In pundit circles, the hot talking point of the past couple of months is that President Obama may be spared defeat because things have been bad for so long that Americans may view the country’s parlous condition as “the new normal.”
This is an honest effort to make sense of polling data that are hard to reconcile with what we know about voters in the past and their attitudes toward sitting presidents during economic woes.
No postwar president has been re-elected with unemployment above 7.4 percent; the unemployment rate is now 8.1 percent. No president has been re-elected with a significant majority of Americans saying the country is on the wrong track; that number’s between three-fifths and two-thirds of all Americans. No president’s been re-elected with the Conference Board’s Consumer Confidence Index below 90; it’s hovering around 70.
Most important, no president has been re-elected with a job-approval rating below 50 percent; as of yesterday, the Real Clear Politics poll of polls had Obama just below 49 percent.
By those lights, Obama should be finished, and many (yes, that includes me) assumed he would be by now. But he isn’t. He leads by a couple of points in the national polls. Surely there must be an explanation for it, and the “new normal” theory seems as good an explanation as any.
Except that logic dictates Obama can’t have it both ways. If he’s not blamed for bad news that’s been around a few years, it seems unlikely he stands to gain much from what little good news he has to trumpet during his presidency.
For instance, the signature achievement of Obama’s presidency abroad was giving the go-ahead for the daring operation that led to the killing of Osama bin Laden. It is surely responsible (along with the simple fact that he is the president, which always helps) for Obama’s lead in the polls on foreign policy.
But the bin Laden killing was 17 months ago. By comparison, the first Gulf War ended in March 1991 with the elder George Bush basking in the highest approval rating ever in polling history: 91 percent. Twenty months later, Bush Sr. won a scant 38 percent of the vote and lost the presidency to Bill Clinton. So there’s a history of voters shrugging off such success.
We’re told that the president might be doing well in Ohio and Michigan because voters in those states are happy with the partial nationalization of two of the Big Three automakers in 2009. Polling suggests this is the case. But that people say they approve doesn’t tell you how deeply they approve, or how passionately they feel about it.
And of course the president talks very little about his two undeniable legislative triumphs — the $868 billion stimulus and ObamaCare, which a clear majority of Americans still opposes.
We’re told that perhaps we should assume the public isn’t angry with Obama for his failures. But we’re told less frequently that we should note how little enthusiasm there is for his successes.
So this is the challenge for Mitt Romney in the first debate tomorrow night. He wants to make a good accounting of himself and his policies, even as he reminds people whose minds aren’t made up yet what has actually happened during the Obama presidency, and the lousy results of the president’s ruinously expensive attempts to address the national crisis.
Here’s the flip side of the “new normal”: People may not be inclined to hold Obama responsible for everything bad, but there’s nothing in the polls to suggest they will be charitable in their judgment of what he has done.
After a pretty awful month for Romney, the president goes into the debates only a couple of points up on his rival. That fact suggests the voters who will decide this election are still looking for reasons to go with the new guy.
A great many people may accept that there’s a “new normal,” but Romney has a real opportunity to persuade them that they don’t have to stick with the president who mired them in it.