Tough lessons from Obama's first year
By Eugene Robinson
WashPost
Tuesday, January 19, 2010
President Obama begins his second year in the White House with such anemic approval ratings, you'd think he was another Ronald Reagan: Among recent presidents, only the Gipper had fallen so low in the esteem of voters at this stage of his presidency.
In the end, things worked out rather well for Reagan -- a landslide reelection, success in changing the course of the nation and the world, canonization by the Republican Party. In this context, the serenity of Obama's political advisers is understandable. It has been a tough year, and the president has had to make a host of decisions that he knew would be politically unpopular. If history is any guide, these early approval numbers say little about where Obama will stand politically in 2012, much less how he will rate at the end of his presidency. The White House is right not to panic.
But serenity isn't the same as complacency. There are important lessons from the past year that Obama and his team had better learn if he is to achieve his goal of being a "transformational" president like Reagan.
The first is that the "enthusiasm gap" matters, and it matters a lot. There is no way that a Democratic candidate for the Senate from Massachusetts, running to fill the seat that the late Ted Kennedy held for decades, should have anything but a cakewalk to victory. It's true that Martha Coakley ran a mediocre campaign and that Republican Scott Brown ran a very good one, but still, this is Massachusetts we're talking about. That Obama would have to fly in two days before the vote and stump for Coakley and the Democrats' filibuster-proof majority was absurd.
(More here.)
WashPost
Tuesday, January 19, 2010
President Obama begins his second year in the White House with such anemic approval ratings, you'd think he was another Ronald Reagan: Among recent presidents, only the Gipper had fallen so low in the esteem of voters at this stage of his presidency.
In the end, things worked out rather well for Reagan -- a landslide reelection, success in changing the course of the nation and the world, canonization by the Republican Party. In this context, the serenity of Obama's political advisers is understandable. It has been a tough year, and the president has had to make a host of decisions that he knew would be politically unpopular. If history is any guide, these early approval numbers say little about where Obama will stand politically in 2012, much less how he will rate at the end of his presidency. The White House is right not to panic.
But serenity isn't the same as complacency. There are important lessons from the past year that Obama and his team had better learn if he is to achieve his goal of being a "transformational" president like Reagan.
The first is that the "enthusiasm gap" matters, and it matters a lot. There is no way that a Democratic candidate for the Senate from Massachusetts, running to fill the seat that the late Ted Kennedy held for decades, should have anything but a cakewalk to victory. It's true that Martha Coakley ran a mediocre campaign and that Republican Scott Brown ran a very good one, but still, this is Massachusetts we're talking about. That Obama would have to fly in two days before the vote and stump for Coakley and the Democrats' filibuster-proof majority was absurd.
(More here.)
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