These words appeared in this newspaper under a headline reading “Obama is heading for a one-term presidency” less than two months after the president took the oath of office: “There won’t be a second Obama term if he doesn’t admit that, no matter how adroitly he wraps himself in Reaganesque rhetoric, Leviathan is no better suited for 2009 than it was in 1933 for FDR. …
“But that’s not the main reason Obama’s prospects for gaining a second term in 2012 are already fading faster than a Maine RINO can forget what being a Republican means. Obama is making himself the symbol of what’s wrong with Washington rather than being the agent of change in Washington.”
At that point in March 2009, Washington was awash in controversy over Obama’s economic stimulus program and dazzled by the spontaneous eruption of Tea Party protests across the nation.
Pretty much everything Obama has done since then — with the notable exception of killing Osama bin Laden — has strengthened the perception that the president who promised “hope and change” actually exemplifies everything that is wrong in the nation’s capital.
For a long time, Obama’s immense likability provided insulation against growing public anger about the policies and programs he and the Democratic majority that controlled the 111th Congress put in place.
But, thanks to the stimulus program’s failure, ramming through of Obamacare, and exploding federal spending and debt, even his personal appeal was insufficient to prevent stunning Republican off-year gubernatorial victories in Virginia and New Jersey in 2009, Republican Scott Brown’s shocking upset in January 2010 to capture Sen. Teddy Kennedy’s former Senate seat in Massachusetts, and the GOP onslaught in the November 2010 off-year congressional election that threw Nancy Pelosi out of the House speakership and sharply narrowed the Democrats’ hold on the Senate.
The GOP’s 2010 gains were even more dramatic at the state and local level, with 700-plus new Republican state legislators elected and nearly a dozen new Republican governors, including Wisconsin’s Scott Walker and Ohio’s John Kasich, who have since successfully gone on the offensive against the once-invincible public employee unions whose members’ compensation jeopardized state government financial integrity.
In the face of such obvious and sustained voter rejection, prudent politicians would moderate their positions and rhetoric, but Obama instead doubled down on the issue most central to protecting the Washington liberal establishment, federal taxes, spending and debt. It also happens to be the issue on which Obama is most out of step with America.
In the wake of the disastrous 2010 election, Obama adroitly worked a compromise with congressional Republicans on a two-year extension of the Bush tax cuts.
But in the months since then, he has grown progressively more intransigent that spending cuts not touch the vast majority of federal programs, even as taxes are hiked, tax credits closed and the national debt limit increased from its present $14.3 trillion.
Then in a well-publicized White House confrontation with House Majority Leader Eric Cantor this week, Obama dared Republicans to call his bluff and threatened that he’s “going to the American people with this.”
A raft of new public opinion surveys suggest that Republicans should tell Obama to go for it because he is on the wrong end of the debate. Ed Morrissey at Hot Air points to eight reasons why going to the people will likely provide “a rude awakening” for Obama:
• Gallup: Americans paying attention oppose debt ceiling increase almost 2-1
• CBS poll shows 69 percent opposed to a debt ceiling increase
• Poll: Majority support a balanced-budget amendment
• Poll shows more people concerned about national debt than national default
• Poll shows Americans getting more pessimistic on economy, want spending cuts
• Americans oppose raising debt ceiling by more than 2-1 in Gallup survey
• CBS poll shows Americans oppose debt ceiling hike 2-1
• Hill poll shows 62 percent opposed to raising the debt ceiling
These polls are perhaps shocking in the context of Obama’s multiple news conferences in recent weeks, careful White House staging of “negotiations” with congressional GOPers designed to put Obama in the best possible light, the liberal mainstream media’s desperately unbalanced reporting of the controversy, and the parallel propagandizing by the thousands of liberal nonprofits, foundations and activist groups.
In spite of all that, most Americans want federal spending and debt brought down and they don’t want federal taxes going up. By pushing an extreme liberal agenda that is wildly out of step with most Americans, Obama and his Democratic allies have only themselves to blame for this result.
Obama’s steely insistence on tax hikes — “eat your peas, America” — parallels his dramatic plunge from a narrow 43-40 lead over Gallup’s generic Republican nominee in May to trailing 47-39 in July.
One poll does not an election make, to be sure, but given all of these considerations, it’s hard not to see the 2012 presidential contest shaping up as an Anybody But Obama election.
Mark Tapscott is editorial page editor of The Washington Examiner.
