A central goal of Barack Obama’s presidency — restoring America’s trust in the power and effectiveness of the federal government — is slipping out of his reach.
Obama’s path to the White House was paved by selling himself as a transformational figure who would fundamentally change how Washington operates. Restoring confidence in government has been a frequent theme of the Obama presidency.
More than six years since he entered the Oval Office, the American public now has less faith than ever before in federal institutions to get big things done.
In his last act before the final curtain, Obama is banking that a barrage of executive actions will validate his defense of big-government fixes. But these seem just as likely to entrench a feeling that Washington ignores the wishes of the people.
Even White House officials admit that Obama has not met his own lofty benchmarks for redefining perceptions of the executive branch.
“I think the president would be the first to acknowledge that much of Washington is fundamentally broken and that much of what plagues this place will endure after he leaves office,” a senior administration official told the Washington Examiner. “That’s why he’s so focused on what he can do on his own. That’s progress, even if it’s not the wholesale change that I’m sure many people were hoping for.”
However, that argument is rather dicey for a president who promised a new era in Washington, not just incremental improvement in rallying government to cure societal ills, analysts said.
“It wasn’t realistic in the first place. When you pledge you’re going to do things you don’t know how to do, you can expect to disappoint folks,” said Charles Walcott, a Virginia Tech political scientist and an expert on the presidency. “He had a much too optimistic view of what his election meant. And he’s made mistakes — let’s face it.”
If anything, Obama’s posture since Republicans gained control of both chambers of Congress in November has reflected even less optimism from the White House that the president can find common ground with congressional leaders.
And the public’s outlook is equally pessimistic.
Pollsters point to a basic public rethink about the role of government.
For example, national media exit polls of House-level races compiled by Edison Research found that in 2008, 51 percent of respondents said government “should do more to solve problems,” compared to 43 percent who believed “it is doing too many things.”
Those numbers have flipped during the time since Obama took over the White House. In 2014, 54 percent said the government was taking on too much, while 41 percent argued that it needed to do more.
In the buildup to the 2014 midterms, Obama repeatedly polled lower than even President George W. Bush on questions of competency, due in large part to the brutal rollout of his healthcare law, mistrust stoked by the targeting of conservative groups by the Internal Revenue Service, the Department of Veterans Affairs scandal and revelations about National Security Agency surveillance techniques.
The November elections largely served as a referendum of the Obama presidency, with many voters saying they wanted a Republican Congress specifically to limit the reach of the president’s actions.
That shift, public opinion experts say, is damning proof that Obama has not improved the reputation of a sprawling federal bureaucracy.
“He has lost the argument that was his basic rationale for his 2008 candidacy: that the government should be doing more,” said Republican pollster David Winston. “If that was the whole reason he should be president, then he failed.”
When Obama entered office, the financial crisis hung over Washington and the appetite for government action seemed immense.
Now, as the economy is showing signs of recovery, a growing share of Americans are essentially telling the White House and Congress to get out of the way.
Obama’s approval ratings have since risen to the mid and high 40s in some surveys. But on issues of trust, Obama still has much work left to do.
A Gallup survey in September found that trust in the executive branch had fallen to 43 percent, the lowest mark of Obama’s White House tenure. The all-time low for that metric was 40 percent, just months before Richard Nixon resigned from office.
A Pew Research Center analysis released in November suggested that public trust in government under Obama has remained at near-historic lows, peaking at 25 percent in January 2009. For context, trust in the federal government as a whole sat at 36 percent in the immediate aftermath of Nixon’s resignation, Pew found.
White House officials counter that Republicans’ public marks are even lower than Obama’s.
The White House pointed to an AP-GfK poll released this week that said voters are more likely to trust Democrats than Republicans on economic issues, by a margin of 33 percent to 28 percent.
And they blame Republicans for the constant gridlock that spawned arguably the least productive Congress in American history.
“I think Republicans would welcome the president’s approval ratings right now,” quipped the senior administration official.
Still, Obama can’t escape blame, especially as he has appears to write off the prospect of pushing major legislation through Congress during the final quarter of his presidency, Republicans argued.
“Truth be told, he has no tools left,” Winston said of Obama trying to bolster public confidence in government through executive action. “He didn’t try to engage Republicans at all. He didn’t understand how to sustain a majority.”
