When evaluating the Obama presidency, I continue to find one of the most interesting historical facets is how closely it’s political fortunes, at least from about the third or fourth year on, seem to mimic those of its predecessor, the Administration of George W. Bush.
In a previous post, I summed them up thusly—president has a subpar approval rating, enough that usually portends electoral defeat, but not so much as to have lost credibility. Opposition party gift-wraps him a patrician pol from Massachusetts who looks and acts massively out of touch. Incumbent uses a hard-nosed negative attack campaign and eventually survives.
The question then became whether the analogy would persist into the first part of the newly elected Administration’s second term. So far, it has.
Republicans were in a high in late 2004 and early 2005. There was brave talk they had conquered the electoral map. I’ll be honest—I believed this at the time and figured only an exceptionally charismatic Democratic candidate could win. I suppose one can say that Obama just happens to be that, and if it were only his presidential victories that might be true. But the fact the Democratic Party swept to wave victories at every level in 2006 and 2008 was a clear repudiation of the “conquered the map” theory.
It’s also worth nothing the sheer amount of cocksureness then directed at the Democratic Left. Even as Bush’s approval ratings began to tumble and his party’s political problems became clear, there were frequent statements from conservatives saying the left wing of the Democratic Party was the GOP’s best friend and would eventually bail them out. Every time a lefty in Congress dipped into rhetorical excess, it was cited as proof of how they would eventually bring the Democrats down, and how they had clearly learned nothing from the last election.
What all this really amounted to was a retreat from reality. In fact, the left wing, led by the blogging crowd at The Daily Kos, was motivated, they weren’t compromising and they weren’t backing down. In purely competitive terms, they won the ensuing elections—which included the 2008 presidential primaries when Obama himself ousted Hillary Clinton, as she tried to recast herself as a centrist—because they deserved to win them.
Now the shoe is on the other foot.
It’s the Republican grassroots, led by the Tea Party that’s motivated and not backing down. Now the cocksureness is coming from the Obama backers and it’s directed at the Republican Right. A column by Greg Sargent in today’s Washington Post is the latest salvo at the “obstructionist” GOP Congress, conveying the message that all this is going to rescue the Democrats in time for the 2014 mid-term elections. CNN's Julian Zeller professes similar "concern" for what's going to happen to Republicans on their current path.
Now we’re told it’s the Republican Right that will save a president whose approval ratings continue their gradual slide—the 45 percent Obama approval ratings in the RealClearPolitics polling average is as low as I’ve seen it, at least over the last couple years. We're told it's the Tea Party who learned nothing from the last election.
And again, what all this amounts to is a retreat from reality. Democrats engaged in the same sort of excess celebration this past November that their GOP counterparts did in 2004. Now we're seeing the same sort of nervousness, like that which overtakes a first-place baseball team when they see a once-distant challenger starting to thunder up on them.
No historical analogy is ever perfect and this one will run its course. I’m not making any predictions on 2016, but I would be highly surprised if the Democrats are as uncompetitive then as the GOP was in 2008. But the pertinent question right now is whether Obama is going to follow Bush’s path to significant midterm losses and an approval rating that never really gets untracked.
I’m going to bet on “yes” as the answer to that. Whatever your projection is, the most important lesson for us all to take is that history doesn’t end with any given election and if you feel yourself given to hubris or despair (depending on whether your side won or lost) you need to remember there’s always next time.
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