There is one certainty: at this point historians will not be calling President Barack Obama’s second term “stellar.” Rather, it has been the unfolding of breaking events that led to an action that had consquences. And when Adam Lanza burst into Sandy Hook Elementary and murdered 20 children and 6 adults, it set in chain a series of consquences that decimated Obama’s original second term hopes. The National Journal’s Alex Seitz-Wald nails it:
There are plenty of reasons this is the lowest point of Barack Obama’s presidency. He hasn’t fulfilled a major legislative campaign promise, his signature second-term immigration initiative is paralyzed, and the administration may never entirely recover from the unforced errors surrounding the Affordable Care Act’s rollout. But don’t blame these problems alone for Obama’s record-low 40 percent approval rating. In truth, his agenda went off the rails on a crisp December morning last year, when Adam Lanza strolled into Sandy Hook Elementary and killed 20 children and six adults. Obama hasn’t gotten back on track since.
But it is worth noting. In his superb book The Candidate, Samuel Popkin notes that successful Presidential candidates are the ones who can adapt, and move swiftly, almost fluidly to absorb the hard punches of unforseen events. And so it is with Presidencies. Yet, in the case of Obama, it’s hard to see how he could have NOT taken some of the path he did after Sandyhook. To wit:
The Connecticut massacre set in motion a cascade of events that led the White House to burn through its only real window to accomplish its goals. The month before the shooting, Obama had won a convincing reelection and a modest popular mandate. One major liberal wish-list entry, immigration reform, seemed not only within reach but almost inevitable.
Immigration was in an almost impossible bipartisan sweet spot: a singularly important policy goal for Democrats that could be a political boon for both parties. For Republicans, it was a way to fix a demographic problem revealed by the 2012 election. Still, they’d have to move quickly. The populist Right that had torpedoed immigration reform under George W. Bush seemed quieted by defeat, but it wouldn’t stay that way for long.
Then Lanza’s rampage altered the debate in Washington. Suddenly, priority No. 1 wasn’t immigration reform but gun control. The base that had just elected Obama was clamoring for background checks and magazine-clip restrictions, threatening to desert the president before his second inauguration.
I have long contended that this is the Democrats’ fatal flaw. Part of the party will threaten to jettison its own President in times of major crisis if their preferred policies are not enacted or a particularly path was not followed. Still, it did indeed seem that the massacre of 26 innocents could give the impetus for meaning full gun control. Instead:
Many in Washington, including Connecticut’s Democratic senators, were convinced that
the much-feared National Rifle Association had become a “paper tiger.” The gun lobby’s muscle hadn’t been truly tested in almost a decade, and NRA head Wayne LaPierre’s bizarre press conference days after the shooting seemed to confirm that the emperor had no clothes.
That meant immigration would have to wait. The clock was ticking on both gun control and immigration, but Democrats moved ahead with gun control first, recognizing that as the memory of the tragedy at Sandy Hook faded, so too would the impetus for new laws. The Senate spent months on a bill, which eventually got whittled down to a universal background-check provision, before it finally died at the hands of a Republican filibuster in mid-April.
But it’s not surprising. In several instances in Obama’s term the pundits and political logic would suggest a certain course would happen. But then the talk show hosts moved in, and their arguments were picked up by conservative Republicans on the web, and soon it became the equivilent of a party line. In this case, it was the NRA and the talk show hosts who helped solidify what became a party line and the phrases GOPers would use. And after a period of perfunctory hope raising it turned out little had changed on gun control.
But, clearly, the political capital and the moment were lost:
In the process, the administration fatally, and irrevocably, antagonized the populist libertarian Right, the same people whom mainstream Republicans and Democrats needed to stay on the sidelines for immigration reform to succeed. By engaging in such an emotional, polarizing issue so early on, Obama poisoned the (admittedly shallow) well of goodwill and the willingness to compromise by Republicans before his term even began in earnest. When a comprehensive immigration bill eventually did pass the Senate in late June with GOP support, the House opposition made clear that the bill had little hope of becoming law.
Even in hindsight, it’s almost impossible to imagine the president choosing a different path; the clamor of the victorious Left for gun-law reform was just too strong. But the ripple effect has disrupted Obama’s entire year. In April came the Boston Marathon bombing, which occurred just two days before gun control officially died in the Senate. In May came a trio of mini-scandals: new revelations about Benghazi; the alleged IRS targeting of tea-party groups; and then the Justice Department’s snooping on reporters. A month later, Edward Snowden’s first leaks started emerging and have yet to stop. Many of these developments deepened partisan resentments.
We all know the political confrontations that followed later. The end result was that while Obama was not exactly a lame duck, the political mojo he seemingly had was dissipated.
But don’t blame it all on the moment and happenstance. Yes, you c-o-u-l-d point to the shockingly inept roll out of Obamacare for having reduced his clout further. The ultimate irony will be if the man proclaimed to be the left’s Ronald Reagan who’d undo some of Reagan’s policies, salvage the under-attack New Deal, and make the case for a bigger role for governmnent in solving problems turned out to be the man made younger generations conclude that government was incompetent and beautiful words about how it could improve things turned out to just be beautiful words.
Still, there’s no doubt about it:
When Lanza entered the school, he took out more than the 26 people he mercilessly butchered.
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Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.