The Quandary for Obama

Take a look at this and see if it makes any sense.

According to Gallup, a year ago, in the wake of Obama’s election, a roughly equal number of voters expected him to pursue “mostly moderate” and “mostly liberal” policies. More recently, 54 percent say that he has governed from the left, with just 34 percent saying he’s done so from the center.

Do Americans even inhabit this universe? The Chronicler, for one, has done a thorough job documenting the Obama administration's centrist tendencies. For myself, while I wish he could be more liberal, I agree with 95% of the centrist moves Obama's made. But how has Fox News managed to convince Americans that Obama has been a liberal? Has the political pendulum swung that far to the right in this country?

Picture yourself as Obama looking at this news. It must be depressing. Liberals feel he hasn't been liberal enough. He didn't nationalize the banks, health care reform is too centrist. Meanwhile, Independents think he's been too liberal. The bank bailout, the auto bailout, the stimulus package, health care reform. It sounds like a lot of money to the uninfomed.

Nobody ever gets everything they want from a president. And in a wealthy world, both sides (liberal and centrist) would be happy enough with Obama's compromises. But presidential approval ratings have historically tracked closely with unemployment rates. In short, when things suck, nobody is happy with compromise. And then low approval ratings make it even harder for Obama to get things done. Its a negative feedback loop that leads to a difficult presidency.

The more I've thought about it, the timing of this severe recession has almost (but not entirely) doomed Obama. He would be in much better shape today if the economic bubble had burst in 2006 or 2007 so that Bush had to bail out the banks and take the blame for job losses (which would only have been fair, given the culpability of conservative economics to the financial crisis). Luckily for the Republicans they were able to keep the bubble going long enough for the effects of the recession to be pinned on a Democratic administration.

Think about FDR--he lucked out by beginning his presidency at the very bottom of the Depression in 1932. America had endured three years of the worst of the depression under the conservative president Hoover. When FDR came into office, things could not get any worse and they gradually began to improve. History's verdict was "Republicans bad, Democrats good." But how different would FDR have turned out if he had come into power in 1930, when things were still crashing? Would his liberal policies have been blamed for the rocketing unemployment rate?

Unfortunately for Obama, 2009 was the equivalent of 1930: the moment after a huge bubble burst. I guess those are the vagaries of timing upon which history turns.