President Barack Obama’s support among Iowa independent voters is taking a nosedive, a new Iowa Poll shows.
Mark Halperin reports on his lively The Page site:
On Obama approval among Iowa independents:
Currently: 38%
November: 48%On Obama’s handling of his job:
Currently: 46% approve
November: 49% approve
There is considerable analysis and speculation about why Obama is taking a hit among independent voter support. There is a wide variety of factors. And there is partisan spin (GOPERS: people don’t like Obama’s “socialist” agenda…DEMOCRATS: Independent voters are wishy washy were closet Republicans, anyway). But here is what I have noted before and will assert again:
His numbers among independent voters would be much different if the job picture was better. Even early on in the Obama administration there were predicts that job growth would be slow. But the Democrats and Obama made a fundamental error:
Early on Obama and the Democrats decided that three things: (1)they were going to use political capital (2)they were going to enact health care reform (3)they wanted to try and get through health care reform in the worst possible way.
They accomplished two of the three things: they used political capital — and they did health care reform in the worst possible way.
Health care reform sucked up all the seeming media focus (the American news media truly has trouble multi-tasking at times as infooutlets scramble to follow the story leader) and the impression to many voters was that Washington and the Democrats were fixated on health care reform — rather than scrambling to fix the job mess. The bulk of voters didn’t elect Obama in 2008 because they felt George W. Bush and the Republicans failed to enact health care reform; they gave the Democrats votes because they wanted change, particularly substantive change in the failing economy.
So while Wall Street stabilized, today almsot everyone knows someone who lost a job, or who works by the job and doesn’t get a paycheck — people who are still feeling the hit of a sick economy and wondering if they’ll have a job or their homes (or apartments) a year from now as jobs are not opening up and as those who don’t get paychecks find per-job income is harder to get.
Independent voters often analyze and then vote, versus starting out supporting a sports political team because they belong to it and want it to win. And if you stand back and look at the job picture, it’s still grim.
People collecting unemployment or getting grocery packs from churches aren’t standing in line talking about how they need health care reform and demand a “public option” (a phrase now as grattingly obnoxious as the medias “defining moment…” or “tried to change the subject” or “a Marine with his buddies” as if every Marine views every Marine as his “buddy”). They are talking about how they want a job — and the Democrats and Obama needed to at least feed the perception that they were focused like a laserbeam on that and not making deals with other Democrats to get the votes to get health care reform through Congress.
There needs to be an at least equal perception that the administration and Democrats are pullling out all stops to do something about jobs — and if in that GOPers try to obstruct it, the Democrats should take the ball and run with it.
But so far they seem clutching the health care reform ball.
Even if Obama’s big televised meeting with the GOP is a net plus for him, the context will be critical: what are the latest numbers on jobs? And how is the administration showing that it’s focused on this issue as well as issues such as whether to use reconciliation to shove health care reform through?
So while there are many factors in independent voter support, or lack of it, the context will still be: where are we now and were are we headed on the jobs scene?
UPDATE: Great Minds Think Alike Dept. Charlie Cook in the National Journal:
Cook: I sort of reject the notion that there is a communications problem with President Obama. I think it’s just fundamental, total miscalculations from the very, very beginning. Of proportions comparable to President George W. Bush’s decision to go into Iraq. While Bush went, “We’re going to go after Afghanistan as a reaction to 9/11,” and then just pretty soon got distracted and obsessed with going into Iraq with varying rationalizations that sort of evolved over time.
This was a case where I think the White House people could see, look at the president, the White House and congressional Democrats as sort of checking the box on stimulus, but found that kind of boring, and moved on to health care and cap-and-trade. And the thing is, Democrats piled all this cotton candy and pork and junk and pet projects into it, so it discredited the stimulus package in the minds of a lot of voters and at the same time, it wasn’t big enough. It was totally insufficient, yet they wanted to keep it under a trillion dollars because they didn’t want to spend a lot of political capital on a really big stimulus package because they wanted to save it for cap-and-trade and health care. And so we start off with the original sin of a very imperfect and inadequate economic stimulus package and then moving off the economy almost entirely going into cap-and-trade and health care.
And then when unemployment numbers started proving to be much, much tougher and it started becoming more clear that the stimulus package hadn’t worked properly, they just kept plowing ahead on health care. And this isn’t a communications problem. This is a reality problem. And I think they just made some grave miscalculations and as it became more clear that they had screwed up, they just kept doubling down their bet.
And so I think, no, this is one of the biggest miscalculations that we’ve seen in modern political history.
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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.