Then came the debt-ceiling debates of July and August, which seemed to crystallize Obama’s vulnerabilities in a way that even the Democrats’ midterm disaster of 2010 did not. It’s probably because he handled the situation so poorly, simultaneously managing to annoy his base, frustrate swing voters, concede a major policy victory to Republicans and — through the fear imported into the market by the brinksmanship in Congress and the credit-rating downgrade that followed — further imperil the economic recovery. On Aug. 12, a week and a half after the debate ended in Congress, Obama’s stock on Intrade, a popular political betting market, dipped below 50 percent for the first time. It has hovered just below the 50 percent threshold, usually at about 48 percent, ever since.
Obama has gone from a modest favorite to win re-election to, probably, a slight underdog. Let’s not oversell this. A couple of months of solid jobs reports, or the selection of a poor Republican opponent, would suffice to make him the favorite again.
Nevertheless, this is an unusual circumstance. Roosevelt, Eisenhower, Nixon, Reagan, Clinton and both Bushes all looked like the favorite to win a year in advance of their re-election battles, either having strong approval ratings or good-enough ones accompanied by robust economic numbers. When we look at the last eight elected presidents, only Carter faced a situation worse than Obama’s: approval ratings in the low 30s rather than low 40s, the likelihood rather than the mere possibility of a recession, a primary challenge rather than a clear path to renomination and a crisis in Iran rather than a string of foreign-policy victories.
The other seven had stronger fundamentals heading into the election year. This includes the elder Bush, who lost despite an extremely high approval rating and a disarrayed Democratic field (Mario Cuomo and others skipped the race at a time when Bush appeared unbeatable). It also includes Reagan and Clinton, who had grave problems early in their terms but who saw their numbers tick upward at the very moment in their presidencies that Obama’s have continued to slide. None of this is news to the White House. Following the debt-ceiling debate, Obama’s strategists started comparing their boss with the original comeback kid, Harry Truman — an implicit concession that the president will most likely fight 2012 from behind.
The fundamental flaw with much of what passes for political analysis is the tendency to think small. I blame soccer moms for this. Not the moms themselves — or their more rough-and-tumble companions from four years later, Nascar dads — but the narrow worldview that these demographic labels represent. The sophomoric strategist thinks he can slice the American electorate into a million little pieces and make it more than the sum of its parts. The smart one recognizes our common bonds.
A recent example of the flawed type of thinking came in September, after Democrats lost a special election to fill Anthony Weiner’s old seat in a Brooklyn district with a heavy concentration of Orthodox Jewish voters. There was much commentary about Obama’s popularity among Jewish Americans and about what this could mean — most importantly for his prospects in Florida.
Obama does indeed have a “Jewish problem.” Polls find that his standing among Jews has deteriorated: only about 54 percent of them approved of his performance in the most recent Gallup survey. But this is to be expected when a president has a 40-something approval rating. He also has a Hispanic problem and a problem among the white working class. He has a problem in Ohio and a problem in Florida and a problem in New Hampshire. He even has, to a mild extent, an African-American problem: Obama’s approval ratings among black voters are still high, but down to about 80 percent from 90 percent.
All of these, however, are symptoms of Obama’s larger problems, a set of three fundamental misgivings shared by much of the American electorate.
Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=32357ffd05251e8549df41597a5639cf