Barack Obama has seen his approval rating free fall to historic levels for a first year president and it comes down to the fact that he lied to the independents with promises of hope and change, campaigning as a centrist, post-partisan unifier and all he gave them was far-left expedient political posturing.
Not only has he, in less than 12 months, turned the independents against him, he’s also energized the Conservative movement and alienated the kook-fringe left who claim he hasn’t been left enough (still troops in Iraq and Afghan, Gitmo not closed, rendition still in effect, no single payer health care or public option, etc)
This is what happens when the dreams of a liberal utopia are attempted in America. Extreme backlash from all sides.
Good piece today from a writer I have a lot of respect for, Michael Barone.
We’re seeing what happens when liberal dreams collide with American public opinion. It’s like what happens when a butterfly collides with the windshield of a speeding sport utility vehicle. Splat.
The liberal dreams may have seemed, on those nights in Invesco Field and Grant Park, as beautiful as a butterfly. But they are still subject to the merciless laws of political physics.
Eleven months ago, this did not seem inevitable. It was widely supposed that economic distress would increase America’s appetite for big-government measures to restrict carbon dioxide emissions and control the provision of health care. Especially when a young, dynamic president employed his oratorical gifts to transcend, as he put it, old ideological and partisan divisions.
[...]
“What’s really exceptional at this stage of Obama’s presidency,” writes Andrew Kohut, the Pew Research Center’s respected pollster, “is the extent to which the public has moved in a conservative direction on a range of issues. These trends have emanated as much from the middle of the electorate as from the highly energized conservative right. Even more notable, however, is the extent to which liberals appear to be dozing as the country has shifted on both economic and social issues.”
From which we can draw two conclusions. One is that economic distress does not move Americans to support more government. Rasmussen reports that 66 percent of Americans favor smaller government with fewer services and only 22 percent favor more services and higher taxes.
The second is that Obama’s persuasive powers are surprisingly weak. His advocacy seems to have moved Americans in the opposite of the intended direction.
Obama first came to national attention in 2004 by promising to heal partisan, ideological and racial divisions. Like the other two Democratic presidents elected in the last 40 years, he campaigned in the center and started off governing on the left. In Copenhagen and on Capitol Hill we are seeing the results. Splat. (Read the whole thing)
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