The Summer of Americans’ Discontent with Obama
August 16, 2013 By 1 Comment
Barack
Obama isn’t very popular anymore. Gallup pegged his job approval rating
over the weekend at 41 percent, twenty-seven points below his
Inauguration Day numbers. It’s not Obama’s approval nadir—he dipped
below 40 percent several times last year—but one can’t help but notice
the downward trajectory. If Obama were a stock, America would be short
selling.Why doesn’t Obama provoke the thrill up the leg that he once did?
The president has grown the state. The economy? Not so much. And as the previous successful Democratic presidential candidate reminded itself, “It’s the economy, stupid.”
On the economy, Obama launched his presidency by signing the largest spending bill in human history into law. The stimulus worked as a sleeping pill.
The president’s health care law, has similarly unleashed unintended consequences. Examples include employers reducing worker hours to avoid paying for their medical coverage and insurance rates that “could double or even triple” for healthy people who buy plans on their own, according to Louise Radnofsky of the Wall Street Journal. The Affordable Care Act makes care less affordable.
The administration’s fetishization of public “investment” in private projects has harmed both sectors. Green jobs have been a boondoggle for crony capitalists, perverting entrepreneurship toward pleasing the bureaucracy instead of the market. To put the federal government’s foray into auto manufacturing in perspective, Antle points out that Ford sold ten times as many Edsals as General Motors has sold of its Volt. For whatever reason, Edsal is a punch line and Volts still roll off assembly lines.
Such failures often prompt Washington to double down when they should fold. “Big government is the only institution that is touted as the solution to its own failures,” Devouring Freedom explains. “If there is a major national security breach because some government agency didn’t do its job, the immediate response is to give the agency more power. It’s as if, at the height of the Enron scandals, people concluded that the problem was that Ken Lay didn’t have enough authority.”
The effects on the economy, health care, and the cars driving on the roads weren’t what the administration hoped for. Neither was the effect on the deficit, which has skyrocketed from under $11 trillion to almost $17 trillion during the Obama presidency.
The president, who brought a wealth of experience in government and the classroom to his office, never worked in private enterprise. Not familiar with what it takes to create a job, Obama unsurprisingly appears obtuse to the concerns of job creators. With unemployment at 8 percent or more for in excess of three years of his presidency, Obama oversaw the longest period of high unemployment since the Great Depression. The gross domestic product expanded at 1.7 percent for the second quarter after growing by an anemic 1.1 percent during the first three months of 2013. Stocks approach record highs. So do the number of young people living at home. If Obama were a Republican, this would be an opposition talking point. He’s a Democrat, so it remains an unspoken irony.
That’s why the morass in which Obama finds himself, much like the morass in which many Americans find themselves, may be the new normal—at least until a change of administrations. Surely the president isn’t about to change his mind on the virtues of an activist state. “As government grows beyond its constitutional boundaries,” Antle concludes, “it really does devour freedom.” It eventually devours job approval numbers, too.
Daniel J. Flynn is the author of The War on Football: Saving America’s Game (Regnery, 2013).
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