No one can seriously question that President Obama’s popularity, measured in his opinion poll approval ratings, has plummeted, and has become an important factor in this year's elections. Democratic candidates are almost universally avoiding identification with the president and his policies; one even refused to say whether she voted for Obama in the last presidential election.
I find this rather puzzling. Of course, there is a core portion of the electorate that has always despised Obama and would always find reasons to do so. But Obama did after all get elected twice with the support of a majority of the electorate (an achievement that eluded Bill Clinton). How do you explain that he now cannot hold the approval of even 40%? Whatever his shortcomings, there is no reasonable way to argue that his performance has been so abysmal that he has understandably alienated such a large percentage of his former supporters
It’s surprising to me, too, that while everyone talks about the president’s unpopularity, I haven’t seen anyone among the various bloggers, pundits and pollsters I read who has made a serious, probing attempt to explain it.
Part of the explanation undoubtedly lies in people’s need to personalize their discontent. When things are going badly and the causes of the malfunction are poorly understood, you look for a scapegoat, and the most obvious scapegoat is the guy who is ostensibly running the country. And things certainly have not been going well in our country in recent years. The economic recovery has been slow, and even though it has been picking up recently, perceptions tend to lag reality. There’s gridlock in Washington, and, more recently, ISIS and Ebola to escalate our national sense of insecurity. It’s not reasonable to blame Obama for most of these things-- indeed, the slow pace of economic recovery can largely be blamed on Republican pressure for spending cuts when instead expansionary policies have been needed.
But the electorate isn’t necessarily reasonable.
I think there’s more to the explanation, though. I think that the readiness to blame Obama reflects a continuing residual racism in this country that is more subtle and complex than the hard-core racism that undoubtedly animates much of the Obama hatred we see on the right. The softer racism that I’m talking about is even consistent with having voted for Obama: We gave the black guy a chance, and now it’s clear that we were too generous, because look--he’s screwed up. We shoulda known better.
Yes, Obama was able to get a near-majority of the white electorate to vote for him even in 2012, but that support was for many white voters highly conditional: a black man in the White House simply has less margin for error than a white man. I have no hard data to prove this, so really, this diary is more aimed at posing a question than stating a firm point of view. I’m curious to see how other Kos readers would answer the question. Why is Obama so unpopular?