Posted on 01/19/2010 7:56:46 AM PST by GOP_Resurrected
“Democrats across the country are starting to wonder aloud if they misjudged the electorate over the last year, with profound ramifications for the midterm elections this year and, potentially, for Mr. Obama’s presidency,” writes Adam Nagourney in the Sunday New York Times. A similar theme appears in Sunday’s Washington Post from Dan Balz, that paper’s lead political analyst. The perception has formed, perhaps indelibly, that the reason Democrats will get hammered in the 2010 elections is that the party moved too far left in general and tried to reform health care in particular.
This perception owes itself, above all, to the habit that political analysts in the media and other outposts of mainstream thought have of ignoring structural factors. Any political scientist can tell you that external factors hold enormous sway over public opinion. Economic conditions tend to matter the most, but scandals, wars, personality, and other factors come into play. While the Democrats may have committed sundry mistakes, the reason for their diminished popularity that towers above all others is 10 percent unemployment.
But political analysts are more like drama critics. They follow the ins and outs of the tactical maneuverings of the players, and when the results come in, their job is to explain how the one led to the other. If you suggested to them that they should instead explain the public mood as a predictable consequence of economic conditions, rather than the outcome of one party’s strategic choices, they would look at you like you were crazy. They spend their time following every utterance and gesture of powerful politicians. Naturally, it must be those things that have the decisive effect.
If you believe that Democratic ideological overreach is the problem--“they thought the country was at a very different place ideologically,” explains perpetually quoted Republican wise man Vin Weber--then you have to undertake the following thought experiment. Imagine that John McCain won the 2008 election. (How? I don’t know--maybe Obama is caught on tape singing “Kill Whitey” to himself in a private moment.) Would McCain have more popular support right now than Obama does, because the public really wants an agenda of smaller government and lower taxes?
That’s not a very plausible scenario. Instead, most of the pundits want us to believe that Obama could have avoided a political backlash if only he’d taken a different course. Charlie Cook asserts that Obama made a “colossal miscalculation” by failing to focus on the economy, but neglects to suggest what economic policies Obama could have proposed instead. Time’s Joe Klein has suggested an alternative course of action for the president. Obama should have been “pushing for stricter financial regulations and a tax on big banks to recoup the bailouts,” argues Klein. “He should also revive his campaign pledge of a National Infrastructure Bank, which would take decisions about the most important new public works projects out of the hands of Congressional porkers. If Obama had done so in his first year, his approval ratings might be closer to 60% than to 50% today.” This strikes me as giving the voters a bit more credit as policy wonks than they deserve.
It’s hard to imagine any non-trivial economic policy Obama could have embraced that would have gained any Republican support. We don’t have to speculate about this--there’s a good case study at hand of a policy proposal embraced by Obama that enjoys strong support among right-of-center economists and provides clear economic benefits. It’s called his stimulus plan. More than one-third of it consisted of tax cuts. A consensus of economic forecasters believes it substantially aided the economy, and even conservative economists like the American Enterprise Institute’s John Makin agree. Yet that stimulus provoked a massive Republican outcry and provided no public-opinion boost to Obama.
Okay, I'm not going to question for a minute that economic conditions are weighing on The One's support right now. But his premise here is that's the ONLY reason Obama's sagging in the polls right now, and the public's hunger for "stimulus," socialized medicine, and other full-bore statism is nevertheless just as vigorous as they judged it a year ago.
Well the problem is there, Jonny, you don't have to GUESS voter attitudes towards those issues specifically. There's these whatchamacallits called "polls," where we simply ASK THEM what they think of them. And every one of them show 2 to 1 opposition to health care, and that the stimulus is a colossal flop. You know, the polls that were all you swore by in assuring us that all those years of GOP dominance you claimed were superficial, because polls said voters agreed with YOUR positions then?
‘Da Nile is a river in North Africa...
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>> Would McCain have more popular support right now than Obama does, because the public really wants an agenda of smaller government and lower taxes? That’s not a very plausible scenario.
This presumes that policy has no effect on the nation’s outlook. If conservative economic policies had been enacted (which is no sure thing if McCain were elected), unemployment would be lower, and McCain would thus likely be enjoying greater popularity than Obama is.
The public really wants an agenda that works.
SnakeDoc
Using the writers analogy, then the only reason that Obama got elected in the first place is because of the impending financial disaster of the banks and the economy turning sour. Not because of any ideas he was pitching.
Quick question for Chait guy, what on earth were demonazis looking at to think they had a mandate to socialize America? Man, these libtards and their ivy league educations are so hard to follow. I don’t believe I have ever seen a poll showing majority support for socialized medicine. Maybe in MA and few other nutball states, but the vast majority of Americans have always preferred free access to medical care for their bodies and disliked the intercession of Govt between them and their bodies. You really had to be a moron to ever buy the proposition that people want to be treated like sheep. It goes without saying that the vast majority of dems like to be considered as chattal, but the freemen of America prefer to be a cowboy rather than a cow. You would think even someone who went to Harvard or Yale could understand this. Guess not.
Most of the stimulus was used to prop up State budgets and pad their political allies. Small business is being squeezed and real unemployment is more than 15% and the currency is weakened significantly.. He wants to say that would have happened regardless, but that just doesent fly.
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