Elected as a center-left candidate, Barak Obama initially found his party in control of the House of Representatives, with a filibuster-proof Senate. With such a dominance of the Federal government, the President tallied a series of legislative victories, including a massive stimulus bill, reforms in the health and finance sectors, and, in the lame duck session, the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” which paves the way for homosexuals to serve openly in the Armed Forces.Although Obama accomplished the most significant legislative agenda since Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, his approval ratings dropped faster and farther than any another president in history, going from a 69 percent approval rating during his first week in office to a low of 41 percent in August of 2010, according to a Gallup Poll.
Early in his administration, President Obama said, “I’d rather be a really good one-term president than a mediocre two-term president,” and many pundits felt the Chief Executive was, though wildly successful, so far to the left that he had lost independent voters, thereby losing his reelection viability.
Indeed, voters challenged Obama’s assertion that his election was a mandate for a slew of progressive legislation, rebuking the President’s party; first by electing the anti-healthcare Republican Scott Brown to take the late Edward Kennedy’s Massachusetts Senate seat, then surging the GOP to a wave electoral victory in the 2010 midterm elections, and control of the House of Representatives.
Losing the House has changed the President’s political realities. Legislation will no longer pass without some sort of compromise with the GOP, thus stymying any far left initiatives, like a cap-and-trade carbon market. He has already angered what his press secretary Robert Gibbs termed “The Professional Left,” by compromising on what they coined the “Bush Tax Cuts for the Rich.” The deal, which extended the Bush-era tax breaks to all taxpayers, also included an extension on unemployment insurance; a boon for the President, as conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer stated that it was a $313 billion stimulus injection into the economy.
President Obama is also giving his White House staff a tincture of moderation, replacing fierce partisan Rahm Emanuel with the more centrist Bill Daley as Chief-of-Staff. Daley, the son of former long-time Chicago mayor, Richard Daley, is considered to be pro-business and had even publically criticized Obama’s healthcare bill. Leaving their posts shortly, as well, are Gibbs, David Axelrod and David Plouffe, senior advisors to the President. All three are returning to Chicago to rev up the President’s reelection campaign.
In addition, the behind-the-scene changes, the President is ramping up his public optimism. In his State of the Union address, entitled “Win the Future,” Obama declared that “America still has the largest, most prosperous economy in the world, and that we’ve “broken the back of this recession.”
While the country is coming out of recession, he continued, the rest of the World is out-educating the U.S., and we have to “out-innovate, out-educate, and out-build the rest of the World.” To do so, he argued, requires the government to invest in the “biomedical research, information technology, and, especially, clean energy technology; an investment that will strengthen our security, protect our planet, and create countless new jobs for our people.”
He offered an olive branch to the opposition party, pledging to cut spending and take care of the deficit; adopt medical malpractice reform; enact a five-year freeze on discretionary spending, saving the country $400 billion over a decade; review and eliminate overly onerous Federal regulations; and promised to veto any legislation containing pork barrel pet projects.
Obama even offered to give way on his magnum opus: healthcare reform, calling for ideas to improve the legislation. He affirmed, “Let’s fix what needs fixing, then let’s move forward.”
But the Republicans are determined not to lose the momentum recently won. Sarah Palin tweeted a salvo, lampooning Obama’s State of the Union address as the “WTF Speech.” The GOP submits that even if the recession is softening, it is a jobless recovery, with the unemployment rate still hovering at 9.4 percent.
They claim that “investment,” like the word “stimulus” used previously, is yet another word for spending by an out of control Federal government. A savings of $40 billion a year is a comparative drop in what is the United States’ $1.5 trillion yearly budget deficit bucket. Republicans advocate “starving the beast” at a time in which the electorate seems to want austerity.
In the current conciliatory political environment, the President is able to mask a move to the middle in the guise of political unity. There is a popular yearn to “turn down the rhetoric,” and fiery rhetoric was the crucible that the Tea Party-led opposition was forged in. Naturally, the President, a powerful communicator, is advantaged in flat-footed political discourse.
After his widely-praised Tucson memorial speech and his gestures of moderation, Barak Obama has an upward momentum in approval ratings, just in time for the opening of the presidential campaign.