President Obama’s political team got some good news and some bad news at the start of December. The bad news is that Obama’s net approval rating, which had stabilized after a summer slide, hit an abrupt downdraft that sent his approval into negative territory for the first time. As I am writing this, on Monday, 7 December, the polling average shows 47.8 percent approving to 48.4 percent disapproving of his job performance, a small but symbolically weighty margin.
The good news is that the US jobless rate also took an unexpected dip, from 10.2 percent to 10.0 percent. New unemployment claims fell so sharply that more than one observer took the figure (11,000 lost jobs), as a typo, since about 100,000 had been expected. The human dimension of this improvement is obvious enough, but it may also be the key to Obama’s and Congressional Democrats’ political fortunes next fall.
The US political media, which must constantly develop new story lines, endlessly belabor their analysis of presidents’ ups and downs, but especially in tough times the main driving engine is the job market. Obama and the Democrats now ‘own’ the economy. They can assert (justly, in my view) that the economy was driven into the ditch under the Republicans. But voters will not be impressed unless Obama and Democrats are making visible progress in getting it back out of the ditch.
If the jobless rate is still near 10 percent next summer, Congressional Democrats can anticipate a bleak fall election. (Voters tend to dismiss last-minute good news.) If, on the other hand, the job market improves substantially, Republican hopes of another upheaval election in 2010 may be dashed.
Democrats will probably lose seats – after large gains in both in 2006 and 2008 they are defending many congressional seats in Republican-leaning territory. In an improving job market, however, they might lose only a dozen or so House seats, retaining a hefty majority. (Senate races are more idiosyncratic, and only a third of Senate seats are at stake in 2010.)
But will the job market improve enough to matter? Conventional wisdom expects a ‘jobless recovery,” with unemployment remaining high for another year or more, and even then falling only gradually. There are a handful of more positive indicators; manufacturing jobs, which usually lag overall job growth, have picked up. Steep slides often produce steep rebounds. And as a meta observation, conventional wisdom tends to be a lagging indicator, always projecting the present into the future.
Other factors will play a role. The healthcare reform bill now being worked over in the Senate is not particularly popular – about 40 percent favoring it, 50 percent opposed – but much of this is a consequence of the public Congressional sausage making process. Nothing is more calculated to turn off voters, especially independents, the party of the annoyed. On the flip side, passing it will make Congress look effective simply because something will have been done, not just wrangled over.
One thing that US liberals (i.e. center-leftists) hoped for after Obama’s early success in passing a stimulus package, and that I anticipated, has not come to pass. As liberal blogger Steve Benin ruefully admits, the US remains a center-right nation in one crucial respect, lack of confidence in large government initiatives.
In hindsight this should be the least of surprises, at least at this point. Until (and unless) the job market revives, the public sees few visible signs that Obama’s policies have been effective, and so has little reason to revise its skepticism. But if the job market does come back, liberals will have a success to point to, and can expect to be rewarded ideologically as well as in their immediate electoral prospects.
Afghanistan, and international affairs in general, may not play much of a role in shaping those prospects. Obama’s Afghanistan speech was a disappointment to many of his strongest supporters. It disappointed me as well. Obama did not shine the light I hoped for onto the murky complexities of this war. (Has the Taliban become in some way a Pashtun ‘national’ movement? And what are our interests if it has, or has not?)
That said, the reaction from the liberal blogosphere has been unhappy but largely subdued. Afghanistan certainly will not generate any enthusiasm from Obama’s political base, but by itself it will not alienate his base. In spite of its misgivings on the war, and associated issues such as civil liberties, the state of the Democratic base is discouraged rather than alienated. An improving job market, and success in passing a health bill, will go far to raise its spirits.
But the state of the US economy, and primarily the job market, remains the dominating force in US politics. That is why, in spite of the international focus of The European Courier, my columns here have been so relentlessly domestic in their focus. Even with two wars ongoing, world affairs have largely fallen off the US political radar in the past year – that is, since the Great Recession took hold. This could change overnight, but for now the drivers of US politics remain domestic.
