Portrait of Konrad Yakabuski, the Globe and Mail's new Washington correspondent.Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail
Lately, the American political academy has been consumed by the so-called "Obama paradox." Despite racking up a string of major legislative successes - on health-care reform, Wall Street regulation and, just on Thursday, extended benefits for the unemployed - the President's approval rating just keeps sinking. Any more "success," and Barack Obama could soon make even George W. Bush look popular.
A recent ranking by 238 top scholars pegged Mr. Obama as the 15th best president out of the 43 men who have held the office - surpassing the likes of Ronald Reagan (18th) and Lyndon Johnson (16th). Yet his approval rating fell to an unenviable low of 44 per cent in the July 21 Quinnipiac University poll, one of the most rigorous in the field.
Fully 48 per cent of Americans, Quinnipiac noted, now say Mr. Obama does not deserve to be re-elected in 2012. Only 40 per cent would give him a second term. The President's favourability rating, according to a Gallup survey out this week, is now only seven percentage points above that of Mr. Bush. Ouch. Bill and Hillary Clinton stand head and shoulders above Mr. Obama in public esteem. That's like a slap to both sides of the face.
One common explanation for Mr. Obama's paradoxical standing is that it is no paradox at all. The popularity of American presidents is always and everywhere an economic phenomenon. With unemployment still stuck at 9.5 per cent and Americans unusually fearful for their financial security, unfulfilled promises of hope and change inevitably start sounding hollow.
The White House made a fateful miscalculation by failing to portray the President as all-consumed with turning around the economy. Instead, Mr. Obama has often come across as caring more about legacy items like health-care reform (fun for historians, but not exactly a vote-getter) than about creating jobs in the here and now. Both are important. But Mr. Obama's priorities are, in the eyes of voters, sorely out of order.
If the President has two years and some to rebuild his popularity, Americans will get an early opportunity to express their discontent with him in November's midterm congressional elections. And with exactly 100 days left to go before the Nov. 2 vote - when all 435 seats in the House of Representatives and 37 of 100 Senate seats are being contested - the situation is looking grim for the President's party. Democrats may need divine intervention to hold on to their majority in the House. And Republicans are increasingly confident they can win back the Senate, too.
It is an understatement to say that, if the Democrats lose one or both houses, the second half of Mr. Obama's first term will not look the same as the first half.
Many pundits think that might be good for him. But that is no consolation to the Democratic members of Congress who will lose this fall. They went to bat to advance the President's agenda expecting, if not gratitude, at least an effort from the White House to save their seats. Instead, they have the White House press secretary telling Meet the Press that "there's no doubt there's enough seats in play that could cause Republicans to gain control."
That utterance understandably left House Speaker Nancy Pelosi fuming. "I don't know who this guy is. I've never met him before. And he's saying we're going to lose the House," she reportedly told her caucus. Being dead to Nancy Pelosi is not a fate to be wished upon anyone. Luckily, the newspaper Politico reported this week, the White House has reassured House Democrats that it is "not actively sabotaging" their campaigns.
Well, that's something, at least. The White House insists the midterms are not a referendum on the President. Except that they almost always are. The particularities of local races are important (more on that later) but countless studies of U.S. elections suggest that the swing voters who most determine outcomes only care about one thing, stupid.
THE BEST PREDICTOR?
Political scientists have tested different economic variables to determine the best predictor of election outcomes. It turns out it's not necessarily the unemployment rate and - Tea Partiers notwithstanding - it's definitely not the size of the deficit. No, the variable that most closely correlates with U.S. election results is the change in real disposable income during the previous year. In May, the year-over-year figure was negative. Any way you slice it, Democratic heads will be in the guillotine this fall.
How many is quite another matter. If the economic reductionists are to be believed, Democratic candidates in swing districts and states can forget the election signs, scrap the speeches, save the unconscionable sums of money they spend on their campaigns and, most of all, spare voters those endless and unseemly negative TV ads
Of course, not even ivory tower elites entirely believe their own research. Campaigns matter, and the economy is not everything. Consider 1966. By all accounts, it should have been a slam dunk for the Democrats. The economy was booming. And Mr. Johnson's Great Society agenda - which included passage of the Civil Rights Act and the creation of Medicare - had moved through Congress. The Democrats still got whipped. Race riots and Vietnam War protests meant that no amount of economic good news could compensate for the social chaos.
Of course, Democrats had racked up such a huge victory in 1964 that the loss of 48 House and three Senate seats hardly put a dent in their massive congressional majorities. And this brings us to another critical point: Not since the 1970s have Americans consistently trusted the President's party to control Congress. One-party rule was the norm for the first three quarters of the 20th century. Teddy Roosevelt (a Republican) and Franklin Roosevelt (a Democrat) could rely on mammoth majorities in the legislative branch. Now, one-party rule is a rare exception.
One reason is that public confidence in both the presidency and Congress has reached scornful lows in recent decades. If Mr. Obama's election seemed to revive the institution's standing, it does not appear to have been a lasting phenomenon. Trust in the presidency has sunk to 36 per cent, according to the latest Gallup poll. That would look appalling were it not for Congress's record low 11-per-cent confidence rating. Americans now trust their banks, health maintenance organizations and even newspapers more than they trust their elected representatives on Capitol Hill.
Under the circumstances, having a Democrat in the White House will make it harder for the party's congressional candidates this fall. The question then becomes whether 2010 will look more like 1994 or 1982.
Two years into Mr. Clinton's presidency, in 1994, the economy was clearly recovering from a tough (but hardly historic) recession. Incomes were rising and the country again had a bounce to its step. But Mr. Clinton rubbed conservative America, and independent voters, the wrong way. The Democrats lost 54 House seats and eight in the Senate, handing control of Congress to the Republicans for the first time in four decades.
In 1982, when unemployment was even higher than it is now, Mr. Reagan's personality and laser-focus on the economy mitigated what should have been (based on forecasting models) a historic reversal for Republicans. By the time of the election, Mr. Reagan had made no fewer than six Oval Office addresses to the nation on the economy alone. (Mr. Obama has made one so far, but it was on the oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico.) Republican losses in the House were limited to 26 seats; in the Senate, it was a draw.
AN UNCOMMON KNACK
Republicans need a net gain of around 40 seats this fall to take control of the House and 10 to win the Senate. Given the state of the economy and Mr. Obama's below-50 approval rating, both of those goals should be eminently achievable, even if the lift is much heavier in the upper house.
Still, Republicans in this election have shown an uncommon knack for self-immolation. Unusually competitive GOP primary races drained candidates of money. Hard-to-elect Tea Party-backed candidates prevailed in scores of races. And even when they didn't, they forced the winner to move far to the right, leaving their Democratic opponents with plenty of incendiary material from which to build damaging (to Republicans) campaign ads.
What should have been easy Republican pickups in the Nevada and Kentucky Senate contests are now toss-ups, with Democrats clearly gaining the momentum. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid should be toast in Nevada, which has the highest unemployment rate in the country at 14.2 per cent. But Tea Party diva Sharron Angle, who compares her mission to that of Moses, Paul and Jesus himself, is making the front-runner she beat in the GOP primary (the one who mused that previous generations of Americans were on to something when they offered chickens in exchange for health care) look progressive.
In Kentucky, the nominally Republican (and selectively libertarian) Rand Paul, who considers it "un-American" for the President to criticize BP and thinks the Civil Rights Act went too far by forcing even private businesses to serve blacks, has seen his 20-plus percentage-point lead in the polls shrink to nearly nothing. Just wait until agriculture-dependent Kentuckians hear what he has to say about farm subsidies.
If Republicans do manage to take even one house of Congress this fall, that old saying about elections being lost rather than won may never ring as true.