An Unpresidential Election
BY JELANI COBB
Two days before the midterm elections, Barack Obama arrived at a high school in Bridgeport, Connecticut, to campaign for Governor Dannel Malloy, who was then locked in a statistical tie with his Republican opponent in his reëlection race. The President gave a rousing speech, concluding with the obligatory photo op of him raising Malloy’s hand in presumptive victory. Nothing about the event was noteworthy, yet something about it seemed discordant. The most salient element of that image was not the President offering assurances on behalf of an embattled governor—rather, it was that the governor thought those assurances were still worth having. By contrast, Allison Lundgren Grimes, during her run for the Kentucky State Senate, would not even admit to having voted for Obama, and Michelle Nunn, in Georgia, had to be prodded to do so. The President was utilized so rarely by Democrats this past election season that the appearances he did make served only to underscore his near-pariah status. Nationally, Obama’s approval rating was just forty-two per cent. But he had a seventy-six-per-cent approval rating among Democrats and eighty-four-per-cent approval among black voters. Tuesday’s electoral returns may have been a referendum on Obama’s leadership, but they also commented on the efficacy of the obstruction and recalcitrance that has attended his time in office nearly since his swearing in.
Barack Obama’s election as President was accompanied by expectations that were outsized even for the historic nature of his Administration. His more than three hundred sixty-five electoral votes were more than double John McCain’s final tally, and he bested McCain by more than ten million popular votes. The huge database of thirteen million Obama supporters and the campaign’s adroit capacity to raise money through hundreds of thousands of small donations made it appear that Obama was poised to create a new kind of populism, a multihued, progressive version. Instead, Tea Party populism, indignant, highly organized, and deeply invested in a kind of entitled patriotism that saw Obama’s ascent as the country being “taken” from them, took hold. Amid the tempest of paranoia and recrimination in that surrounded the town hall discussions of the Affordable Care Act in the summer and fall of 2009, the most noteworthy thing was not the angry crowds gathered to attack a law that, in their view, sought to kill off their grandmothers but the absence of a cohesive grassroots counteroffensive. This has been a theme in the Obama Presidency. In order to become President, Barack Obama had to create a grassroots machine that could, in primary election after primary election, circumnavigate the Democratic establishment. Yet his Administration has been as insular and remote in its functioning as that of any institutional standard-bearer.
We’ve come to expect congressional losses for the President’s party in midterm elections, but even so the 2014 elections look like a bloodletting. In successive midterms, Obama has lost control of the House and the Senate. In his comments on the election yesterday, he pointed out that nearly six out of ten eligible voters stayed home—and electorate that is even smaller than the diminished turnout of the 2010 midterm. Following that loss, Obama pledged to find common ground with the new House majority. Instead, we witnessed a moribund grand bargain on the budget, successive, manufactured crises surrounding the debt ceiling, a bogus lawsuit against the President filed by the Speaker of the House, and repeated moot votes to repeal the Affordable Care Act—all theatrically orchestrated to appease Republican grassroots movements.
Addressing the results of this week’s election, Obama made a similar promise, yet not even he believes that it is likely to be seen through. The G.O.P.’s newfound majority was facilitated by the fact that they haven’t found common ground with the President. Obama’s idealism survived for barely twenty-four hours. In a press conference where the tone alternated between patronizing and belligerent, John Boehner all but threatened Obama, should he issue an executive order regarding immigration. “He’s playing with fire,” the Speaker said. “He’s going to burn himself if he continues down this path.”
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