Barack Obama’s crusade against political apathy, which helped drive voters to the polls in 2008, is backfiring four years later as Americans grow increasingly frustrated with the sputtering economy and gridlock in Washington.
Several weeks after he announced his bid for the presidency in 2007, Obama ordered a mostly black crowd in Selma, Ala., to “get off the couch” because “we have too many children in poverty in this country and everybody should be ashamed.”
“Take off your bedroom slippers,” Obama shouted. “Put on your marching shoes. Go do some politics. Change this country!”
When he criticized Americans’ materialism and said younger generations have come to believe they don’t “have to make as many sacrifices” as the generations that preceded them, the crowds cheered him.
Back then, Americans — numbed by years of war and anxious about a lingering recession — felt inspired by Obama’s call to action. Back then, Obama was still a community organizer, not a Washington insider even though he was already serving in the Senate.
He told them change can’t just come from Washington, that Americans must step up and get involved in bettering their communities, and they listened.
Four years later, “Barack Obama now looks like every other politician,” said Craig Smith, former speechwriter for President Ford and writing consultant for former President George H. W. Bush.
A growing number of Obama’s 2008 supporters now feel the president has failed them, analysts said. Americans’ trust in the political system has never been lower and more voters than ever feel their voices aren’t being heard in Washington. When the president once again admonished a predominantly black audience to “put on [their] marching shoes” in September, members of the Congressional Black Caucus reacted angrily.
Obama’s call to action, though rhetorically no different from his first campaign, is now beginning to sound like he’s trying to shift blame onto the public for his own shortcomings, said Kevin Coe, an expert on presidential rhetoric at the University of Arizona
“It’s a very risky message,” he said. “The GOP knows that and they are hammering him for it. If it looks like he might be trying to blame [the public], they will be up in arms.”
Republican presidential candidates seized on Obama’s recent remarks that America has grown “lazy” in trying to attract foreign investments.
“Can you believe that?” Texas Gov. Rick Perry says in an ad attacking Obama’s remarks. “That’s what our president thinks is wrong with America? That Americans are lazy? That’s pathetic.”
When leading a nation that’s down on its luck, presidents must strike a careful balance between instilling hope in the American people and issuing stern warnings for the nation’s future, Smith said.
President Carter erred on the side of sternness when in a 1979 speech he famously bemoaned a “crisis of confidence” in America only to have Republican Ronald Reagan turn that speech against him by professing a crisis of leadership.
Republicans are now trying the same strategy on Obama, Coe said.
“The way Obama’s term has gone, he’s in a difficult position to offer stern warnings,” Coe said. “He is probably in a spot now where cheerleading is going to be more beneficial to him than any stern warning could be.”
