It wasn’t supposed to be like this.
Barack Obama entered the White House in January 2009 with all signs pointing toward major liberal policy reforms. He had campaigned unabashedly as a reformer, promising “change we can believe in,” and won the largest popular-vote majority of any Democrat in more than forty years. He had an outsize congressional majority in both chambers, dominated by the kinds of northern Democrats who had long been the prime movers of liberal reform. The Republican opposition was seemingly discredited, taking the blame for a terrible economy as well as a congressional faction of so-called conservatives who had spent money like drunken sailors during their years in the majority. To top it all off, his job approval upon entering office was nearly 70 percent, higher than that of any incoming president in decades.
Within twenty months it was all over. In November 2010 the country elected more Republicans to the House of Representatives than in any election since the 1940s. President Obama’s job approval had fallen below 50 percent, and his rating among the all-important group of independent voters who swing elections had dropped into the danger zone of the low forties. The new Republican majority in the House promised a return to the party’s role as a responsible steward of the economy and the federal budget, and the reform era of the Obama administration was well and truly finished.
How could this have happened? More at the link. ◼ Buy the book at Amazon.
