure would threaten the solidarity upon which democracy depends. Successful political performers plant their feet squarely inside the civil sphere. Demonstrating their moral trustworthiness, they work furiously to push their opponents outside the world of civility into the immoral world outside.1

1

The Performance of Politics

On November 2, 2010, when the Democratic Party suffered severe defeat at the hands of its Republican opponents, 63 seats turned over in the House of Representatives, the most in a midterm election since 1938. Democrats gave up control of this major legislative body to a new Republican majority. They also lost critical seats in the government’s other legislative body, the Senate, maintaining control only by a thin margin.

These bare-faced facts were interpreted by the mass media in dramatic terms, as “The Death of the Hero.” In the days leading up to the election, Maureen Dowd, an influential syndicated columnist for the New York Times, had prophesied about the president’s “coalition and governing majority shattering around him.”1 A poll taken among 18–24-year-old students just two weeks prior declared that the “Obamamania that gripped college campuses two years ago is gone.”2 Even Hollywood liberals were quiet during the last push, reflecting an “enthusiasm gap.”3

The day after the defeat, the New York Times posted an ominous, almost Shakespearean headline: “In Republican Victories, Tide Turns Starkly.”4 The Wall Street Journal spoke of the “balkanized state of American politics” after the “historic” election,5 and its conservative opinion editor rejoiced, “The Empire Strikes Back … Let the recriminations begin!”6The conservative Washington Examiner’s Byron York predicted “irreconcilable conflict.”7 The New Yorker’s senior editor, former Jimmy Carter speech writer Hendrik Hertzberg, augured: “For him and for the country, the next two years look awfully bleak. Capitol Hill will be like Hamburger Hill, a noisy wasteland of sanguinary stalemate.”8

There was blood in the water, a smell of murder in the air. Right-wing activists from the “Tea Party” had risen to power and challenged the status quo among the GOP.“Not since Barry Goldwater thumbed his nose at country-club Republicans in 1964 has a rebel movement created such a crisis of legitimacy among the GOP establishment,” proclaimed TIME.9 After the elections, the Republicans welcomed its new right-wing members into the legislative ranks. As then House speaker-inwaiting John Boehner put it: “What unites us as Republicans will be the agenda of the American people.”10 Obama’s rise had not heralded the rebirth of liberalism, but merely a temporary zig-zag on the long and steady horizon of conservative ascendancy. With the defeat of Obama’s party in 2010, the line had now been straightened back out. “Today the American people admitted the mistakes they made two years ago,” one of the founders of the group, the Tea Party Patriots, declared.11 “Personally, I think he’s already lost his re-election,” Dick Armey trumpeted triumphantly about the president.12 The neo-conservative activist and former Bush cabinet secretary had been the leading establishment figure behind the Tea Party’s confrontation with Barack Obama’s healthcare plan in the summer of 2009.

America’s conservative pundits interpreted the massive Republican shift as the rebuking response of the US electorate to a leftist president, one whose government-directed programs of redistribution stretched from Wall Street regulation to the auto industry bailout and healthcare reform. Republican master strategist Karl Rove described voters as “sick of the administration’s direction and tone” and accused the president of embracing a blame-game attitude “creating a vast army of people who feel personally assaulted by him.”13 John Boehner declared: “The American people have sent an unmistakable message to him [the president] tonight and that message is ‘change course’!”14 On Fox News, former Alaska governor and vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin offered some advice to the president going forward: “He is the one who is going to have start coming more to the center of America, toward some middle ground, instead of staying on that extreme far left that has driven us to where we are today.”15 In its end-of-year editorial for 2010, the Rupert Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal could scarcely conceal its satisfaction. The election result, it opined, was a clear-eyed, up and down judgment by rational citizens about liberal social policies: “The real story of 2010 is that the voters were finally able to see and judge this liberal agenda in its unvarnished form.”16

These statements about the meaning of the 2010 election, however, were less reflections of social reality than efforts to shape it. Forcefully crystallizing hopes and fears, they were interpretations of the voting result, not objective descriptions of it. Rather than denoting a condition that already exists, they constituted efforts to bring that condition into being by the very action of speaking about it. They were, in other words, political performances.

Is the electorate really rational in the way that reactions to the Democrats’ 2010 defeat suggested? Are the opinions of voters really so clear? How do we know what a vote indicates, exactly? Can we even speak of an “electorate” per se? Is it empirically correct that the results of the 2010 congressional voting actually indicated something about an entity called “the American people”?

From a cultural perspective, voting is viewed as symbolic communication, a political performance that demands interpretation. No doubt, those who participated in the election, and those who didn’t, were reacting to something about President Obama’s first two years in office, but was it, in fact, the leftist nature of his policies? Was the Republican shift in voting perhaps less a clear-eyed citizenry responding to liberal policies than a response to a symbolic failure – the weakness of his performance of liberal politics? Perhaps it reflected this liberal administration’s inability to reach out to centrist audiences and the clumsy inadequacy of its efforts to get even potentially sympathetic audiences emotionally engaged.

Leaders do not offer policy to clear-eyed citizens who rationally evaluate its effectiveness and register their deliberative judgment through their votes. Political leaders project complex and multilayered performances to audiences who engage these symbolic actions with more and less enthusiasm, with more and less criticism, and may not actually engage with them at all. Strictly speaking, such responses are not even interpretations of political actions. What citizens have available to them is only “news” about these actions – only journalistic reconstructions. What voters interpret are mass-mediated performances.

In the 2010 exit polls, only 37 percent of those casting votes – for their local congressional representatives – viewed the national election as a referendum on the Obama administration. Another 24 per cent did not. The remaining 39 percent of the electorate were not sure how to interpret the vote.17

And what about those who had not voted? Significant segments of the aroused electorate that had thrust Obama into power during the presidential voting in 2008 sat out the midterm congressional election two years later.18 Polls indicated that the audience of young voters aged 18–29, the so-called youth vote, continued to favor Obama by an historically unprecedented majority.19 In 2010, however, relatively few of these young voters cast their votes – just 11 percent, compared to 18 percent in 2008.20 Despite the even deeper and wider commitment of African Americans to Obama, their participation in November 2010 declined as well. Just 25 percent had given “quite a lot of” or “some” thought to the midterm elections, compared to 44 percent in 2006 and 85 percent in the 2008 presidential elections.21 One black commentator observed a few days before the election: “[T]he sense of hope and history that drove turnout in 2008 are in short supply.”22

The exercise of political power is not only pragmatic and practical, but cultural – not just about getting things done, but about making legislative accomplishments and organizational changes seem meaningful and legitimate. The electorate responds to the manner and style of power. President Obama had been a powerful executive in purely pragmatic terms, initiating far-reaching repairs that would deeply alter the social organization of American society. In the process of accomplishing these organizational reforms, however, he had been unable to make meaning in his old way. He lost his symbolic footing. His actions, while effective legislatively, were no longer affecting. As the president’s performances lost symbolic power, the Tea Party rose up and unceremoniously kicked the once and future American hero off the public stage. “The buzz and intensity for some months now has been on the right, led by the Tea Party,” the New York Times observed in March, 2010.23 After the midterm elections, seven out of ten Americans felt that it was very or somewhat important that “Republican leaders in Congress take the Tea Party movement’s positions and objectives into account as they address the nation’s problems.”24

The venerable political journalist Elizabeth Drew observed in the leftist New York Review of Books: “President Obama seems to be shrinking and becoming more ineffectual before our eyes.”25 The Democratic defeat in 2010 was a reflection of this cultural deficit. In the wake of the deflation of their party’s political symbol, Democratic political campaigners had tried to “reignite”26 the audiences of citizens who had supported them in 2008, but they could not generate the spark. The Democrats had been looking for a way to “energize” the electorate,27 but they could not find it.

This book describes the symbolic deflation of Obama’s early years in office and explains how the Democratic president eventually found a way to get his mojo working again. We show how it was the cultural re-inflation of “Obama power” – not only shifting demographic and economic indicators – that allowed the Democratic Party to gain traction and the liberal president to be elected again.28

2

Symbolic Deflation

In his campaign for the presidency in 2008, Barack Obama had delivered a striking performance that powerfully connected with the left and the center sections of the citizenry, even as it deeply antagonized the right. He deftly deployed the moral language that undergirds US democracy and, demanding “change we can believe in,” presented himself as a transformative figure, a singular political hero who would solve the crisis of our times and take the nation along a new path.

Performing as a successful president, however, is even more difficult – exponentially more so – than winning the campaign. In one sense, the challenge is the same – to become a collective representation of democratic ideals. But the social circumstances surrounding this cultural effort have starkly changed. Political campaigns can be conducted in the future tense; presidents, by contrast, must tell their stories in real time. It is much more difficult to tell your story when you need to account for a real situation, especially when your position as head of state makes contemporary social conditions seem your responsibility.

The first two years of Obama’s presidency, 2009 and 2010, unfolded as a sequence of political duels that amounted to vicious, if symbolic, knife fights. Each side invoked the dichotomies of democratic morality to do maximum cultural injury to the other: Who is secretive, who open? Who is truthful and reasonable, who deceptive and domineering? Who is trying to be cooperative and who aggressive and bullying? Whose policies constitute a threat to the autonomy of individuals on the other side?

Healthcare as Primal Scene

The primal scene was the battle over healthcare reform. Republicans accused the administration and its liberal representatives of dishing out phony numbers and making secret deals. They highlighted the Obama administration’s insistence on the so-called “mandate.” Every American would be required to purchase health insurance, or else to pay a substantial fine. Since Teddy Roosevelt had first proposed government-sponsored healthcare a century before, American resistance to “socialized medicine” was legendary. Controversy over the mandate triggered deep moral anxieties about individual submission to an impersonal, domineering, and bureaucratic state.

What emerged was a melodrama featuring the very public struggle between grass-roots “Tea Party” activists and an Obama-led, full court press for major government legislation. For the right, that push had all the earmarks of an antidemocratic conspiracy. During the summer congressional recess in 2009, just months into Obama’s first term, right-wing activists began to stage an extraordinarily effective symbolic struggle against the healthcare proposal. Dressed in the garb of the eighteenth-century American colonists who protested King George’s luxury taxes and triggered the Revolution, the Tea Party movement exploded on the scene, grabbing the headlines in newspapers and television. Announcing “Beyond Beltway, Health Debate Turns Hostile,” the New York Times reported on the “volatile mix” of heckling and even violence when Tea Party members protested at town-hall meetings held by congressional members across the country during the 2009 summer break.1Reporting on the largest of these rallies, held on September 12, Fox News declared “Tea Party Express Takes Washington By Storm,” noting that “tens of thousands” of protestors were chanting, “enough, enough” and “you lie, you lie!”2

While they were far from monolithic, Tea Party activists were united in their effort to block the Patients Protection and Affordable Care Act, which many dubbed “Obamacare,” from becoming law.3 They repeatedly portrayed Obama as a socialist, in their view the radical obverse of American-style democracy.4 When Jenny Beth Martin, the national Tea Party Patriots coordinator, enumerated the movement’s “core principles,” she equated “fiscally responsible” officials with “constitutionally limited government” and “free markets.”5 The sacred democratic code of individual autonomy was interpreted as demanding non-interference by government: “There are two competing visions for health care in America. One centralizes control in Washington DC, while the other empowers families and individuals – i.e. the patients.”6

As the healthcare debate heated up, Newsweek headlined, “The Case for Killing Granny.”7 A big “bogeyman,” as one Dartmouth Medical School professor called it, was the idea that somehow care for the elderly could become rationed. Former Alaska governor and vide-presidential candidate Sarah Palin stoked the fire by referring to “death panels” of bureaucrats that would decide who was “worthy of healthcare.” Her comments propelled an enormous push to code the health reform as deeply immoral, a danger to democratic civility; indeed, Palin called the proposal “downright evil.”8 This death panel metaphor, and the media interpretations layered on top of it, was to prove remarkably durable. Even two years after the Act was passed, four in ten Americans still believed the law would create death panels.9

Obama’s response to this pressing pollution was to reach for symbolic representations of his own that would resonate with the center of the citizen audience. In a town-hall meeting in Colorado, he invoked Social Security, the most popular and taken-for-granted governmental benefit, reminding the audience that opponents had called it socialist when President Franklin Roosevelt had first introduced the idea in the 1930s.10 A few days later, the Democratic president tried tapping into what he called the “moral convictions” of religious organizations. Proclaiming that the healthcare debate “goes to the heart of who we are in America,” he asserted the “core ethical and moral obligation that we look after each other.”11 He was translating the widely popular Medicare program for older Americans into the moral language that sustains social solidarity, calling it a “sacred trust that must be passed from generation to generation.”12

But regardless of how energetically Obama projected such rhetoric into the court of public opinion, these performances did not connect with the hearts of the US audience. It was not that the president failed in practical terms. Eventually, the Act was passed into law, and repairs to the inequitable and costly state of American healthcare were begun. In symbolic terms, however, tremendous damage had been done to Obama’s cultural power. Not a single Republican in the House or Senate voted for the bill. Public opinion on the issue shifted considerably, not toward but away from the president’s side. In June 2009, most Americans (72 percent) supported the idea of a “government administered health plan like Medicare that would compete with private health insurance plans,” and 57 percent said they would be willing to pay higher taxes so that all Americans would have coverage they couldn’t lose “no matter what.”13 But by the time the Act became law, in March 2010, only 32 percent approved of it.14

Obama had won the battle but lost the war. He proved unable to energize the feelings of solidarity that are necessary to legitimate egalitarian institutional change. It was the ceremonial powers of the office that were at stake. As compared with Britain, where the Crown and Prime Minister are starkly separated, in America the same person, the president, exercises both instrumental and symbolic power. As the King (or Queen) of the civil sphere, a president carries not only a legal mandate but what the ancient Chinese called the mandate of heaven. He is not just the head of government, but the guarantor of social peace and tranquility; there are ruffles and flourishes, standing and deference, wherever he goes. Describing the “hushed crowd of 1.5 million” listening to President Obama’s 2009 inauguration speech, People magazine made note of the promise he made to the assembled faithful: “We have gathered because we have chosen hope over fear, unity of purpose over conflict and discord.”15 Hope and unity were precisely what President Obama had been unable to sustain.

This ceremonial function of the presidency is such that, if partisanship increases, the mandate of heaven may be considered lost. If there is political paralysis and venomous, seemingly endless bickering, the president can become vulnerable indeed. If civility seems endangered, then it is harder for the president to present himself as a symbol of the entire nation. The idealized solidarity required for legitimating radical institutional change breaks down.

This same deflation of authority afflicted the presidencies of Obama’s predecessors. The symbolic power of Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Clinton, both Bushes, and even Reagan had withered in the face of intense partisanship and political paralysis. But Obama was particularly vulnerable because of the hero story he represented. The persona he had constructed promised to create a new vital center, to lead the nation beyond the polarization of the 1960s generation, to unity and consensus over conflict and discord. This hero narrative, paradoxically, gave the Republican opposition veto power over Obama’s success. They deployed this cultural power with ruthless magnificence. If they erupted in endless partisanship, and refused to compromise, it would appear, symbolically speaking, to be Obama’s own fault. He had not fulfilled his responsibility as president to create a civil society. He had lost the mandate of heaven and fallen from grace.

The Economy and National Mood

Partisan political eruption was the first social fact that undermined Obama’s symbolic authority during this first term. The failure of the economy to dramatically improve was the other. The economy is politically significant not only because it affects the material situation of a decisive segment of the voting populace, but also because the state of the economy creates a mood, establishing a tonality in the collective conscience that affects everybody. The economy delivers cultural as well as material goods – the hopes and anxieties that affect what Keynes called capitalism’s “animal spirits.” These moods and emotions translate into estimations of the president’s civil capacities. “It’s so psychological,” the Wall Street Journal’s “MarketWatch” would explain in the midst of the 2012 race, asserting that voters’ “gut feeling” would ultimately decide their vote.16

Candidate Obama promised that, if elected, he would resolve the economic crisis. President Obama, in the early days of his first term, predicted that, if his nearly trillion-dollar stimulus package were passed, unemployment would stand at 6 percent four years later, by next Election Day. He painted a forward-moving narrative of economic salvation: “I have every confidence that if we are willing to continue doing the critical work that must be done – by each of us, by all of us – then we will leave this struggling economy behind us, and come out on the other side, more prosperous as a people.”17 But in the early years of his presidency, the economy moved in the wrong direction, from an unemployment rate of 7.8 percent when he took office to 9.5 percent by the 2010 midterm election, even rising to 10 percent in late 2009.18

Some critics, including the future Republican candidate Mitt Romney, implied that the president didn’t regard the situation gravely enough, wondering out loud how he could appear on the late-night Jay Leno show with the economy in crisis.19 When the newly inaugurated president translated his salvation narrative into a massive stimulus bill – the $831 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 – the conservative right, still smarting from its humiliating national defeat, saw an opportunity to go on the attack. They framed the stimulus as deeply anti-democratic. Saul Anuzis, former chair of the Michigan Republican Party, referred to the Obama agenda as “economic fascism.”20 Conservative pundit Michelle Malkin joined South Carolina’s governor in denouncing the movement toward a “savior-based economy” ready to bail out entitled and undeserving masses.21

When positive economic results from the stimulus were not immediately forthcoming, Obama’s promises of heroic transformation began to seem vulnerable, if not empty. Public opinion about the way in which the president was dealing with the economy began a slow but steady downward spiral, and a thoroughgoing pollution of the president’s first major legislative victory seemed possible. By August, 2009, six months after its passage, 57 percent of adults thought the stimulus package was “having no impact on the economy or making it worse,” and only 18 percent said it had “done anything to help improve their personal situation.”22 While Obama’s overall job approval rating held steady in the mid-50s, on the economy it had tanked, falling from 54 percent in September to 46 percent by the beginning of November.23

When his promise to heroically transform the economic crisis did not come to pass, the president appeared, to a growing number of Americans, weak and impotent. It seemed there were forces much mightier than he himself. In the first interview of the 2010 New Year, Obama responded to a question about the people who were now feeling “deflated” after feeling so hopeful one year earlier, during the inauguration: “They have every right to feel deflated because the economy was far worse than any of us expected … People have rightly been anxious this year.”24 President Obama could not transform chaos into order and create a peaceful and abundant world. He had not been able to act as a hero in America’s time of need. Just one year after re-election, a Wall Street Journal/NBC News survey found the country “in a decidedly negative mood” when it came to the economy.25 It seemed as if Obama were ready to admit being defeated by events rather than being in control of them: “What I haven’t been able to do in the midst of this crisis is bring the country together in a way that we had done in the Inauguration. That’s what’s been lost this year … that whole sense of changing how Washington works.” It was time to beg the American public for a second chance: “And so this year, refocusing on how – whether we’re Democrats or Republicans – we all have common values and care about our kids; we all want work that’s satisfying, pays the bills and gives children a better future and security. Returning to those themes is going to be really important.”26

It didn’t work.

Defeat and Disconnection

Liberals who had supported candidate Obama complained that, during his performance as president, he had disappeared from the stage, that he didn’t engage in speech-making and made little effort to rally popular support. Actually, President Obama had tried doing all of this. The problem was that his performances failed to reach the hearts and minds of the sharply fragmented audiences he faced. The left was angry and vituperative because the president had abandoned the public option on healthcare and had not nationalized the banks.27 The center was disappointed because he seemed to have embraced the very big government tools the left accused him of shirking. The right, already embittered at the assumption of power by such a liberal and non-traditional politician, became politically enraged. They began taking over the public stage. In early January, 2010, conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks narrated a somber New Year’s message about the state of the nation, blaming the “new administration” for not having “galvanized a popular majority:”

The United States opens this decade in a sour mood. First, Americans are anxious about the future. Sixty-one percent of Americans believe the country is in decline … Only 27 percent feel confident that their children’s generation will be better off than they are. Second, Americans have lost faith in their institutions. During the great moments of social reform, at least 60 percent of Americans trusted government to do the right thing most of the time. Now, only a quarter have that kind of trust. The country is evenly divided about President Obama, but state governments are in disrepute and confidence in Congress is at withering lows … The Ipsos/McClatchy organizations have been asking voters which party can do the best job of handling a range of 13 different issues. During the first year of the Obama administration, the Republicans gained ground on all 13.28