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Published
on TheHill.com...
The Left Turns on Obama
By Dick Morris
August 2,
2011
The
pathetic performance of President
Obama in the debt debate is showing the left how incompetent and weak a
leader
it selected. Many are wishing they had Hillary Clinton in the White
House
instead! Once the man has to move beyond a set teleprompter speech, he
is lost.
During the BP disaster, he showed what a poor administrator he is. And
now he
has belied any pretensions to legislative skill. He is the un-Lyndon
Johnson.
The
consequences of this
disillusionment will be profoundly felt in the 2012 election.
Republicans and
independents will vote against Obama with their hands. Democrats and
liberals
will do so with their feet -- by staying home. Turnout was the key to
Obama’s
2008 electoral majority. The vote among under-30 whites,
African-Americans and
Hispanics set new records. Obama won, after all, about the same share
of the
white vote -- in total -- that Gore did in 2000. He only won because
the young
white turnout offset defections by middle-aged and elderly whites,
black
turnout rose from 11 percent to 14 percent and Hispanic votes rose by
1.5
percentage points. Any diminution of the white-hot intensity of
enthusiasm that
animated his 2008 election will cost him dearly.
Compare
the performance of Bill
Clinton in the 1995-96 government budget crisis with that of Obama in
the
latest skirmish. In Clinton campaign tracking polls, the president’s
approval
rating rose from 40 percent in May 1995 to 54 percent in January 1996.
This
14-point increase has its opposite equivalent in Obama’s plunge from 55
percent
approval in May 2011 to 40 percent approval in late July in the Gallup
polling.
The one went up and the other went down by nearly identical amounts.
For
Clinton, the standoff was a chance
to show his strength. No Republican ever believed the president with a
reputation for wanting to please and waffling would ever stand up to
the GOP.
But Clinton did, day after day, hammering away at his position and
defending it
against all comers. Obama had no plan, and his positions shifted with
the hour.
First he wanted a clean debt-limit increase with no budgetary
attachments. Then
he would settle for cuts, but only minor ones. Then he signed on for
major cuts
as long as there were tax increases to go with them. Finally, he
abandoned it
all, asking only that the deal last until after the election so he
would not
have to go through this process again.
Clinton
reaped great credit with
independents and moderates for fashioning a third way between liberal
demands
for deficits and conservative cuts to Medicare. Obama’s attempts to
portray
himself as pushing a “balanced approach” proved laughable in view of
his
surrender at the end. And his deal-making to resolve the problem
resembled a
surrender far more than a compromise. He’s no Henry Clay.
Finally,
while Clinton earned the
respect of his party’s left wing by way of his confrontations with Newt
Gingrich, Obama has garnered only contempt from his colleagues for his
craven
inability to prevail despite holding a formidable array of cards in his
hand.
That
House Speaker John Boehner
(R-Ohio) polled lower than Obama during the debt talks is scant
comfort.
Boehner is not running for president. When Clinton prevailed in 1996,
it was
against Bob Dole, who was not only the Senate majority leader but also
his
opponent for reelection. Clinton and Dole were, indeed, locked in a
zero-sum
game. But it does Obama no good if Boehner’s ratings drop.
Now
Obama will have a devil of a time
replenishing the enthusiasm that led his march to victory in 2008. He
will
instead meet with the same tepid support from his base that doomed
Jimmy Carter
in 1980 and George H.W. Bush in 1992. His voters are discovering that
there is
no “there” there.
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