Obama loses his mojo

A couple of days ago President Obama held a town hall meeting on CNBC. It didn't go well. This is a metaphor for the president's last several weeks. What happened to his popularity?

An important thing to remember is that his enormous popularity when he took office was as a symbol. A man with dark skin and an African name became the post powerful man in the world proving once and for all that anyone can grow up to be president. A lot of people had no idea where he stood on issues and didn't care.

Once people got used to having a black man in the White House, he lost his first achiever luster and started to be judged on his accomplishments.

Then there is the curse of the super-majority. The entire time Obama has been in the White House, Congress has had 59 or 60 Senators and a comfortable margin of Representatives. This hurt the Democrats in general and Obama in particular in several ways. With such a majority, the Democrats did not feel any need for bipartisan compromise. This helped the Republicans keep their solid voting block. Why would any of them break ranks when the Democrats were not offering them anything? But this meant that they needed every vote from the Democrat Caucus to break filibusters. That gave each senator more bargaining power. The moderate senators took advantage of this. The result was messy legislation. The far left was upset because they couldn't get the more radical parts of their agenda through. Everyone else felt trampled. If the Democrats had a couple more or a couple fewer senators then they either could have ignored the moderates or they would have had to compromise. Along the way, the President outsourced the writing of his signature legislation to the back rooms of Congress.

Obama also had the curse of his promises. He made twice as many promises as most presidential candidates do. That's a lot to live up to. But it gets worse. Many people expected him to live up to promises he never made. He came out against same-sex marriage but his supporters assumed that he was lying in order to get elected. A repeal of Don't Ask/Don't Tell has been low on his priorities. Other groups feel similarly slighted.

His handling of the economy has hurt him more than anything. Originally his team forecast a strong recovery starting late last year. A year ago his economic team was talking about "green shoots". The was supposed to be the "Recovery Summer" when the jobs from the stimulus kicked in and the Great Recession finally ended. Just this week it was announced that the recession actually ended in June of last year. This leaves the White House looking clueless. Obama needs the financial sector, what he calls "Wall Street" but he doesn't like them. In fact, he is, at best, apathetic about employers in general and his focus on health care made it appear that he does not care about the millions of unemployed.

President Obama's favorite quip about the Republicans and the economy goes, "They drove us into this ditch and now that we are almost out they want the keys back." This is a great applause line but it underscores two hard truths - the crash may have happened under the Republicans but the Democrats managed the recovery and it has been a flop. After hearing the President say this you wonder if he really believes that things are nearly back to normal?

On his CNBC appearance one of his supporters told him that he needs to come out and tell us if this is a temporary downturn or the new normal. as always, he passed. To the Obama administration, recovery is just around the corner. His economic team probably told him early on that recovery would be slow but he kept this secret for political reasons (if they didn't tell him that there would be a slow recovery then the remaining ones should be sacked). Had Obama told the country early in his administration that this would be a long, slow recovery he could have shifted the blame. Instead he used the recession as an excuse to pass the mother of all pork barrel bills. Once the stimulus was passed, the recovery was his problem, not Bush's. In addition, the stimulus and a home-owner bailout gave rise to the Tea Party.

Finally there is the war in Afghanistan. Between 2004 and 2008, the Democrats insisted that this was the good war and that the war in Iraq was the bad war. They would abandon the bad war and use the resources to win the good war. Many Democrats were lying. They wanted out of both wars but they didn't want to seem weak on defense. They are outraged that Obama followed through on his promise to try to win the war. So far things do not look good. It looks all the worse because President Bush was able to get Iraq under control. Even the war's supporters are getting tired of it. But if Obama loses Afghanistan then he will hurt the Democrats for a generation. They are still living down the loss of Viet Nam. A second loss would permanently mark them as surrender monkeys.

A great leader could recover from these setbacks but Obama has gone from being an electrifying candidate to a boring president. Instead of fainting in his presence, his supporters now complain that they are exhausted. His failures, the economy and the war, are dragging him down and his wins, health care and the stimulus, are so muddied by back-room dealing that they cannot provide a counterbalance.

All told, it is no wonder that things look so bad for the Democrats going into the mid-term election.