Attacked by critics from the left and right, the president can regain his popularity by imitating an illustrious predecessor
by Michael Crowley
When Barack Obama arrives in Boston this afternoon, he will be confronting a possible tragedy of Shakespearean proportions. This Tuesday, Massachusetts will hold a special election to fill the Senate seat that belonged to Senator Edward M Kennedy before he succumbed to cancer last August. Massachusetts is an overwhelmingly Democratic state, but the party’s heir apparent, attorney general Martha Coakley, appears at best tied with her little-known Republican challenger, state Senator Scott Brown.
A Coakley loss would be a nightmare for Democrats, not only for its symbolism, but because it would imperil the passage at long last of Obama’s signature healthcare reform bill. (Democrats have precisely enough votes now to pass the bill in the Senate and cannot afford to lose a single “yea”.) Hence the potential tragedy: the death of healthcare champion Ted Kennedy could conceivably lead to the historic measure’s bizarre demise. “If Scott Brown wins, it’ll kill the healthcare bill,” the Democratic Massachusetts Congressman Barney Frank declared on Friday.
Some of the blame lies with Coakley: she was slow to campaign in earnest, for instance, and recently scoffed at the notion of shaking voters’ hands outside Boston’s Fenway Park “in the cold”. But her woes also have to do with the deeper forces bedevilling Barack Obama as he completes his first year in office. Like Obama, Coakley finds herself caught between conservative anger and liberal disillusionment. Conservatives are energised by the notion that Obama is trying to impose “socialised medicine” and Brown is touting his candidacy as a chance to stop healthcare in its tracks. Liberals, meanwhile, are upset that the health bill isn’t bolder and that Obama is escalating the war in Afghanistan (which Coakley opposes).
As a result, it appears possible that a strong Republican turnout and a weak Democratic one will combine to hand Coakley – and, by extension, Obama himself – a reeling blow. Which is why Obama is making today’s last-ditch campaign stop in Boston.
Even if a healthcare debacle is averted, Obama won’t be in the clear. The national political currents that have shaped the Massachusetts showdown are sure to carry on well into 2010. Take the right wing: after healthcare, Obama’s upcoming agenda items seem sure to further inflame such populist-conservative passions. Next up could be a bill to address global warming, something the right denies is even a problem. There’s also been talk of a new push to reform the country’s immigration laws, a move that could grant amnesty to some illegal immigrants – political nitroglycerine on the nativist right.
Meanwhile, Sarah Palin enjoys the bestselling non-fiction book in America and will soon be peddling her views on the airwaves via Fox News, where she recently signed a contract to become a commentator. And a recent poll found that a plurality of voters would vote for a candidate running under the banner of the loosely organised and occasionally fanatical “Tea Party” movement before supporting either a Republican or a Democrat.
But Obama can’t simply take shelter under his party’s left wing. There is no room for him at that inn. The healthcare bill’s passage will come with outraged cries that Obama sold out his core supporters. Liberals like the former Democratic party chairman Howard Dean have argued that a health bill with no public option provision which forces private insurers to compete with the government is worse than no bill at all. Other prominent liberals, including the New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, are upset that Obama hasn’t forced Congress to inject more stimulus dollars into the economy; others complain he has yet to make good on his pledge to allow gays to serve openly in the military, and to shut down the Guantanamo Bay prison camp once and for all.
As for Obama’s surge of 30,000 more troops in Afghanistan, the powerful Democratic Appropriations Committee chairman David Obey speaks for many a liberal when he calls it “a fool’s errand”. It’s a stunning turn of events for a president who many progressives believed was their saviour and would usher in a new era of bold liberal activism.
At the moment, this grip appears treacherous indeed for Obama. The latest polling from Gallup shows him with a meagre 49% approval rating, with 45% of Americans disapproving of his performance, down from a 66-27 split in early May. But the middle can be a good place to be and Obama may yet escape the dreaded left-right pincer.
Consider the example of Bill Clinton. Two years into his presidency, Clinton appeared ruined. Republicans stampeded in the 1994 midterm elections to capture the House and Senate, leaving Clinton to argue for his own relevance. But Clinton understood that the Republicans had benefited from a public perception that he had lurched to the left on healthcare and gays in the military. Clinton began his comeback by forcefully taking on unsympathetic Republican rivals such as Newt Gingrich. But he also “triangulated”, to use the word made famous by his adviser, Dick Morris, against his party’s left wing. Clinton balanced the federal budget, signed a welfare reform bill and even famously declared in his 1995 State of the Union speech that “the era of big government is over”.
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