Last weekend, Bill Clinton was the featured guest at two
fundraisers which brought in a reported $2 million for President
Obama’s 2012 campaign.
As the
Daily Caller put it, “Clinton gives Obama $2 million
worth of faint praise.”
Although the current president has substantially outraised Mitt
Romney in the early part of the campaign season — to be expected
of an incumbent facing a field of hopefuls prior to the
determination of the eventual challenger — Obama’s fundraising
pace is down dramatically from 2008. Given Obama’s rhetorical war
against the “rich,” the slowest economic recovery in modern
American history, and an unpopular piece of “signature” legislation
that has a real chance of being found unconstitutional, the
downturn in his campaign contributions should not be a surprise.
Remarkably, even the New York Times
understands it.
The president’s basic re-election theme was demonstrated in
short sentences during the fundraisers: Bill Clinton said that
Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney “basically wants to do
what they did before, on steroids, which will get you the same
consequences you got before, on steroids.” President Obama said
that he, working with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, have
“spent the past three-and-a-half years cleaning up after other
folks’ messes.”
In other words, “vote for me because what I’m doing is better
than what they did — which is what you should expect they will do
again.”
But that is a difficult argument to sustain. People’s assessment
of today and memory of last week are usually clearer than their
memory of a few years ago, especially because across much of
America the economy does not feel much better than it did a few
years ago. If you haven’t been working in a bailed-out industry
like banking or a bailed-out company like GM — after all, who
wouldn’t do well with billions of dollars of Other People’s Money?
— and you don’t own a lot of stocks and bonds, the world feels far
from rosy. As we put it in my business, “the trend is your friend”
(in this case, Romney’s friend and Obama’s challenge.)
More damaging for Obama is that while the recession and
financial turmoil did indeed begin under President Bush, voters in
2008 had some sense of hope for the future, that things would get
better, not least because of Obama’s famous campaign slogan of
“hope and change.” Now, despite that promise, current economic
indicators and optimism about the future are stagnant, and
uncertainty about the next regulatory or tax shoe to drop keeps
potential job creators on the sidelines. (Or more precisely,
certainty that there will be another shoe to drop as long as this
man is in charge.)
As Donald Sutherland, playing the president in the movie
The Hunger Games noted ominously, “Hope is the only thing
stronger than fear.” If he is correct, and America’s 2008 election
results suggest some political validity in his statement, then few
things will be more powerful in 2012 than the disappointment of a
hope unfulfilled. Indeed, fear of trying someone new, especially
someone who is so carefully running as not the usual Republican,
not the second coming of George W. Bush (even if also not the
reincarnation of Ronald Reagan), will not be the motivating force
that the Obama letdown is.
A recent Gallup poll shows that the percentage of American
adults who feel that they “have enough money to live comfortably”
has reached a new low of 60 percent, down from 75 percent in 2002.
The decline occurs across income groups, though college graduates
do not feel as pessimistic as those with less educational
achievement.
Sentiment among Republicans and Independents has dropped more
than among Democrats, though the Democrat results still matched the
prior low (registered strangely in 2005, implying that political
partisans tend to feel worse when their team is not in charge.)
A dangerous aspect of the Gallup numbers for Obama’s reelection
prospects is the large and persistent decline in perceived
financial well-being among Independent voters. At 57 percent, the
current reading among this critical segment of the electorate is by
far the lowest registered among any of the three political
groupings at any time during the past decade. This is a giant
flashing neon warning sign for Barack Obama — and there is little
he can to do about it.
The lack of economic confidence despite modestly lower
unemployment rates and modestly higher consumer spending is
representative of the fact that Barack Obama instills in many
Americans the opposite of hope: the sense that we are being
governed by a man (and his various henchmen and henchwomen) who,
whether due to ideology or incompetence, cannot or will not
implement the pro-growth policies needed to bring us out of our
current economic morass.
Instead, he spends his time pitting Americans against each
other: The “rich” against the middle class, Republicans against
women, college students against everyone (and against
responsibility for their own educations), and that’s just in the
past few weeks. It is anything but a message of hope; it is a
message of fear. Fortunately, it’s not working, in part because
Americans are not people who want to feel fearful and in part
because we know that such a message is no part of a solution.
In 2008, Barack Obama understood the Hunger Games
president’s wisdom. In 2012, he has abandoned it, because his
dismal record leaves him little choice.
Campaigning with President Clinton is necessary for Barack Obama
who is having trouble appealing to big-check-writers on his own.
After all, at this same point in his presidency, Bill Clinton had a
56 percent approval
rating while Obama is mired at 48 percent, below the
significant 50 percent threshold he has not been above for a year.
But while Bill Clinton was deemed “the first black president,” he’s
not actually the guy on the ballot in November, and approval
ratings points are not tradable assets.
Hitting the campaign trail with Slick Willie poses its own risks
for President Obama, reminding people that he, unlike Clinton, is
presiding over a terrible economy. Obama, unlike Clinton, is not
even pretending to look for areas of policy cooperation with
Republicans (such as on welfare reform). And for a president whose
primary electoral hope is his personal likeability, standing next
to the relatively warm and jovial Clinton, our current president’s
persistent coolness may remind voters that Obama is in fact not
that likeable.
When it comes to enlisting the help of Bill Clinton, Barack
Obama is doing what he has to do. The fact that he has to do it
shows a recognition of his reelection campaign’s fundamental
weakness. If Barack Obama had a James “It’s the economy, stupid”
Carville instead of a David “Divide and Conquer” Axelrod to advise
him, he might be reminded daily of Donald Sutherland’s Hunger
Games wisdom. But then it’s hard to campaign on hope when fear
is really all you have left to work with.
