Ever since the Democrats got their behinds handed to them by the Tea Party in the 2008 elections, I feel like I have been writing the same article on President Obama. During that time, unemployment was over 9%, the President’s approval ratings were in the low 40%, the President was not only taking fire from the buoyant Republican party in Congress, but he was also being undermined by the base on his party – yet I remained fairly confident that come the general election in 2012, Obama would be re-elected.
What was the cause of my confidence in Obama’s political fortunes reversing for the better? Well, history. Today, everything in American politics is amplified and sensationalised and this blinds some political analyst to history. After the mid-term elections in 2010, I discussed with my then American Foreign Policy lecturer what the mid-terms could mean for Obama’s re-election chances – his answer? Nothing – and I agree. Over the past two decades, the sitting President’s party tends to lose seats during the mid-term elections – they tend to lose a lot of them. This has been the case as far back as Franklin Roosevelt. President Obama’s problem is that he lost seats in the house, the numbers of which had not been seen since, well, Roosevelt. He did this in the age of the hyper media presence in politics, so naturally, the media and his opposing party conflated the meaning of such losses. Mid-terms are not important to a president’s re-election, if you go by history. Now the unemployment rate however…
The 2010 mid-term elections are also important in my opinion because I believe this is where Obama “derangement syndrome” started to infect the Republican Party. Suddenly the narrative that Obama was the “worst President ever” started to take hold within the GOP. This resulted in the Democratic Party’s “Obama deflation” syndrome – the idea that Obama has not delivered on any/ or enough of the promises he made in 2008. If one thing is true of Americans is that they are competitive and Democrats hate to lose as much as any American – the success of Tea Party and Obama’s unwillingness to fight back during the tax and debt ceiling fight only strengthened these feelings.
The problem with the foundations that both Obama derangement/ deflation syndromes is that they are not rooted in facts and can be easily disproved. The way Democrats have treated Obama over the past 3 years has been nigh near suicidal. The very fact that there are still some influential grass roots activists that are advocating for Democrats not to vote for Obama because he did not do enough in his first term is laughable. They either expected far too much out of a four year term or they don’t fully appreciate why Obama’s achievements this past three years have been important for the Democratic movement.
But this article is not about liberals, it’s about conservatives. I feel that the penny has finally dropped with them. They may just have realized the huge mistake they have made letting Obama derangement syndrome and the Tea Party take over their Party. With the economy moving in the right direction, people understanding more about ObamaCare and the President’s recent high-profile national security success, it is very difficult to call Obama the worst President of all time – it sounds, well, it sounds demagogic.
It is also become apparent that President Obama has trapped the Republicans on the key issue of taxes. For four years the President has advocated raising taxes on the wealthiest Americans and reducing them for middle-class Americans and every step of the way, the GOP opposed him, defending the “wealth-makers” of Americans. Now those “wealth-makers” are now seen in such a positive light. In fact, what the GOP has done is handed Obama one of those “wealth-makers” as his potential general election opponent.
Now I have been saying for almost a year, if Obama could design his own general election candidate, in this economic climate, Mitt Romney would be it. As much as some people are trying to make him appear as you traditional bottom-up entrepreneur business man, that he is not. From what I understand, the only business he ever created was Bain Capital and that enterprise destroyed more businesses than it created. His company leveraged against the majority of businesses it took over and left most of them fatally crippled with cancerous debt. Yes, they also helped some companies become more successful (I love Dominoes Pizza by the way, thanks Mitt), but the hundreds of stories and ads that Bain alone can give the Obama re-election team is extraordinary. And the narratives of these stories are tailor made for this political climate.
Many argue that Mitt doesn’t scare enough independents and moderates who are disappointed with Obama. I would argue that after the week Mitt has had, where it was revealed he pays a tax rate of 15%, where it has been revealed that he has money in various off shore accounts and where he has botched answers about his tax returns – give him time, he won’t scare you, he will likely sicken you.
If I was Obama, I would make 2012 a history lesson on what went wrong with the American economy, how it was only when he came into office he realized the scale of the problem and how he has been fighting the GOP and special interests in attempt to put America back on the right financial footing. Mitt Romney is the picture perfect villain for such a story and it maybe the narrative that keeps him in the White House for 4 more years.
Just a normal everyday bloke writing about films.