As President Barack Obama’s 2010 health care reform law continues to unfurl and cancel millions of Americans’ existing healthcare plans, Obama poll numbers continue to decline — which comes as a surprise to New York Times columnist David Brooks.
On PBS’s “NewsHour” on Friday, Brooks compared Obama to former Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush at the same point in their second term. Brooks pointed to the Bush’s second term struggles with Hurricane Katrina and the Iraq war in 2005, saying he was surprised by the similarities of the two presidencies.
“It turns out if you sell a health care plan on the basis that we won’t increase the debt and nobody will be a loser, then, when there are losers, they get really mad,” Brooks said. “And there were bound to be losers. And so that’s part of it. But part of it is just the weakening of the law, the weakening of support for the law, and the weakening of the own president’s authority to say, trust me, trust me. I’m really struck by the downward slide that he’s doing.”
“I’m a little surprised by it, frankly,” he continued. “And what’s interesting is, compared to Reagan and Clinton in their second terms, had very similar popular approval ratings, which were going up at this point. George W. Bush and Barack Obama have extremely similar downward slopes. Bush’s went all the way through, caused by Iraq and Katrina, and, in Obama’s case, healthcare and other things. And one of the things that strikes me is the country has changed, much more cynical, much more anti-Washington and, as a result of that, much less likely to come in a big collective effort to help some uninsured off, so much more skeptical of the law, and, second, when it is not implemented properly, much more punishing on the government. And so that makes it very fragile to me.”