President Obama’s choice

Without a doubt, these are difficult days for Barack Obama.  With a job approval rating in the 40s, with voters threatening to desert the Democrats in the midterms, and with no sign of events breaking his way, the heady days following his inauguration seem a dim and distant memory.

What happened?

Some in Washington blame the Republicans, as well as their allies on talk radio and cable, but the GOP controls neither the executive nor the legislative branches of government.   Their losses in 2006 and 2008 have rendered them powerless to stop virtually any legislation favored by the White House.  Indeed, with firm majorities in both houses of Congress, the president has pushed through major legislation, from the stimulus package to health care and banking regulation.

Others allege poor communication on the administration’s part, but that won’t wash, either.   Obama remains today what he always was, a personally appealing man, and a superbly gifted orator, arguably the most eloquent since Ronald Reagan.   He’s done a credible job explaining and defending his policies and programs.   Most people who follow politics even on a cursory level know where he stands and why.

Still others blame the White House’s response to the Gulf oil spill, but that’s dubious as well.   Its political troubles were brewing months before that event overtook the country.

Truth be told, the seeds for the president’s political decline, and that of his Democratic allies in Congress, were sown shortly after the inauguration, ironically by something bad that actually didn’t happen.

That something was the end of life as we know it in America.

As of Obama’s inauguration, Americans were traumatized, not by their new president, but by what they had just experienced — the near-collapse of the banking system, the frightening slide of the stock market, and the panicked expectation of calamities to come.   More than any time in memory, what Americans feared was a looming apocalypse, both financial and economic.   In response, they looked to the president for dramatic action.

It was in this environment that Congress passed the biggest spending bill of its kind in history, and began accumulating additional debt in the trillions.

The president and Congress had guessed, rightly it seemed, that a shell-shocked nation would be more accepting of big government spending and expansion than at any time since FDR’s programs during the Great Depression.

But then, sometime in the spring of ’09, Americans awoke to find life as they’ve known it continuing.

In most cases, the bank around the corner was still in business.  So were most gas stations and supermarkets, restaurants and repair shops.

In other words, doomsday never arrived.   It was just business as usual, as far as the eye could see.   Unemployment was very high, but the world still looked the same.

Surrounded by this sea of normalcy, Americans began taking a second look at Washington and its multi-trillion-dollar spending commitments.