By BRIAN HOWEY
INDIANAPOLIS — We are not seeing any “1.19.13” bumper stickers — yet — but at the end of President Obama’s first year at the White House, he is receiving a stinging rebuke from the most liberal state in the union with the election of Republican Scott Brown to the Senate.
It closed an absolutely wild year and prompted me to go back and look at what I said as Obama entered the presidency. I predicted that given the array of problems Obama inherited when he entered the White House, the deck was stacked against him. I said his approval rating would probably be in the 40th percentile by November 2009. There were too many “damned-if-you-do; damned-if-you-don’t” scenarios.
And here we are! Do you pull out of Afghanistan and take heat as a war wimp soft on terror, or push forward with a surge? On that one, Obama committed troops to what appears to be a quagmire, only to find the next terror attack attempt emanating from Yemen, the new al-Qaida redoubt.
Do you let General Motors and Chrysler liquidate? If you do, the 10 percent jobless rate surges to 12 to 15 percent as the rest of the auto sector collapses. The American manufacturing base — a bare 12 percent of the economy — erodes further. On this one, Obama rejected two GM and Chrysler restructuring plans, forced them into an accelerated bankruptcy, and GM plans to repay its TARP funds by June. Chrysler is still a precarious basket case.
What do you do with Wall Street, the true benefactor of the biggest political payoff in U.S. history with $780 billion at the end of the Bush presidency? Here, Obama has made headlines docking executive bonuses and is now talking about a tax to regain the TARP funds, estranging him from 2008 supporter Warren Buffett. But little has been done structurally to keep the barons from doing the exact same things they did leading up to that meltdown. Here it appears Americans will be condemned to repeat history, though Obama is tagged as the “socialist” while Bush is not. Go figure.
The stimulus? It’s fueling the Tea Party movement. Republicans lash out at the stimulus, but here in Indiana, it bailed the state out and kept severe education cuts temporarily at bay. Without the Obama stimulus, we would be raising taxes and shutting down services. Some economists don’t believe the stimulus was enough and others are outraged that Pelosi and Reid back-loaded it for political advantage later this year. With the jobless rate at 10 percent, I can hear James Carville’s wicked voice: “It’s the economy stupid.”
Energy? We had virtually no energy policy during the Bush-Cheney years. Obama’s efforts to increase CAFE standards and incentives to the electric car sector appears to be paying off, particularly here in Indiana as EnerDel grows and Th!nk comes to the state. In a normal year, this would have been a major achievement. In the year of Obama, it’s almost an afterthought.
Education? I remember riding back from Kokomo with Gov. Daniels in the fall of ‘08 as he contemplated a potential “President Obama” and said that if he had the guts, he could reshape American education in a Nixon-goes-to-China type scenario. On this front, Obama and Daniels are speaking from a similar script. Daniels and Supt. Tony Bennett have embraced the Race to the Top.
Health care? Now we know why the White House was pressing for the reforms to pass the House last July before the August recess. When they didn’t, the Guns of August appeared, watering the tree of liberty with the blood of patriots and young presidents. This is the proverbial snowball in hell that grew into the ballot box shots in Lexington on Tuesday. Republicans like Sen. Lugar counseled Obama to concentrate on the economy and take an incremental approach. Such counsel fell on deaf ears, even for Obama who used Lugar as a campaign example of consensus building.
You can understand how Obama made the decision to use his political capital early, forge historic reforms and hope that good public policy nourishes his reelection three years hence. Today, it stands in shambles. Obama vowed during countless Indiana campaign appearances that he would reach out to Republicans. It was a half-hearted effort on both sides. Leaving the details to the Congressional liberal leaders has provoked a vigorous backlash.
The deficits? Whew! This just makes folks angry, particularly Republicans and Sen. Bayh. The $1.4 trillion deficit is staggering. But give Obama credit for at least putting everything on the ledger; as opposed to the good old Bush-Cheney days where about a trillion dollars spent on two wars weren’t counted.
So, we’re looking at a one-term president, right? Not so fast. President Clinton lost the health reforms in 1993 and Congress in 1994. Two years later, he had a relatively easy reelection victory over Bob Dole. The problem for Republicans is they don’t even have presidential timber as credible as Bob Dole right now.
The odds were so stacked against President Obama and are even more so today. We just can’t wait to get the Republicans back in control so they keep a lid on things.
Howey publishes at www.howeypolitics.com
