John Judis is a very good writer at a very good liberal magazine, The New Republic, which is brimming with thoughtful contributors rather than hysterical polemicists. (Well, mostly.) So when Judis decided to tackle the notion that Barack Obama’s presidency is starting to resemble that of Jimmy Carter’s, I expected an intellectually honest look at the question, and was not disappointed.

Judis could not deny the obvious similarities and still look at himself in the mirror, so he plays it straight and acknowledges what is plain for anyone to see – that Obama’s presidency is imploding politically, even if you don’t agree that it’s been a disaster substantively (which Judis does not).

But Judis is still a liberal, so he characteristically misdiagnoses the real cause of Obama’s problem. In Judis’s mind, Obama is in trouble because, like Carter, he has failed to turn a moment of national crisis into a platform for effective political populism:

In the United States, politics pivots around the allegiance of the middle class, even as its identity has changed from yeoman farmers and mechanics to store clerks, office workers, x-ray technicians, and small business owners. They are, in Bill Clinton’s words, “those who work hard and play by the rules.” They are the central characters in a populist rhetoric that goes back to the early republic. It depicts the middle class as embattled and threatened either from forces below (impoverished immigrants, welfare cheaters, ghetto rioters) or above (Wall Street speculators, state bureaucrats, K Street lobbyists). Populism can be embraced by Glenn Beck or Tom Harkin. It is intrinsically neither left-wing nor right-wing.

Politicians, such as Franklin Roosevelt or Ronald Reagan, who found a way of using populism’s appeal during downturns have enjoyed success, while those who have spurned it have suffered accordingly. If, in circumstances like the present one, you don’t develop a populist politics, your adversaries will use populism to define you as an enemy of the people. That’s what Carter discovered during the stagflation of the late ’70s. And that’s what has happened in the last 20 months of the Great Recession to Barack Obama and to the Democratic Party he leads.

Actually, Judis may be half right. It is certainly true that Obama has not won the affection of the middle class. Indeed, it has slipped much farther from his grasp than when he first took office.

But this is not because Obama has done a poor job of perpetrating populism. It is because he has not, from the very beginning, governed with the consent of the governed.

This is what happens to politicians who are intentionally disingenuous about their real agenda in order to get elected. Obama did not promise on the campaign trail that he would explode the deficit to over $1.5 trillion, with designs on keeping it north of $1 trillion for a decade. He did not promise a behemoth of a health care bill that would pass over the vociferous objections of almost the entire country. He did not promise a weak, confused foreign policy. He did not promise managerial incompetence and indifference in the face of a looming fiscal disaster. He did not say, “When banks repay TARP funds with interest, I will turn around and spend the money on something else instead of returning it to the Treasury.”

Had he done so, Sarah Palin would now be vice president.

We know from recent elections that about 40 percent of the electorate will vote Republican no matter what, and another 40 percent will vote Democratic no matter what. You win by getting a majority of the remaining 20 percent. That means Obama got his 52-plus percent of the popular vote by winning over about 60 percent of independent voters – by convincing them he was a smart, competent, thoughtful, open-minded, post-partisan, visionary leader.

Now that it is obvious Obama is none of those things, most of that same 60 percent of independents feels like it got sold a bill of goods, and Obama’s approval rating has sunk to 42 percent.

This is not because of Obama’s political strategy. It is because of his governing priorities. He chose to spend a year chasing the Democrats’ dream of socialized health care while unemployment soared. He chose to pour $862 billion into a rathole on the promise that it would keep unemployment below 8 percent, which it of course did not.

Obama is not in political trouble because he suddenly became a bad politician. Obama is a great politician. He’s in trouble because he’s a bad president,  so horrifically bad that no amount of political skill – not even his, which is considerable – can cover it up.

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9 Responses to “Welcome back, Carter: Obama’s problem is not his political strategy, it’s that he’s a bad president”