OPINION:
Barack Obama’s presidency can be boiled down to four numbers: 9.1 percent unemployment, nearly $3 trillion in budget deficits, a sick economy barely growing at less than 1 percent, and a job approval rating that has fallen to below 40 percent.
The president can spin his excuses every which way from Sunday, zigzag from one policy to another or point the finger of blame at his predecessor or the Republicans who control half of Congress, but he can’t refute the failing grades on his report card.
The Gallup Poll’s daily tracking survey, which showed his job approval numbers sinking to 39 percent on Sunday, said he had lost support in just about every single political subgroup in the country.
Notably, just 30 percent of the independents who put him in office still approve of the job he is doing. His approval rates among others who helped elect him have fallen to just 49 percent of Hispanics, 48 percent of voters age 18 to 29, 44 percent of females, 36 percent of seniors and just 33 percent of whites.
His approval numbers among dispirited Democrats are nothing to write home about, either: 79 percent of liberal Democrats, 70 percent of moderate Democrats and 64 percent of conservative Democrats.
As he nears the end of the third year of his presidency, with the economy edging closer to another recession, he’s even beginning to lose support from one of his most loyal constituencies: the liberal news media.
In an unflattering political portrait of the president in The Washington Post on Sunday, headlined “The loner president,” White House reporter Scott Wilson reveals that Mr. Obama has little or no relationship with his party in Congress, rarely spends much time with supporters, has only a tiny circle of advisers around him, dislikes the art of politics and the glad-handing at the ropes in campaign events, and shuns legislative details that he leaves to others on Capitol Hill.
“Obama, in short, is a political loner who prefers policy over the people who make politics in this country work,” Mr. Wilson writes in a lengthy pre-election examination of the president.
The “legacy of his relationship, or lack thereof, with Democrats on the Hill remains a problem for his jobs plan - and by extension, his political future,” Mr. Wilson concludes.
On Monday, Post analyst Jennifer Rubin took her gloves off and pounded Mr. Obama for his policy failures, aloofness and indecisiveness.
“Certainly, Obama’s lack of attentiveness is widely known. His news conferences are generally an exercise in woe-is-me blame-mongering. He chastises rather than cajoles political allies and vilifies an ever-growing list of enemies,” Ms. Rubin writes.
“Legislative details hold no lure for him,” she adds. “If he is devoted to policy, he’s a failing student. Everywhere one looks - economic revival, Middle East policy, etc. - there are disarray and disaster. So it’s not that Obama prefers policy to politics; rather, he stinks at both.”
The latest jobless figures for September remained stuck at 9.1 percent (compared to 6.2 percent in September 2008) even though the economy produced 103,000 jobs. The national news media promoted the number as if it were the greatest thing since sliced bread, but half those jobs were the result of striking Verizon employees returning to work. One might call this Mr. Obama’s new math.
But the jobless number didn’t budge one iota because many discouraged unemployed people who had dropped out of the labor force began looking for work again.
According to the White House’s job projections in 2009, Mr. Obama’s $800 billion economic stimulus bill should have slashed the unemployment rate to 8 percent or less. But the president’s much-ballyhooed “summer of recovery” in 2010, when he insisted the economy “is running at a good clip,” never materialized.
The economy is weaker, and the real underemployment rate is getting worse. Discouraged jobless Americans who have given up looking for employment or had to settle reluctantly for part-time or temp work rose from 16.2 percent to 16.5 percent last month.
The number of out-of-work Americans who have been jobless for more than half a year increased by 208,000 to 6.2 million.
The recession that began in 2008 and shouldn’t have lasted more than two years has turned into a stubborn, full-blown national crisis that shows no signs of receding anytime soon under this administration’s impotent policies.
Mr. Obama, who’s in danger of losing his job, is desperately running around the country trying to convince the people who voted for him last time that the Republicans are to blame for all this because they are blocking his latest tax-and-spend jobs plan.
But a lot of vulnerable Senate Democrats who are up for re-election next year don’t like key parts of Mr. Obama’s plan. Like raising taxes in the midst of a recession, or the payroll tax cuts that are draining the badly depleted Social Security and Medicare funds, and the micromanaging tax breaks for small businesses but only if they hire long-term unemployed. Employers in their states say they can’t hire anyone, let alone the long-term jobless, until the economy begins growing and business improves.
Mr. Obama, unfortunately, doesn’t have a clue how to get the largest economy on the planet growing again. He’s in over his head.
Donald Lambro is a syndicated columnist and former chief political correspondent for The Washington Times.
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