Revolt! Page 2
We’ll gladly give him a one-way ticket back home.
Let’s face it. Defeating an incumbent president, even an unpopular one, is not an easy task. A sitting president has an amazing arsenal of tools available to woo the voters that a challenger can never match. And, in fact, most presidents are reelected. Of the ten presidents since World War II, seven were reelected: Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, and George Bush 43. Only Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, and George Bush 41 were not.
But when a president loses badly in the Congressional elections after only two years in office, it becomes a lot harder for him to bounce back. Only Eisenhower and Clinton won a second term after losing control of Congress during their first midterm election. And, in Ike’s case, the magnitude of the swing in opposition seats was not very great and he personally remained a very popular and likable figure. In Bill Clinton’s case, he moved deliberately and significantly to the center and enthusiastically embraced conservative policies that attracted swing voters.
That’s not likely to happen with Obama. After the cataclysmic Congressional elections, he did not seem to have even considered a voluntary change in his political direction. And he won’t. When he finally realized that he did not have the support in Congress to limit the extension of the Bush tax cuts, he surrendered, while petulantly lashing out at the Republicans.
Obama is vulnerable and we can defeat him. To borrow his own words, “Yes, we can!”
Consider how far and how fast he has fallen. When he took office, he was riding high. His favorability and job approval were stratospheric. Now they have plunged sharply; each week seems to bring him to a new low!1
The Zogby poll shows Obama even lower with his approval dipping below 40%!2
What happened?
Obama reached the height of his surge in popularity after his victories in the early caucuses and primaries. In the later primaries, he mostly lost the large, industrial states like Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Ohio to Hillary, in part due to the Rev. Wright tapes. He won the nomination anyway because his early victories, many in sparsely populated caucus states, had given him enough delegates to prevail.
McCain had surged to a lead over Obama after the conventions, and the Democrat only moved ahead because of the sudden economic collapse and McCain’s inability to seize the moment by opposing TARP. So Obama was fading at the finish line.
Doubts about Obama surfaced right before the election in the Joe the Plumber flap, where he explicitly embraced income redistribution.
On taking office, he overpromised on what his stimulus package could deliver, claiming it would stop the recession and lower unemployment.
His health care bill was a vast overreach. And when he failed to sell it to the people, he pushed it anyway. Even when the most liberal state in the nation—Massachusetts—voted for a Republican senator, Scott Brown, to protest the proposal, he used parliamentary tricks to push it through anyway.
As unemployment soared up to nearly 10% and stayed there for his entire first two years as president, public patience wore thinner and thinner. More and more people began to realize that, at best, Obama had no clue as to what to do and that, at worst, his policies were causing things to get worse.
Obama’s takeover of GM and Chrysler illustrated the lengths he will go to socialize our economy. His vast expansion of federal regulatory powers over banks and his huge financial bailouts of the states underscored that he was a big-spending, big-government man, out of control.
The British Petroleum oil spill began to create an image of incompetence. As the facts of his late and tepid response came out, we began to suspect that he would rather spend his time using the spill to stick it to the oil companies than figuring out how to mitigate the environmental damage. As BP scrambled to contain the spill and Obama looked on passively, he seemed like a president out of touch and out of answers.
Terror attacks began again after a seven-year hiatus under Bush after 9/11. At Fort Hood, a gunman massacred our troops, and a terrorist was only seconds away from detonating a bomb in a plane over Detroit before alert passengers wrestled him to the ground. Mayhem was only narrowly averted in Times Square in the heart of New York City when a terrorist failed to set off his bomb amid a crowded street.
The war in Afghanistan grew hotter and seems to have no end in sight. This peace candidate has failed to end the war and has only escalated it.
Then came his “shellacking”3 at the polls on November 2, 2010. His losses showed the country how weak he was and how much his citizens disapproved of his presidency. When he caved in and backed the Republicans on extending the Bush tax cuts, voters gave him credit for compromise, but the affair reinforced his image of weakness.
Now it is up to us to finish the job.
FIRST ORDER OF BUSINESS: BARACK OBAMA
How do we defeat Obama?
There’s only one way: by running front and center against his deplorable policies and programs. Our message is very simple: Obama’s big picture for our country will bankrupt us and transform the America that we love into a superbureaucracy that controls every aspect of our lives and businesses. That’s his plan; that’s his passion; that’s his ideal.
It’s not ours. That’s why we have to stop him. It’s not too late. But we can’t waste any time. Starting today, we have a burning mission: to incessantly remind our fellow voters that Obama is the archetype of a zealous tax and spend liberal. That’s truly what he is. That’s truly what he believes in.
This is not simply a call to obstruct everything that Obama proposes. If, by chance, he suddenly introduces initiatives that make sense, we should support them. This is not a call for a knee-jerk opposition to everything he calls for.
It is, however, a call to systematically reverse his calamitous signature achievements, such as health care and deficit spending, and to stop him from any further disasters.
It’s important not to forget just how dangerous his ideas are. We need to remind voters about the real Obama. To do that, we need to repeatedly call attention to his history: the genuinely frightening implications of his health care “reform,” his commitment to class warfare and the redistribution of wealth, his nonstop plans to raise more and more taxes, his utter failure to create jobs, and his over-the-top spending. In short, we need to use his dismal record and his frightening delusions to beat him.
To do otherwise and run a campaign that attacks him personally would only help him win reelection. It might be tempting to some, but that kind of strategy would take us down a dangerous and futile road. We have to take the high road. Voters like Obama, even if they don’t believe that he is particularly competent. So personal attacks just won’t work.
Pollsters routinely rate presidents according to two different measures: personal favorability and job approval. The former measures the public’s opinion of the politician as a person, while the latter gauges how people feel he is doing his job as president.
Most modern presidents score better on personal favorability than on job approval. Americans like their presidents. So, at times, even though our economy may be falling apart or casualties in a foreign war may be mounting so high that we express disapproval of a president’s policies, we still like the guy.
Here’s an average of post–World War II presidents and their ratings compiled by Gallup. Notice how their personal favorability is usually higher than their job approval.
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COMPARISON OF FAVORABLE PERSONAL RATINGS AND JOB APPROVAL RATINGS OF PRESIDENTS: EISENHOWER TO BUSH
President: Eisenhower
Average Favorable Personal Rating: 84%
Average Favorable Job Approval Rating: 65%
President: Kennedy
Average Favorable Personal Rating: 88%
Average Favorable Job Approval Rating: 70%
President: Johnson
Average Favorable Personal Rating: 77%
Average Favorable Job Approval Rating: 55%
Average Favorable Personal Rating: 80%
Average Favorable Job Approval Rating: 49%
President: Ford
Average Favorable Personal Rating: 73%
Average Favorable Job Approval Rating: 47%
President: Carter
Average Favorable Personal Rating: 70%
Average Favorable Job Approval Rating: 45%
President: Reagan
Average Favorable Personal Rating: 70%
Average Favorable Job Approval Rating: 53%
President: George H. W. Bush
Average Favorable Personal Rating: 73%
Average Favorable Job Approval Rating: 61%
President: Clinton
Average Favorable Personal Rating: 56%
Average Favorable Job Approval Rating: 55%
President: George W. Bush
Average Favorable Personal Rating: 67%
Average Favorable Job Approval Rating: 68%
Source: Gallup, http://www.gallup.com/poll/8938/historical-favorability-ratings-presidents.aspx4
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Recently Bill Clinton and George W. Bush have had favorability and job approval ratings that were more equal. Clinton’s scandal with Monica Lewinsky and his impeachment diminished his popularity, while unhappiness about President Bush’s handling of Iraq and the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq slashed Bush 43rd’s previously high favorability ratings.
But Obama has picked up the old pattern of higher personal favorability than job approval. Because Americans genuinely admire Obama’s personal journey and because of what his election as president represents for America, Obama’s personal favorability has run much higher than his job approval. Pollster John Zogby says that the gap between them has averaged 7 to 8 points during his first two years in office.5
This means that in working to defeat Obama, we must be especially careful to take on the president, not the man. Our attacks must never go to his motivations, character, veracity, integrity, personal life, middle name, or intellect. That won’t work. Americans may wonder if Obama knows how to handle the economy, and most think his ideas about health care are cockeyed, but they still admire him personally. It’s important not to forget that.
Some may have come to feel that he is a liar and a faker. Even in that case, it would be best for those who do to keep their opinions to themselves and their eyes on the ball. We want to defeat him! It might feel temporarily good to criticize him personally, but those who do so are helping him. Those who criticize what he has done in office, his initiatives and his programs, are hurting him.
HOW TO BEAT OBAMA
To understand how to defeat Obama in 2012, it’s important to examine what brought his party down in 2010. There are three theories:
The first is the Gospel According to Obama, which claims that the Democrats lost because he failed to end the bitter partisan tone in Washington.
The president is fond of saying that he simply did not communicate his message well and that he was so intent on getting the policy right that he neglected to explain it adequately. “I neglected some things that matter a lot to people, and rightly so: maintaining a bipartisan tone in Washington…I’m going to redouble my efforts to go back to some of those first principles.”6
Of course, this apologia for the election defeat is pure self-serving nonsense. There’s no evidence that Obama didn’t tell us enough about health care or the bank bailouts. He did. The problem isn’t that we didn’t understand him, it’s that Americans fundamentally disagree with him. His tone or communications style is not the issue. In fact, most of us like his coolness, his calm and dispassionate reason. We find his speaking style attractive (even if he does have to drag a teleprompter everywhere he goes). And, when he gets going, we sometimes even forget how much we disagree with him and find ourselves attracted to his enthusiasm. Although MSNBC anchor Chris Matthews seems to be the only one who feels a tingle going up his leg when the president speaks.
But it’s not like we don’t understand him. We do.
We get it. But we don’t like it.
We don’t like partisan rancor, but if the alternative is to follow Obama’s misguided policies, we would rather hear the noise of debate in Washington than the sound of boots marching in lockstep in the wrong direction, as they did when ObamaCare passed through Congress.
There’s nothing that Obama could do to improve communications about that. Nothing at all.
Then there’s the Establishment Gospel, which posits that the Democrats lost simply because the economy was in the tank. According to this line of reasoning, the Congressional defeats were directly linked to the unemployment rate and slow—almost nonexistent—economic growth. With foreclosures and For Sale signs all around us, we are constantly reminded of how dire the economic situation has become. And it touches all of us. A McLaughlin & Associates poll reports that 84% of us know someone who has lost their job.7
The implication, of course, is that Obama’s success or failure is totally dependent on the economy’s improvement or decline. If the numbers get better, he’ll win. If not, he’ll be a one-term president. Under this theory, it’s out of our hands. It doesn’t matter how the campaigns go. If the Federal Reserve and the Treasury and the global economy pull us out of the recession, Obama is in for eight years.
But history doesn’t bear this argument out. Bush 41 lost in 1992 despite improving economic numbers. The recession ended in March of 1991—a year and a half before he was defeated,8 and the fourth quarter of 1992, when the ballots were counted, featured an astounding 4.3% growth rate.9 And, in 1994, a recovering economy did not save Clinton’s Democrats when they went down to massive defeat, losing both Congressional houses.
It takes time for good economic news to filter down to the voters. The economists may be euphoric, but the public barely notices when unemployment drops a bit or growth rises. It takes a while for people to see any change in their own lives and for the word to get around.
And things are so bad right now, even a modest improvement will still leave us in dire straits. If unemployment drops to, say, 7%, there won’t be any celebrations. To have the truly massive recovery that a president needs to buoy his chances for reelection, the turnaround must be long lasting and massive.
When Clinton was reelected in 1996, aided by a robust recovery, the reversal in our national fortunes had been going on for five years. An amazing 11.5 million new jobs10 had been created since he took office. That is the kind of economic performance a president needs to get a second term. A few good numbers or a couple of quarters of positive news didn’t do much. It was only a real economic sea change that helped to boost his fortunes.
What about Ronald Reagan, who also lost ground due to a bad economy, during the midterm elections of 1982, but was able to win two years later, proclaiming “It’s morning again in America”? But remember that Reagan’s reverses in the midterm elections of 1982 were comparatively minor. He lost only twenty-seven seats in the House and none in the Senate. Though he fell further behind in the House, the Republican Party kept control of the upper chamber. The recession, which ended in late 1982, was followed by a robust recovery, the sort Obama can only dream about. In 1983, economic growth was 4.5%, and in the reelection year of 1984 it soared to 7.2%. Obama might post numbers like these and cruise to reelection, but don’t bet on it.
Finally, there’s the Conservative Gospel, which correlates the 2010 Congressional losses to the fact that Americans fundamentally disagree with Obama’s policies. According to the Rasmussen Reports’ Daily Presidential Tracking Polls, 57% of American voters oppose his health care reform legislation and want it repealed, while only 39% oppose repeal.11 Americans think government spending has gotten too big and that the deficit is out of control. They are basically in sharp disagreement with their president.
That’s why the Democrats lost so dramatically, and that’s why the voters repudiated the president’s programs. Thi
s is the only explanation that fits the facts of the 2010 election. According to the McLaughlin Poll, there has been a marked shift to the right among the American people, and almost half now describe themselves as “conservative.”
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IDEOLOGY OF AMERICAN VOTERS
Conservative
Nov. 2008: 40%
Nov. 2010: 49%
Moderate
Nov. 2008: 35%
Nov. 2010: 28%
Liberal
Nov. 2008: 21%
Nov. 2010: 21%
Source: McLaughlin & Associates12
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Obama has made us conservative. We get it. He doesn’t.
So, to beat Obama, we must focus intently on his policies and programs.
Obama’s obvious weakness is his total failure to create jobs. At this writing, we have already lost 9 million of them since he took power. Next to Herbert Hoover, Barack Obama has the all-time worst jobs record of any president in history.
Republicans need to make the nation understand that Obama’s policies are holding our economy down. That is our mission for the next two years.
People need to realize that his threatened tax increases are deterring consumer spending. Americans are afraid to spend money when they don’t know whether their taxes will suddenly rise dramatically—both as individuals and as business owners.
We need to make people recognize that it is ObamaCare that has stopped job creation in the health care sector and raised insurance rates. His bank overregulation, particularly of community banks, is strangling loans to small businesses. The threat of a carbon tax and forced unionization is paralyzing manufacturing. Who can grow and expand with the federal government’s tax policy in limbo? What will be deductible? What will capital gains taxes be? Will rates go up? Will the ceiling on Social Security taxes be lifted? Will the deficit block new lending? Who knows? So who can plan? Who can add new jobs?