President Obama One Year Later: He's Doing All Right, Considering

It's a rare day when liberals and conservatives agree on anything in Washington anymore, but when it comes to assessing President Obama, the conventional wisdom from right and left has coalesced into a similar story line: He's heading south, and his plummeting poll numbers and the fate of three statewide Democratic candidates who've run -- and lost -- since he took office proves it.

Historical context, however, suggests an alternative view: namely, that other presidents confronted by similar tribulations facing the 44^th president of the United States have also seen their popularity decline. It rises when, and if, those troubles appear to be receding.

For now, that is not the most prominent interpretation. Republican gubernatorial wins in 2009 in Virginia and New Jersey, and this week's astonishing upset of Democrat Martha Coakley by Republican Scott Brown in the race for Edward M. Kennedy's Massachusetts Senate seat, have the president and his party appearing anxious, weak, and vulnerable.

The two ideological camps disagree on the reasons, of course. Democrats have identified their recent setbacks, as they often do, as a communications problem, one exacerbated (of course) by the grotesque mess bequeathed Obama by George W. Bush, by angry, tea partying "right wing extremists," talk radio demagogues, and spineless moderates in their own party. This view was succinctly summed up recently by columnist E.J. Dionne, who wrote that "the truth that liberals and Obama must grapple with is that they have failed so far to dent the right's narrative."

Liberal Washington Post blogger Jonathan Capehart added in response to Dionne: "Let me go a step further. It's not enough to discredit the conservatism that Ronald Reagan nurtured into dominance. If Obama and his allies want to dent the right's narrative, they have to devise a coherent, cohesive and concise narrative of their own. They failed to do that in year one. Their political lives depend on them doing it from this day forward."

Meanwhile, viewing elections through a conservative prism yields an utterly different picture. In this telling, Barack Obama is a president who campaigned as, if not a fiscal moderate exactly, a deeply prudent man -- but who has governed as a caricature of a big government liberal. During his watch, conservatives will tell you, we've seen a $768 billion stimulus that didn't stimulate, unheard-of trillion dollar deficits, and a government takeover of U.S. banks as well as a venerated automobile maker. It's been a year capped by the sight of strutting Wall Street types casually announcing that they are returning to the days of million dollar bonuses and a Congress paralyzed over White House-backed legislation that would nationalize a significant portion of the nation's health care delivery system – all while unemployment soared past 10 percent, and the nation stayed stuck in the Great Recession.

"Voters went for the hope-and-change Obama in part because he promised fiscal sobriety after the Bush $500 billion deficit," says conservative historian and writer Victor Davis Hanson. "Instead, in utterly cynical fashion, Obama trumped that red ink four times over. It only makes it worse that the more the administration borrowed, printed, and spent the higher unemployment rose and the lower economic activity plummeted."

Alvin Felzenberg, a veteran of two Republican administrations and a political scientist who authored an acclaimed book on judging presidents, notes that there is a gap between Obama's personal ratings, which remain high, and his job approval, which is fluctuating within three or four points – in either direction – of the mystical 50 percent line. This suggests that Americans still have affection for the president and his family, but now harbor doubts about his competence – a recent Gallup Poll showed that only 40 percent of the electorate approves of his handling of the economy. This does not necessarily bode well for Obama's future.

"All through Carter's presidency, people liked him personally," Felzenberg told Politics Daily. "They decided to fire him when they concluded he was in over his head."

So is that what Obama's incredibly sinking public opinion polls, along with the election returns in Virginia, New Jersey, and Massachusetts are telling us: that a crucial swath of the electorate -- the independent voters in the middle -- have concluded that Obama is a nice guy who is not up to the task?

It seems incumbent on anyone seeking an honest and insightful answer to that question to compare Obama to presidents who faced similar problems: namely a stubbornly stagnant economy, a stalemated foreign war, and a lousy public mood. This is not as easy as it sounds: For one thing, recessions don't come at the same time in presidents' terms. For another, Obama doesn't really face one war, but two – three if you count the worldwide struggle against Islamic terrorist organizations as separate from Iraq and Afghanistan. Nonetheless, there are some comparisons to be made, albeit carefully.

Let's focus on the economy: The "Reagan recession" began in mid-1981 and didn't abate for more than two years. Initially, it didn't appear to threaten Reagan, whose popularity was sky-high due to an utterly random variable -- the assassination attempt on his life. But then the unemployment rate rose throughout the summer of 1982, surpassing (as it did in 2009) 10 percent and peaking at nearly 11 percent in December 1982. That November, Democrats made inroads in the midterm elections, recapturing 26 House seats.

More to the point, as unemployment rose, Reagan's job approval rating fell. It dipped below 40 percent in January 1983, reaching as low as 35 percent the last week of that month before he (and the economy) began their inexorable recovery. Reagan had vowed to "stay the course," a mantra ridiculed by his opponents, and in 1983 an impressive field of Democratic operatives and candidates began assembling on the political battlefield for what they assumed would be a victorious challenge to the old man in 1984.

"In general, high unemployment leads to low (presidential) approval," Greg Schneiders, one of those 1983 would-be Democratic kingmakers, noted this week. "Adding a couple bad wars, extreme partisanship in D.C., and a generally (crappy) national mood doesn't help."

Schneiders went to work for John Glenn back then. The astronaut-turned-Ohio senator did not garner the Democratic presidential nomination -- not that it would have made any difference: Reagan carried 49 states in his 1984 re-election, in one of the great landslides in U.S. history. Taking account of the truism that some of Obama's 'change' has not been what voters envisioned, Schneiders believes Obama ought to do what Reagan did.

"My advice to him would be 'stay the course,'" Schneiders says. "Things will get better if he continues to govern thoughtfully and decently." Will they get better in time to save the necks of vulnerable House and Senate Democrats running in November 2010? Perhaps not, but Obama's own re-election is not for another three years -- and presidents are not judged by congressional elections, but by their own. Moreover, some presidents, including Dwight Eisenhower and Bill Clinton, achieved greater legislative success after the opposition party was ascendant on Capitol Hill.

Divided government is the voters' way of reining in one party or the other. Independent voters seem to be telling the White House that with friends like House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, Obama needs no enemies. But today's antipathy toward the Democrats may not last. Deep, lingering recessions tend to exacerbate -- and exaggerate -- voter disaffection with the party in power.

"It's par for the course," says presidential scholar Shirley Anne Warshaw, a professor at Gettysburg College. "The recession is a serious problem. It takes time to heal (the damage of) a recession."

This is not to say that Obama has unlimited time. "Given the state of the economy, his numbers are not all that bad," says Gary Jacobson, University of California, San Diego political science professor, who is an expert on divided government. "Of course, polling data suggests that most people still blame the economy on his predecessor, but that proportion is diminishing. If there is no noticeable upswing within the next few months, then his numbers are likely to fall to a level more reflective of economic misery."

One problem for Obama and his party, as the Massachusetts election returns made clear, is that the Democrats' priority on health care legislation seems to many voters to be a prosaic concern at a time one out of ten Americans is out of work. "Despite everything, President Obama is still (around) a 50 percent approval rating – just imagine if he hadn't inherited the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression," says veteran Democrat Lanny Davis. "That being said, the trouble is the national Democratic Party focus on health care -- and being labeled by Republicans as favoring big government and higher taxes -- is a recipe for disaster in 2010 congressional elections, and endangers Obama's own re-election unless we make a sharp turn towards center soon."

Perhaps that's true. Another way of thinking about it is that Obama was elected as kind of a blank slate -- and voters are making decisions about him, and his policies, during very trying times. He's hardly the first president who had a fateful first year in office, but he doesn't have a lot to fall back on, as some others have had, including Dwight D. Eisenhower. "Ike had all kinds of problems his first year ...but Americans could always look at him as someone with amazing experience on the world scene," said George Colburn, producer of an acclaimed documentary series on Eisenhower. "Alas, Barack Obama does not have that kind of a foundation, and I think it will hurt him."

Another issue Obama has to face that men like Eisenhower and John Kennedy did not is that so much of the media commentary today is done by those with a rooting interest, and apparently not much in the way of institutional memory. Observers who are more dispassionate about politics know that recessions eventually ebb, and that when they do employment rises, government deficits decrease -- along with public anxiety -- and presidents are judged less harshly. These less-partisan observers know that wars, even long ones, eventually come to an end, too, that terrorist leaders die or are apprehended, that history moves on. They know also that the public grows to accept, and sometimes even appreciate, legislation that was initially unpopular.

They know all these things, and more besides: that a president's success is not dependent on having a majority of his party in control of both houses on Capitol Hill. It almost certainly helped Clinton when Democrats were swept from congressional majorities in 1994. The Democrats' defeat that year -- and, make no mistake, the Republicans ran against the incumbent in the White House -- got Clinton's attention. The GOP takeover on Capitol Hill also gave Clinton someone to negotiate with, sharpened his survival skills, and played to his temperament. And he proved adept as a counterpuncher mixing it up in the ropes and the darkened corners of the ring.

Eisenhower also lost his congressional majorities two years after taking office. And although Ike's nature was both more politically cooperative and more personally aloof than Clinton's, he won re-election handily and had that rarest of presidential phenomena: a highly successful second term. U.S. presidents, you see, are not on one-year schedules. It's more like a timetable that's 3 ½ years in duration. Independent voters will ultimately make up their minds about Barack Obama in the summer of 2012.

That is not to say that the 44^th president's success is written in the stars. The Democrats chose Obama knowing he was untested, hoping that he would overcome that inexperience and prove to be another John F. Kennedy. The loss this week of the Kennedy family's old Senate seat in Massachusetts showed that he could prove to be another Jimmy Carter instead. Likewise, he could be Ronald Reagan, and remake his party in his image. Or he could be George H.W. Bush, an honorable man swept from office after a single term because voters ultimately concluded he wasn't quite up to the challenges the nation faced.

One thing seems certain, though: History shows us that all of that is yet to be decided.