A year ago, Washington was preparing for an inaugural celebration unlike any before.
The projections that as many as 5 million celebrants would flood the city — more than triple the previous record — matched the expectations for the president-elect.
Barack Obama was about to become the first black president and do so in the midst of what many believed was a period of massive economic and political change.
Young, energetic and determinedly different from the unpopular president he was replacing, Obama and an enthusiastic media cast the transition not as the orderly transfer of power, but as a pivot point in history.
On Inauguration Day, NBC’s Tom Brokaw compared the atmosphere in Washington to that in Prague in 1989 when young dissidents swept the Communist regime from power.
Experts said the crowd was less than 1.5 million for Obama’s big day. A tremendous show of support, and an attendance record, but not a quantum leap beyond the 1.2 million who cheered Lyndon Johnson in 1965.
Outlandish expectations had made the remarkable seem disappointing.
But the exuberance of Obama’s supporters was understandable because the whole nation seemed smitten with the new president.
In an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll conducted a month after the inauguration, 68 percent of respondents had a positive view of Obama, and 60 percent thought he was doing a good job.
Republicans were flummoxed. As the president pushed his $787 billion stimulus package through Congress, GOP lawmakers went to great pains to explain that while they disagreed with the president’s plan, they supported him and liked him personally.
Obama responded by raising the stakes again, using a joint address to Congress in February to call for remaking the American health care system, strict limits on carbon emissions and a new public education system “from cradle to career.”
Even as the administration struggled to fill key Cabinet posts because of appointees’ tax troubles and tempers flared over Obama’s move to take over bankrupt car companies and failing banks, the president’s detractors dared not attack him directly.
The change came in May from an unexpected source: former Vice President Dick Cheney, perhaps the least popular figure in American politics at that moment.
Cheney had been getting attention for attacking Obama’s plan to import the inmates of the Guantanamo Bay prison. He was set to give another speech on the issue May 21 when the president scheduled an address on national security for the same day — a showdown Obama expected to win.
Obama may have been more popular, but the Democratic Congress seemed to side with Cheney, rebuffing every administration request for funding to close Guantanamo, a task now delayed until at least 2011.
It was a sign of trouble ahead.
Things were going badly in the Afghan war, despite a troop surge Obama initiated in March, and unemployment continued to rise beyond the levels projected by the administration in selling the stimulus plan.
On top of that, anxieties were mounting about Obama’s main priority for his first year in office: a health care overhaul. Public outrage over health care threatened to derail the plan in an already overwhelmed Congress.
Obama tried to break the slide with an unprecedented media blitz and another address to a joint session of Congress in September. And polls showed the full-court press worked, but only for a while. The limits of the power of presidential persuasion were made clear when the candidates for whom Obama campaigned in New Jersey and Virginia were routed in off-year elections.
Part of the reason Obama struggled to hold the public’s favor on domestic policy was his three-month review of his strategy for the Afghan war. During the process, hawks blasted Obama for ignoring the pleas of Gen. Stanley McChrystal for more troops. After he announced that he would fulfill McChrystal’s request, doves were irate that Obama was again escalating a war they wanted to see ended.
That tension was further illustrated by Obama’s acceptance of the Nobel Peace Prize, during a time of war. What should have been a triumph for any president was a mixed blessing for Obama, reflected by polls that showed most Americans felt he didn’t deserve the award.
As he closes the year, the NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll shows Obama with a 47 percent job approval rating and, more surprising, only a 50 percent personal popularity rating — a 6-point drop from November.
Democrats say eventual passage of a version of Obama’s health plan and a sustained, if anemic, recovery will help restore some of the glory from a year ago to Obama.
But Bill McInturff, the Republican half of the bipartisan team that conducts the NBC-Journal poll, said the sudden drop in personal popularity was an ominous sign.
“While the political class has been mesmerized by the drop in President Obama’s job approval, the more important finding in December has been a corresponding drop in his personal positive rating,” McInturff said.
At the start of the year, most Americans liked Obama personally but disagreed with his policies. At the end of the year, those numbers have come into alignment, but not in the way Obama or his supporters might have hoped.
Chris Stirewalt is the political editor of The Washington Examiner. He can be reached at [email protected].
