Half a Century Since an 'Historic Mistake'

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Fifty years ago, in August 1964, North Vietnamese torpedo boats reportedly attacked the American destroyer Maddox and, possibly, the Turner Joy in the Gulf of Tonkin.

See, there were (reportedly) two separate incidents. The first occurred on Aug. 2, 1964, and it seems pretty certain that one did happen. The Maddox was attacked, and a sea battle followed in which the Maddox fired nearly 300 rounds at the torpedo boats.

Two days later, the Turner Joy was reportedly fired on after it had moved into position to provide support for the Maddox. The evidence of that incident was shakier. It was initially reported as a sea battle, implying that both sides had been firing weapons, but it later emerged that the firing of Turner Joy's weapons may have been triggered (so to speak) by "Tonkin ghosts" — false radar images.

(An internal National Security Agency report, which was declassified in 2005, found that "[i]t is not simply that there is a different story as to what happened; it is that no attack happened that night.")

Real or false, President Lyndon Johnson used the attacks as justification for escalating American involvement in Vietnam — and winning political support from some conservatives.

What most Americans did not know was that the Maddox had been sent to the Gulf of Tonkin on a special mission — to provoke the North Vietnamese into using their radar. The Americans would then track the radar — "the naval equivalent of spotting enemy artillery positions so that they can be destroyed by counterbattery fire," historian William Manchester wrote.

But the Americans apparently hadn't expected their presence to draw enemy fire.

The outcome was the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, a joint resolution approved by both chambers of Congress a week later. It gave Johnson the authority — without Congress' formal declaration of war — to use "conventional" military force.

The House approved the resolution 416–0. In the Senate, only two senators — Wayne Morse of Oregon and Ernest Gruening of Alaska — voted against it.

"I believe this resolution to be a historic mistake," Morse told his colleagues. "I believe that, within the next century, future generations will look with dismay and great disappointment upon a Congress which is now about to make such a historic mistake."

It didn't even take that long.

By 1967, opposition to the war was growing and the rationale for American involvement was under close scrutiny by the public. A movement to repeal the resolution began to gather steam. The repeal was achieved as an attachment to the Foreign Military Sales Act of 1971, which was signed into law by Richard Nixon.

To further limit a president's war powers, Congress passed the War Powers Resolution of 1973 over Nixon's veto.

But there weren't many critical comments in August 1964.

It was perceived as the logical progression of the anti–appeasement policy that had been in style since World War II.

"President Johnson has earned the gratitude of the free world," wrote the Washington Post.

Fifty years later, The Hill calls it a "tragedy." To me, that seems more accurate than "historic mistake," although I guess both are correct.

And Johnson's response to the perceived aggression of the North Vietnamese apparently shored up his support on the right. In July, Gallup reported that 58% of respondents had been critical of his handling of the military effort in Vietnam, but in August, nearly three–fourths of respondents approved. That was an impressive shift. And, in November, Johnson won a full four–year term as president by the widest margin in history.

Whether legitimately or not, it is clear that Johnson reaped considerable immediate political benefits from what historian Theodore White called a "deft response" to a threat.

"For all I know," Johnson told a group of visitors in 1965, "our Navy was shooting at whales out there."

Pushing the Panic Button

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When I was a journalism student in college, one of my professors said something that remains with me today. "Use real quotes whenever you can," this professor said. "People like to read what other people have to say."

Unless the article is clearly a personal opinion piece, he continued, readers don't care what the reporter has to say about anything. They only want the reporter to give them an account that is as complete — and as completely neutral — as possible.

Readers are interested in opinions, of course — which goes a long way, I think, toward explaining the public's fascination with public opinion polling.

Public opinion polling is an emerging science, and I believe many (regretfully, not all, but many) of its practitioners do try to learn from mistakes, theirs and others'. Pollsters in the mid–1930s learned from the Literary Digest's mistakes when the Digest predicted that Franklin D. Roosevelt would lose his bid for re–election in 1936 (primarily car and/or home telephone owners were polled, and those were two things that only the affluent could afford during the Great Depression, so the poll was skewed ).

Pollsters learned from their experience in 1948 — when Dewey defeated Truman — that, if you decide a race is a foregone conclusion and stop polling two weeks before the election, you do so at your own peril.

That kind of stuff seems like common sense today, but there was a time when it was not obvious. I honestly believe most pollsters really do want to be right so they try to make adjustments that will improve the efficiency of their polling.

It is still important to remember that all polls are not conducted equally. You need to know who is behind a poll and whether that person or group has a reputation for leaning to one side or the other. You need to know how questions are worded — even the slightest variation can affect the results, and some pollsters do choose certain words that are likely to get the kind of response they want.

(For such people, I suppose, a good thesaurus is the most valuable professional investment they can make.)

Those are issues that have affected polling all along, but new issues always crop up. For example, American law prevents pollsters from calling phone owners who will be charged simply for answering the call so people whose only phone is a cell phone will be underrepresented — and that affects certain demographic groups (the young, the poor, etc.) more than others.

That's the thing about polling. It's a work in progress.

Personally, I tend to favor Gallup. Gallup has been around much longer, and it has more credibility than the others, more of a reputation for neutrality.

But I pay attention to the others as well. Even if they have a bias of some kind, they can still tell you things about the public mood.

Having said that, I think there are a lot of messages coming from two polls that have come out in recent days — particularly the Washington Post/ABC News poll but also the NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll.

As usual, though, the two sides are only interested in hearing what they want to hear — or reacting (perhaps overreacting is the better word) to results that seem to jeopardize their agenda.

Well, here we are, six months before the midterm elections, and there is a lot in the Washington Post/ABC News poll to worry members of the president's party, especially those who will be on the ballot this year. After all, the Washington Post and ABC News have been friendly to the administration.

By and large, Barack Obama's agenda is the Democratic Party's agenda. That is usually the case with an incumbent president. His party is his army. It takes its marching orders from him. So, even though the president's name will not be on the ballot in the sixth year of his presidency, he still hovers over this election like a Shakespearean ghost. His approval will have a huge influence on the outcome — and, historically, sixth–year midterms have not been kind to presidents.

Dan Balz and Peyton Craighill of the Washington Post observe that Obama's current approval rating is the lowest it has been since the Post began measuring it early in his presidency — 41%. That was Harry Truman's approval rating in May 1950; that November, Truman's approval was unchanged, and his party lost 29 House seats and six Senate seats.

Truman's successor, Republican Dwight Eisenhower, is the only postwar president whose approval clearly went up between May and late October in his sixth year (from 52% to 57%), but his party lost 48 House seats and 13 Senate seats.

Since the end of World War II, there have been seven presidents (or presidential teams) who faced a sixth–year midterm. In almost every case, their approval in spring of the midterm year was higher than their approval shortly before the election in November.

And only Bill Clinton, whose approval ratings were in the 60s in his sixth–year midterm, avoided losing ground in Congress, thanks primarily to the backlash over the Republicans' attempt to remove him from office.

The Washington Post/ABC News poll indicates there are a number of areas where work needs to be done.

Balz and Craighill speculate that Obamacare will be a major issue, as it almost certainly will. A plurality in the Washington Post/ABC News poll opposes Obamacare. Nearly 60% of respondents say Obamacare is raising health care costs.

But that isn't the only thing that has Democrats pushing the panic button.

Balz and Craighill also write that "[p]essimism about the economy also persists, with more than seven in 10 describing the economy in negative terms. Public attitudes about the future of the economy are anything but rosy. Just 28 percent say they think the economy is getting better, while 36 percent say it is getting worse and 35 percent say it's staying the same."

Part of that, I am sure, has to do with the increased costs of health care, but it also has to do with the recovery, which has been as tepid as a recovery can be.

Two–thirds of the poll's respondents say the country is going in the wrong direction — an ominous conclusion for a sixth–year incumbent's constituents to reach.

Strategists for both parties are certainly keeping an eye on the 2016 races for the party nominations, which is addressed in the NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll. That poll found that nearly 70% of respondents don't want either Jeb Bush or Hillary Clinton to be the next president.

The news in that poll was slightly better for Obama — it showed his approval rating at 44%, but that isn't very encouraging. It is still lower than Obama's rating at this point in 2010.

Perhaps we'll get a better idea of how the recovery is coming along when the latest jobless report comes out on Friday.

Forecasting an Incumbent's Chances

We are just about six months away from the 2012 election.

In the early days of my collegiate career, I was a political science major, and one of the things my professors drummed into my head (and the heads of my peers) was the conviction that voters reach their conclusions about an incumbent about six months before the election.

That is a piece of conventional wisdom that has held up rather well, whereas I have found that people who rely on surveys that measure the likability of an incumbent inevitably are misled.

When times are generally good, as they were when George W. Bush ran against Al Gore, voters can afford the luxury of picking the presidential candidate with whom they would rather share a beer. (Of course, the incumbent wasn't on the ballot that year.)

But when times are not good, likability takes a backseat to competence with most voters. In 1972, for example, when Richard Nixon was seeking a second term, the Vietnam War was still unpopular and there was some dissatisfaction with the economy, but voters were influenced more by whether they thought he was doing a good job (and most did) than whether they liked him (and most did not).

Job approval surveys didn't make their debut until Franklin Roosevelt had already won his second term — and FDR has always struck me as being a special case, having been elected president four times. The margins were different each time, and, of course, one of the issues when Roosevelt sought his third and fourth terms was whether any American president should be allowed to serve more than two terms. Some people who had supported him the first two times opposed him the second two times for that very reason.

Those campaigns for the third and fourth terms qualify as unique cases, therefore, and job approval surveys were still evolving, anyway, so the conventional wisdom of which my professors spoke isn't really applicable.

Nor, for that matter, is it applicable to 1948, when Harry Truman defeated Tom Dewey in an "upset."

I don't mean to suggest that Truman's victory wasn't a surprise (it was) or that voters were insincere when they told pollsters they didn't approve of the job he was doing.

I'm just mindful of the fact that Truman was completing FDR's fourth term. He hadn't been elected president. He was elected vice president.

And, while I can't speak for everyone, I can say that I have never based my presidential preference on the identity of the running mate. Those who choose which ticket to support on that basis are all but assuming that the guy at the top of the ticket won't complete the term.

That strikes me as being the same thing as trying to prove a negative, and, at least in my opinion, it is the wrong way to choose a president.

(In 1980, I did know some people who supported Ronald Reagan because George H.W. Bush was his running mate, and they figured that there was no way Reagan could survive the term. They became increasingly frustrated as Reagan simply refused to die — even after he had been shot — and they wound up having to wait eight years until Bush was elected on his own.

(There are sure to be some who have voted on that basis in other elections. I'm confident there were those who voted against some Republican tickets because Sarah Palin or Dan Quayle were on them. But my gut feeling is that their numbers were few.)

Besides, job approval surveys were still evolving, as I say, and the 1948 election would have a significant influence on how such surveys were conducted in the future.

So I don't include Roosevelt or Truman in such comparisons. Approval polling methods were still primitive when they occupied the White House.

But, by 1956, when Dwight Eisenhower sought his second term, a lot had been learned.

For one thing, pollsters kept polling right up until Election Day. They didn't stop polling long before the election, as they had in 1948 because it was a foregone conclusion that Truman would lose.

In early May 1956, Gallup found that 69% of respondents approved of the job Eisenhower had been doing.

A lot of that may have been due to something of a wave of sympathy for Ike. He had suffered a heart attack about eight months earlier. If the May approval rating was influenced by his health, that wave crested well before Election Day 1956, but Eisenhower still carried 41 states and received 57% of the popular vote.

Eisenhower's successor, John F. Kennedy, died before the end of his term, and his vice president, Lyndon Johnson, had been president for less than a year when he won a full term.

Six months before the election, three–fourths of the respondents to a Gallup survey approved of the job that he was doing — but that, too, may have been the result of public sympathy.

Johnson went on to win the 1964 election by a landslide — but, four years later, the increasingly unpopular Vietnam War forced Johnson to drop out of the race, and a month after he did so, the approval ratings appeared to confirm the wisdom of his decision.

In April 1968, Johnson's approval rating, as reported by Gallup, dropped below 50% and never exceeded that number again. It was tumbling by May.

Consequently, Johnson's decision to drop out of the race seems prescient in hindsight. Odds are, he wouldn't have been successful, even if he had been renominated.

Nixon replaced LBJ, and his Gallup approval ratings in May 1972 hinted at what was to come.

Nixon's job approval six months before the election was somewhere between 54% (his rating in late April) and 62% (his rating in late May). On Election Day, more than three–fifths of the voters endorsed his bid for a second term.

One can argue, of course, that Nixon's campaign was tainted by the illegal activities of his staff and his own involvement in efforts to cover up those activities. But the bottom line is that the job approval ratings pretty accurately measured how voters felt about the Nixon presidency in mid–1972.

Nixon's second term was cut short by the Watergate scandal, and his replacement, Gerald Ford, enjoyed high approval ratings in his first month in office, but his ratings declined rapidly after he pardoned Nixon.

In May 1976, he received approval ratings that hinted at what would happen in the election. For members of Barack Obama's staff, it might be instructive to study the Ford campaign because Ford's approval in mid–1976 was close to where Obama's has been lately — just short of 50%.

Ford, of course, went on to lose to Jimmy Carter in a very close election. Some people have been tempted to presume that it was almost entirely because, not having voted for him to begin with, voters felt no real allegiance to Ford — but he lost largely due to his job performance, because he pardoned Nixon, not because voters stopped liking him. He was still affable Jerry Ford in the minds of most.

But voters did not like the decision to pardon Nixon.

The voters definitely soured on Carter by the time he sought a second term in 1980, and the approval ratings six months out did more than hint at that. In May 1980, Gallup found that the share of voters who approved of the job he had been doing was in the upper 30s and lower 40s.

When the voters went to the polls that November, Carter received 41% of the vote and carried six states. Reagan was elected in a landslide.

In 1984, Reagan won a second term in spite of a jobless rate that was higher than it had been for any successful incumbent in nearly 50 years.

It was conceded at the time that Reagan was widely liked by the American people, but their electoral endorsement of his presidency in November was foreshadowed by Gallup polls in May that indicated that (1) a majority approved of the job he was doing, and (2) that majority was growing, not declining.

When the votes were counted in November, Reagan received nearly 59% of the vote and carried 49 states.

Reagan's vice president, George H.W. Bush, was elected in 1988 when Reagan was constitutionally prohibited from running again, and his lightning–like victory in the Gulf War seemed to be propelling him to a second term — but a funny thing happened to Bush on the way. A recession derailed him.

The recession was mild by historical standards — certainly when compared to the one that Americans have been slogging through since late 2007 — but it was bad enough to lower Bush's approval ratings from the 50s in late 1991 to 42% by May 1992, according to Gallup.

Once again, it was a reliable predictor of the incumbent's fate. Bush went on to lose to Bill Clinton in a three–man race.

The economy was better four years later when Clinton sought his second term.

Clinton's Democrats lost control of Congress during the 1994 midterms, but Clinton, through a combination of shrewd political moves and sheer good fortune, was on an upward trajectory in May 1996. Six months before the election, CNN/Time reported that 51% of Americans approved of the job he was doing; Gallup found that 55% approved.

The endorsements were solid, if not resounding — as were November's election returns. Clinton was re–elected with 49% of the vote and the support of 31 states.

In 2000, of course, George W. Bush defeated Gore in the Electoral College but lost the popular vote. Although extremely rare, such an outcome was not unheard of — but, to be old enough to remember the last time it happened, one would have to be at least 130 years old when Bush was elected — and there were no job approval surveys in those days.

That probably made Bush something of an exception to the conventional wisdom concerning the relationship between job approval numbers and eventual electoral verdicts on incumbents — since he hadn't received the support of at least a plurality of the voters the first time, as nearly every duly elected president has.

But the job approval rule still held true when Bush sought his second term in 2004.

The job approval ratings in May 2004 warned Bush that he would face a close race in November. NBC/Wall Street Journal, Gallup and other surveys in early May found about as many Americans who disapproved of his job performance as approved.

And that was borne out in the general election, when Bush received less than 51% of the vote and the support of 31 states. In the Electoral College, he defeated John Kerry by 35, 286 to 251.

What will all this mean in the 2012 election? I guess that remains to be seen.

Next Sunday is precisely six months from Election Day, so any job approval numbers that are announced on or after that date could be said to be potential indicators of what to expect in November.

But Gallup reports that, according to his job approval average for his 13th quarter in office, Obama's ratings are below the average for presidents who went on to win re–election.

They're even below one president — Carter — who was defeated in his campaign for re–election.

J. Robert Smith makes intriguing observations in American Thinker that speak to the relevance of history — even though he doesn't connect the dots between job approval ratings and an incumbent's odds of winning a second term.

"Presidential election history gives us indications," Smith writes, "that Mr. Obama either squeaks back into the White House or gets an undignified boot in the back of his designer trousers. ... [O]nly Jerry Ford lost his re–election bid narrowly. Odds are, if Mr. Obama loses, it will probably be on the order of [Herbert] Hoover (1932) or Carter (1980)."

The Tipping Point?

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"All I know is what I read in the papers."

Will Rogers

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Sometimes I feel like Will Rogers — although these days, with the newspaper industry on life support in many markets, I guess the more appropriate reference would be what I read on news web sites — or something similar.

The president says the economy is getting better and that another recession is not going to happen.

But Morgan Stanley says that prospect is more, not less, likely.

Wall Street clearly puts more — ahem — stock in Morgan Stanley than Barack Obama. Stocks closed down again yesterday, and there is considerable anxiety about the week ahead.

There is a lot of bad news about the economy these days, a lot of uncertainty.

Jobless claims are up.

Gallup reports that confidence in Obama to handle the economy is at its lowest point in his presidency — with only 26% approving.

Obama says he has a strategy to put America back to work — and he will unveil it right after Labor Day, which I suppose is better than what he did for the jobless on his first Labor Day in office.

But why the delay? So he and his family can ride their bikes on Martha's Vineyard for a couple of weeks? If he's got a plan — at long last — shouldn't it be treated with the urgency that this administration has promised but never delivered to the unemployed — and call Congress into special session?

His protests sound a lot to me like when Richard Nixon said he had a "secret plan" to end the war in Vietnam — and the American public, weary of the war and Lyndon Johnson, bought it. No details were required.

Nixon was the challenger at the time, not the incumbent, and that is a difference this president simply cannot comprehend. Challengers can speak like outsiders because they are outsiders — even if there was a time when they were insiders.

Presidents are the flip side of the coin. They may well have been seen as outsiders when they were elected, but the very act of being elected transformed them from outsiders to insiders. They were elected to use the power of the office for the common good. Their re–election campaigns tend to be about how well they have done that.

Presidencies, regardless of how novel they may seem at first, have relatively short shelf lives. The American public tends to be quite generous with its presidents — and it has been generous with this one, believe it or not. It is hard to imagine any of his most recent predecessors enjoying popularity ratings in the 40s, as Obama has, in spite of an unemployment rate that is officially around 9.0% but unofficially may be twice as high.

As I listened to Obama complaining about the "bad luck" that has plagued him in recent months, it sounded a lot to me like the kind of thing I have heard from other one–term presidents in my life — Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush — but also from some twice–elected presidents.

I think a majority of voters have stopped listening to Obama. And, in my experience, when they have stopped listening, the president needs to start packing.

James Pethokoukis of Reuters puts Obama's prospects into historical context: "In fact, if a) the economic forecasts of Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs are accurate, and b) voters behave as they usually do during bad economic times, then c) Barack Obama will be a one–term president."

Independents' Day

Barack Obama's job approval has matched his presidential low, according to Gallup's three–day tracking poll.

As Michael Memoli and Peter Nicholas write in the Los Angeles Times, that could be attributed to "gas prices, the budget debate, or simply the usual ups and downs of public opinion polling."

And it is true that some presidents receive something of a "bounce" in popularity after their parties experience a "shellacking" in the midterm elections. It is usually understood that the recipient of such a bounce will come back to earth.

That bounce comes around at different times for different presidents.

• Bill Clinton, for example, saw his popularity decline to about 40% between Election Day 1994 and the end of the year, but he began to turn things around in 1995.
  
  Clinton, of course, had his ups and downs for the remainder of his presidency, but he (a) never fell to 40% again, and (b) went on to win re–election.


• Similarly, Ronald Reagan dropped to 35% by the end of January 1983 after losing more than 20 seats in the House in the 1982 midterms.
  
  Reagan also rebounded, had his high and low moments and won re–election.

But there have also been those presidents like Lyndon Johnson who won by wide margins, then saw their parties go down in flames in the midterms and ended up not running for another term.

In Johnson's case, he was elected by a landslide in 1964, but his party lost a ton of seats in Congress in 1966, in no small part because of the public's souring on the Vietnam War. Shortly after the midterms, LBJ's popularity was a respectable 48%, but it seldom got that high again, and he dropped out of the race in 1968.

Obama's bounce came shortly after the midterms, but it seems to have peaked rather quickly and is making its way back to earth.

There's a cautionary tale in there for the president, I think. A president must seize his opportunities while he can.

In those roughly six months in late 2009 when the Democrats held a filibuster–proof majority, they chose to wield their power on behalf of a Supreme Court nomination that was in no way threatened and the health care reform bill — and alienated, I believe, many Americans who may have, at one time, identified with one of the parties but now call themselves independents.

Independents have been part of the political landscape all along, but most of the time they have represented a fairly small portion of the electorate.

Many of those independents, especially the newer ones, had misgivings about Obama but were willing to give him a chance because they were disappointed in (or discouraged by) Republican leadership. And many independents opted to give the Republicans a chance in 2000 because they were disappointed in (or discouraged by) Bill Clinton's leadership.

If their numbers are growing, it is because they are increasingly disenchanted with all politicians.

Now and in the future, it seems to me, presidents can be less certain of the continued support of those who voted for them in the last election. For many more people than was true when I was a child, the last election simply does not equal a long–term commitment.

Be that as it may, Gallup says Obama's decline in job approval is most pronounced among those who call themselves independents. Gallup doesn't discuss the portion of the electorate that says it is independent. But it reports that Obama's average in that group was 48% between 2009 and 2011.

Thus far in 2011, his approval among independents stands at 44% — and, even more ominously, Obama's approval among independents between Tuesday and Thursday of this week (a period that includes Obama's speech on fiscal policy on Wednesday) is — wait for it — 35%.

A president who has recently launched his campaign for re–election (nearly a year before the first presidential primary) should sit up and take notice of numbers like that.

Gallup's raw numbers underscore the polarized political climate in which we live. A Democratic president enjoys high approval numbers from Democrats (although they aren't as high as they were). He also receives low approval numbers from Republicans (lower than they were, but, frankly, they couldn't drop too much).

Everything hinges on the independents.

The situation was the same for Republican George W. Bush, who emerged the winner of two close presidential races, and Democrat Bill Clinton, who never got a majority of the popular vote in spite of winning by landslides in the Electoral College, as it is now for Obama.

The faithful in both parties give their knee–jerk approval to and march in lockstep obedience behind their leaders, defending the indefensible.

But they can't win by themselves.

And, as Charlie Sheen could tell you, it's all about winning.

The Wimp Factor

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I'm not really sure when "wimp" was introduced into presidential politics.

I suppose the concept has been around for a long time. The word "wimp" brings to mind a cowardly person, a poor leader, and that is something that I am sure has always been a concern for the voters — but there must have been other words for it.

"Wimp" is a term from the late 20th century, and it seems to conjure up images of appeasement — British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and the Munich Agreement in the 1930s, for instance, but I don't think "wimp" was a synonym for coward in those days.

(There was, at the time, a character in the Popeye cartoons named "Wimpy" who was always trying to borrow money to buy a hamburger — but I doubt that he had much to do with the terminology in political campaigns.)

Today, the word "wimpy" tends to be associated with Democratic politicians.

I bring this up because the word "wimp" came to mind today when I was reading a Gallup report that said Americans were less likely to see Barack Obama as a strong leader now than they were when he took office.

This "stands in contrast to the stability in the trend for two other personal dimensions," says Gallup. Those two dimensions are concerned with his ability to empathize with his fellow Americans and whether he shares the values of his constituents.

In truth, Obama's standing in all three categories has declined since he took office, but the decline has been much more pronounced in his perception as a strong, decisive leader — and Democrats seem to have chosen to "accentuate the positive," as the old song says.

There has been less movement in the public's perception of Obama as being able to empathize with their problems or whether he shares their values. Hence, those ratings appear relatively stable.

And much of the emphasis that I have heard from Democrats who have been promoting the re–election of the president has centered on those two things — he understands what you're up against and he believes the same things you do.

At first glance, that might seem like a logical approach. But I believe it is the wrong approach to take. The poll numbers suggest that there has not been much movement in either of those categories. Those attitudes are set, and there is little to be gained. Those who disagree that Obama understands what they face every day or that he shares their values are in the minority, but they have felt that way all along.

There has been a lot of movement, however, on the question of whether Obama is a strong leader. People may think that you empathize with their problems and that you share their values, but if they think you aren't a strong leader, you might as well start packing your things.

The situation should be even more alarming for Obama because he has fallen from such heights. When he became president, Gallup reports, nearly three–quarters of Americans saw him as a strong leader. A year later, that rating was down to 60% and, today, it is down to 52%.

The growing crisis in the Middle East, along with the higher gas prices it has spawned, may force Obama to do things he doesn't want to do. It may alienate him from some on the far left. It might even lead to a challenge within Obama's party.

But the alternative is to risk being labeled a "wimp," and that has not been a good thing for Democrats in the past.

When I was a child, many Democrats in Congress were considered "hawks" because they supported Lyndon Johnson's Vietnam policy. That was a tough image, especially when compared with the equivalent term that was used for opponents of the Vietnam policy — "doves."

More and more, Democrats in general got a reputation for being doves, for being weak, indecisive, easily pushed around. I don't think it started in the 1960s.

I was pretty young during the 1968 campaign, and the Democratic nominee that year, Hubert Humphrey, had been LBJ's vice president. He was held accountable for Johnson's unpopular Vietnam policy, which could hardly be described as "wimpy."

It might have gotten its start when George McGovern was the party's nominee in 1972. But it wasn't mentioned much (if at all) in 1976, when Jimmy Carter was nominated for the first time. His opponent, President Ford, had his own problems trying to convince the voters that he hadn't made a deal with the man he succeeded and later pardoned, Richard Nixon.

But, when Carter sought re–election in 1980, the word "wimp" was being used to describe Democrats on a fairly regular basis — and the next couple of standard bearers, Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis, resorted to ridiculous measures to try to refute a negative.

Then, I guess, Republicans experienced something of a wimp backlash.

Ironically, it didn't really come in the field of foreign policy. In 1992, George H.W. Bush was on pretty solid ground following Operation Desert Storm.

No, the backlash came over the economy. Bush had gone back on his pledge not to raise taxes, and the economy was in a recession. It was nothing like what Americans have experienced in recent years, but, in the context of recent history, it was unsettling enough.

I have always felt it played more of a role in Bush's defeat that year than Ross Perot's presence on the ballot — no matter how much Republicans wanted to blame Perot.

Thus, I suppose, it can be said that Bush was seen as something of a wimp when it came to domestic issues. The idea was that he was weak and indecisive on economic issues. At the very least, it could be said that he was out of touch.

In the last 20 years, Democrats have appeared increasingly eager to take positions that are in contrast to their unfavorable image. During the Clinton years, the White House often found itself involved in conflicts abroad — and it was not always clear whether American involvement was legitimate.

There were those who contended Clinton was simply using situations to manipulate public opinion. Perhaps he did, at times, but, if he did, he wasn't the first — and no one ever satisfactorily demonstrated that he was guilty of that kind of manipulation, anyway.

Democrats were sensitive to the charge, though. In 1998, when much of the talk about Clinton centered on his relationship with Monica Lewinsky, American plans to strike where Osama bin Laden was believed to be staying were ultimately abandoned for a couple of reasons — in public, the administration said children's toys had been seen in surveillance footage and there were concerns that civilians and their children might be hurt or killed, but, in private, the administration was concerned about public relations and the perception that the actions were intended to divert attention from the president's relationship with an intern.

A few years later, bin Laden put the wimp factor right back on the political map with the September 11 attacks. In 2004, Democrats were so concerned about the need to look strong and decisive that they nominated a Vietnam veteran to run for president — even though, upon his return from southeast Asia, John Kerry made a name for himself speaking out against the war.

In the early 1970s, that was a courageous position for Kerry to take, but, 30 years later, in the aftermath of a coordinated and unprovoked attack on both civilian and military targets in early 21st century America, it was seen as weak, appeasing, compromising.

If it hadn't been for the economic collapse in September 2008, Obama might have had to defend himself against charges of being a wimp as well. His campaign began before the recession did, and, at that time, it was widely expected that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan would dominate the 2008 race.

But, instead, the economy dominated, and Obama won, in large part because he was the anti–Bush.

Fast forward about 2½ years. The economy is still struggling, but the Democrats apparently have settled on the updated version of their strategy from 2008. They plan to remind people that it is George W. Bush's fault — unless there is a sudden and, at this point, completely unexpected drop in unemployment, in which case (in keeping with an old American tradition) the administration will take full credit for it.

Perhaps, if you are running for re–election and your economic policies have not improved the situation, that is your only option, your only excuse — especially when your party also enjoyed majorities in Congress that made just about any legislative initiatives possible for roughly six months.

But the Democrats didn't seize their opportunity. That was their fault.

I think it is a mistake to continue to point fingers. It comes across as whining. Part of being a strong leader is being willing to take responsibility when things don't go well.

Americans liked it when John F. Kennedy said, after the Bay of Pigs disaster, "Victory has a hundred fathers, but defeat is an orphan" and told them he would take responsibility for the setback, even though the plan had been put in motion during his predecessor's presidency — and he had been president for only a few months.

They liked it, too, when Harry Truman put a sign on his desk that said "The Buck Stops Here." They don't like it when presidents pass the buck. And they don't like would–be presidents who seem likely to pass the buck.

They like it when you "feel their pain," as Clinton put it. That was part of George H.W. Bush's problem in 1992. Too many Americans thought he had no clue what life was like for most Americans. And they like it when you share their values.

But they'll trade both of those things for a president who isn't a wimp, who will stand up for America.

Musings on Popularity

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"The 2010 Colorado electorate was a total outlier (67 percent with a B.A. or more), while Ohio was a near–microcosm of the national presidential electorate. Every Midwestern state for which exit polls are available looked pretty much like Ohio."

William Galston
The New Republic

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Gallup reports that Barack Obama's popularity is down across the board.

His highest approval ratings come from Hawaii, where he was born, and Washington, D.C., two places that are about as secure for a Democratic presidential nominee as any in the United States. Hawaii has supported the Republican nominee twice in its 50 years as a state; D.C. never has.

For a president who is midway through a term that began with approval ratings well into the 60s, those are the only places that exceed 60% approval less than two years before he must face the voters again — and, as high as the approval ratings are for Obama in those two states (84% in D.C., nearly 66% in Hawaii), they're still lower than they were a year ago.

Thus, if this was Election Day 2012, Obama presumably could count on at least seven electoral votes, needing a mere 263 to wrap up a second term.

In fairness to Obama, several states are reporting approval ratings that exceed 50% — right now. That may or may not be true in November 2012, but right now New York, Delaware, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, California, Connecticut, Illinois and Vermont give Obama approval ratings in the 50s — the state of Washington barely gives the president a majority.

(The flip side is that Obama's approval has dropped by more than 10% in seven of those states in the last year — and all the exceptions also report declines. If he keeps hemorrhaging support at that rate, many of those currently supportive states could be in jeopardy as well. )

If Obama carries all those states (most of which, it should be noted, are in the Northeast), that would result in a total of 144 additional electoral votes. With the ones from Hawaii and D.C., Obama would have 151 electoral votes — but that still leaves him needing 119 to win. Where will they come from?

That brings me to an intriguing article by William Galston in The New Republic about two possible campaign strategies for Obama — only one of which, he says, can succeed.

But, before I get into that, let me point out that those states currently giving Obama majority approval in Gallup's survey are states that have been inclined to support the Democratic nominee in recent years. The last time a Democrat did not carry California, Illinois, Vermont, Connecticut, Delaware or Maryland was in 1988. New York, Massachusetts, Hawaii and Washington last voted Republican in the Reagan landslide of 1984.

Anyway, back to Galston's article.

He starts off by observing that, in presidential politics, the economy tends to trump everything else — and, with unemployment still staggeringly high, gas in the $3–plus range and food prices surging, it seems all but certain that the economy will be the dominant topic in next year's election.

A whole bunch of things could happen between now and November 2012, Galston concedes.

"The economy could over– or under–perform current projections; the Republicans could choose a nominee who's too conservative or lacks credibility as a potential president," he writes.

"But it's more likely that both the economy and the presidential nomination contest will yield results in the zone where strategic choices could prove decisive. In that context, two recent events are alarming, because they offer clues to what may well become President Obama's re–election strategy."

One of those events, Galston says, was David Axelrod's remark that Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet's triumph in last fall's Colorado Senate race was "particularly instructive."

The other was the choice of Charlotte, N.C., over places like St. Louis, Minneapolis and Cleveland as the site for the 2012 Democratic National Convention.

These two events, Galston says, "focus more on the Democratic periphery — territory newly won in 2008 — than on the heartland, where elections have been won and lost for the past half–century."

This, he says, has the potential to be "a mistake of epic proportions" because the U.S. has much more in common with Ohio than Colorado.

True, Obama carried Colorado in 2008, but it was the second time in the last 15 presidential elections that Colorado was in the Democratic column. It may occasionally elect Democrats to statewide offices, but it remains, at heart, a red state, and I believe it is a longshot to support the president's re–election campaign.

After all, Colorado voted for Bill Clinton in 1992, but it opposed his re–election in 1996.

And I wouldn't necessarily say that there was anything especially instructive about the Senate race in that state. Republicans nominated a terrible candidate; even so, a shift of 15,000 votes (out of nearly 1.8 million) would have altered the outcome, and many people believe the candidate who lost the GOP nomination, the state's lieutenant governor, would have captured the seat.

In what was clearly a Republican year, Democrats really dodged a bullet in Colorado.

What's more, Galston observes that (according to Gallup) people who lean Democratic or identify with Democrats have declined in every state since 2008.

"The median loss was 6.1 percent," he points out. "And every Midwestern state was at or above the median."

(That includes an 8.2% drop in Obama's home state of Illinois.)

The Democrats' base is shaky at best.

"The Midwest is home to large numbers of white working–class voters, who accounted for nearly 40 percent of all voters nationwide in 2008," Galston writes. "Obama has never done very well with this group, losing them by 2 to 1 against Hillary Clinton in the primaries and by 58 percent to 40 percent against McCain in the general election. And they turned against Democratic candidates in the vast majority of 2010 House and Senate races."

Thus, those 151 electoral votes are not exactly in the bag yet. And, even if they are, I ask again, where will Obama get the other 119?

Then 10 states with the highest disapproval rating for Obama — Wyoming, Idaho, West Virginia, Utah, Oklahoma, Alaska, Kentucky, Montana, Arkansas and Kansas — all voted for John McCain in 2008. They also voted for George W. Bush twice.

If Obama asked me for my advice, I would tell him to avoid spending much time or money in any of those states. But my guess is that this was already going to be part of the plan. It wouldn't be much of a change from last time, though, since he spent little to no time or money in any of them in 2008.

Arkansas, Kentucky and West Virginia last voted for a Democrat in 1996. The others haven't voted for a Democrat since Lyndon Johnson in 1964.

Gallup says Obama's approval rating in Colorado is currently 45%, approximately the same as Texas and below Mississippi and Georgia, three states with large minority populations that haven't voted for a Democrat since Jimmy Carter 35 years ago.

Obama's 2008 triumphs in places like Florida, North Carolina and, especially, Virginia raised some eyebrows, but they were clear exceptions to the rule in the South. With Obama's popularity sinking, I doubt that he can expect to retain them, particularly if Republicans nominate a strong candidate next year.

(That might not be imperative. Gallup recently reported that Obama is running even with a generic Republican nominee.)

Back to the question. Where ya gonna get those 119 votes?

Well, let's go back to that strategic question posed by Galston, the tug–o–war he sees between Colorado (and the recently acquired territory) and Ohio (and states that have been voting primarily for Democrats for the last 20 years).

Apparently based only on political considerations, he favors an agenda that is directed at the working–class white, modestly educated voters in Ohio as opposed to the more intellectually inclined voters in Colorado.

Some folks would say that is playing to the lowest common denominator, but Galston thinks it makes sense — and so do I.

Obama swept the Midwestern states by generally wide margins two years ago, but Gallup's numbers show him in a precarious position there.

If approval ratings are any guide, only Illinois would be likely to vote for Obama today. Michigan (49% approve) would be close; so would Minnesota (48%) and Ohio (47%), but Indiana (44%) appears poised to resume voting for Republicans. Barring a dramatic development, I think you'll see Indiana voting for the GOP nominee next year.

The Democrats' decision not to hold their convention in St. Louis may have been a wise move. Now, personally, I love St. Louis, but I don't think Obama can win the Show–Me State, where only 41% approve of his performance as president. There wouldn't have been much to gain there.

Well, he didn't win Missouri last time, anyway. And he did win North Carolina. That is true, but I don't think he will be able to hold North Carolina, even with the convention being held in Charlotte.

What about the other states that voted for Obama?

Those states are torn. If Monday had been Labor Day 2012 instead of Presidents Day 2011, Obama would have had a lot of ground to make up and not a lot of time to do it. His biggest problem is that this is not confined to a single region. It's all over the map — New Mexico's approval is 49%. Nevada's is 47%. Oregon's is 48%. So is Iowa's. Pennsylvania's is 46%.

I guess 2011 will be the year Obama will have to earn his salary.

And a good way for him to keep earning that salary would be to do whatever he can help unemployed Americans start earning salaries, too.

Destined for Greatness?

Art Linkletter used to say that kids say the darnedest things.

But those kids had nothing on some of the adults living in America today.

According to Frank Newport of Gallup, "Americans are most likely to say Ronald Reagan was the nation's greatest president."

I'm not trying to turn this into an English lecture, but it seems to me that sentence really should say Americans are more likely to name Reagan, not most likely.

To me, the latter implies a majority, and nothing resembling a majority picked Reagan. He actually got 19%, which was more than anyone else, but it was hardly a landslide.

The runnerup, Abraham Lincoln, was the choice of 14%. The third–place finisher was Bill Clinton with 13%. John F. Kennedy was fourth with 11%, and George Washington was fifth with 10%.

It was obvious a couple of weeks ago, when the nation observed the 100th anniversary of Reagan's birth, that Americans generally respect the 40th president, but it's wrong to rank him the greatest president — even if you agree with everything he ever said in public — which I did not.

As I wrote here a couple of years ago, when C–SPAN released its rankings of the presidents, you have to give history a chance to catch its breath by allowing a president's actions some time to bear fruit.

"I would say that any presidency that ended in the last 20 years should not be considered," I wrote. "That would remove both of the Bushes and Bill Clinton from consideration, although the elder Bush would be eligible in the first survey that is taken after the next presidential election.

"Twenty years is an arbitrary figure, though. Based on my personal observation, it would be wiser to allow 30 years — thus giving history additional time to render its assessment. Using that yardstick, the Reagan and Carter presidencies would not be eligible for ranking this time."

Under that restriction, Jimmy Carter would now be eligible for consideration as the greatest president, but Reagan would not.

If it seems unlikely that Carter would be chosen as the greatest president in American history, consider this. Gallup reports that 1% of respondents did name him as America's greatest president.

For that matter, both Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon — the two most reviled presidents in my lifetime — got some support in the survey. Not much, but some.

Anyway, if that 30–year restriction was in place, then any folks who named Reagan, Bill Clinton, either of the Bushes or Barack Obama would have to choose someone else.

That would free up about two–fifths of the respondents — as it should. It's still too early to pass that kind of judgment on those five presidents — especially the incumbent because his administration is still in office.

How can we judge the effectiveness of his policies at this point, especially when his signature legislative achievement, health care reform, really will not begin to have an impact for a few more years? Yet 5% of the respondents chose him.

Remember the phrase "destined for greatness."

It seems to me that, if a man is going to be judged truly great, it will be revealed over a long period of time.

It is not achieved if one simply wins an election — or even two.

Nor is it gained through seductive oration.

It is a marathon, not a sprint.

Greatness truly is a destination.

Winning the Future

During his State of the Union address last month, Barack Obama spoke of "winning the future."

To most ears, it had a positive sound to it — even if Sarah Palin famously used the acronym WTF to describe her reaction to it (and it wasn't an abbreviation of "winning the future," either, the way that Gerald Ford's WIN in the 1970s was an acronym for "whip inflation now").

Palin, of course, is a divisive figure. When she is the topic of conversation, no one seems to be in the middle of the road. She always inspires strong feelings, either pro or con.

For that reason, I have long felt that she is not likely to be the Republicans' presidential nominee — in 2012 or, for that matter, any other year. She's kind of like Hillary Clinton. Her supporters really love her. Her detractors really hate her.

No middle ground. No room for compromise.

Palin's unfavorable ratings are just too high. To be as politically extreme as Palin and be nominated for — and go on to win — national office, you have to be likable, and she isn't. Palin may, at times, sound warm and fuzzy like Ronald Reagan, but, upon closer inspection, she comes across as cold and prickly like Pat Buchanan.

Obama is a different kind of politician, more inclusive in his words, less defiant in his actions. In 2008, I guess he always seemed to be cut more from the same cloth as the politicians who have been the traditional American leaders. He came across as someone who rose from humble beginnings — a latter–day Lincoln — and had a vision.

But, for all his talk about winning the future, Obama is not winning. He is running out of time. By this time next year, the New Hampshire primary is almost sure to be over, and the Republican front runner is likely to be anointed.

Obama is losing ground to that candidate, according to Gallup. A recent survey says Obama is running dead even with a nameless, faceless, generic Republican opponent.

At about the same time last year, when that question was asked, Obama led, 44 to 42. Now, they are tied at 45 to 45.

The big shift seems to be coming from the folks who said they were undecided. Last year, 11% of respondents said they were undecided. That number is down to 6% today, and the generic Republican picked up three times as many of the undecideds as Obama did.

When you break down the findings, it seems that Obama's support remains fairly constant among women and nonwhites, and his opposition remains equally constant among men and whites. But, while race and gender were often mentioned when Obama and Hillary Clinton were dueling for the nomination, they do not appear to be the crucial battlegrounds today.

Another component of his 2008 triumph was young voters, and Obama's popularity with them is clearly down. Young voters were unusually motivated to participate in 2008, and nearly two–thirds of them voted for the Democrat. Today, Gallup reports, barely a majority of young voters would vote to re–elect Obama.

How much of an impact will young voters have in 2012? Well, absent the kind of motivation that Obama provided three years ago — and absent an equally appealing Republican rival — my guess is that their participation rate will return to a more historically consistent level.

What may be even more worrisome for Obama is the trend among voters in the 35–to–54 age range. In 2008, Gallup says, Obama won 53% of the votes in that group. Today, only 43% say they will support his re–election.

That could be a problem for Obama because, unlike younger voters, people in that age range do tend to vote — at least in greater numbers than the young.

Voting, in fact, is something that people do more regularly as they get older. Thus, the older voters tend to be the more reliable ones. And maybe, in 2012, they will be motivated to support Obama because of his health care reform legislation (assuming it survives congressional repeal attempts).

If that proves to be the case, Obama may have the last laugh on all of us. Voters over the age of 55 only gave Obama 48% of their ballots in 2008, Gallup reports. Consequently, if health care reform is viewed favorably by older voters in 2012, a majority of them may support him for re–election.

But there is no indication that anything like that is happening. Only 43% of voters over the age of 55 support Obama against the generic Republican in 2012, Gallup says.

Poll numbers, of course, are fluid, like the approval ratings of which I wrote this week. And one thing that both should indicate is that presidents, with the "bully pulpit" of which Teddy Roosevelt spoke a century ago, have a certain amount of control over their fate — even when the midterm elections go heavily against them.

Gallup reminds its readers that, when a president is seeking re–election, the election is less a choice between two individuals as a referendum on the incumbent.

"That is not to say it won't matter whom the Republicans choose as their standard–bearer," writes Lydia Saad of Gallup, "but perhaps it matters slightly less than it would in an open election" like the one Obama won in 2008.

The voters' verdict has yet to be written, but time is short for Obama. To make a convincing case for a second term, he must preside over a clearly improving economy — and, as long as unemployment remains where it is and job creation remains as anemic as it has been, it will be hard to persuade voters that things are getting better.

On Your Own

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"You used to laugh about
Everybody that was hangin' out
Now you don't talk so loud
Now you don't seem so proud
About having to be scrounging
For your next meal.

"How does it feel
How does it feel
To be without a home
Like a complete unknown
Like a rolling stone?"

Bob Dylan
Like a Rolling Stone

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In less than a year, Bob Dylan will be 70 years old.

That's probably hard to comprehend for a lot of folks who can remember the lanky twenty–something fellow who burst onto the music scene in the early 1960s and composed songs that became anthems for social and political movements in America, a seemingly hesitant troubadour of unrest.

But those ballads may be due for a comeback, and, in the years to come, the twilight of Dylan's career may be remembered as a revival of the songs he wrote when his career was dawning half a century earlier.

I say that because, with each passing day, I get a greater sense of a growing unease and frustration. The middle class is being squeezed out of existence. People with college degrees, even advanced college degrees, have been out of work for months, even years. Many are losing the unemployment benefits that have kept them going — and with them, they are losing their faith in the future and in their leaders.

Speaking of unemployment benefits, I heard some people speaking optimistically recently about the fact that initial unemployment claims were below expectations for the first time in four weeks.

But Jeffry Bartash of MarketWatch quoted Brian Levitt of OppenheimerFunds, who wisely warned that the number of new claims (473,000) is "still an elevated number."

No kidding.

"Nevertheless," wrote Bartash, "investors welcomed the news and U.S. stocks rose modestly in early Thursday trades."

What do you suppose is the message that is being received by long–term unemployed Americans and those who are partially employed or "underemployed?"

Do you think it could be that, as long as you have deep pockets, deep enough to invest in stocks — and political campaigns — you won't be abandoned by your government, but if you're an individual who has worked hard for years to feed his family and keep a roof over the heads of his spouse and children, but you lose your job, not because of anything you've done but because of the mistakes of the higher–ups, then you're not even close to being too big to fail — and your government will throw you under the bus just to show that it can pinch pennies?

"[T]here are well over 14 million Americans without a paying job," writes Mortimer Zuckerman of U.S. News & World Report, "so the level of discontent is very high. Just how are they going to regain control of their lives?"

I've heard a lot of people worrying about Barack Obama's plunging job approval numbers. And, I'll grant you, those numbers are alarming, especially when you compare them to the incredible approval numbers that accompanied him into office (when, if you want to be technical about it, there was nothing, other than rhetoric, of which to approve or disapprove) or some of the numbers of his predecessors.

For example, Gallup currently has Obama's approval rating at 43% and his disapproval rating at 50%. That was the same approval rating George H.W. Bush got in a Gallup poll about two weeks after he lost the presidency to Bill Clinton in 1992. It is also the same approval rating Ronald Reagan — the same Ronald Reagan who is now revered as a conservative icon — had when his party suffered setbacks in the 1982 midterm elections.

And it's lower than any of the job approval findings for Clinton right around the time of the 1994 midterm elections — when Clinton's party lost control of both chambers of Congress.

Obama and the Democrats insist that things are better than folks think, a proposition that seems to me to be so fantastic that it belongs in a Monty Python movie. When Joe Biden, for example, talks about how great the economy is doing, he sounds to me like the Black Knight in "Monty Python and the Holy Grail," swearing that his injuries, which left him with no limbs, were merely "flesh wounds."

Maybe they are right — it's a tough point to prove or disprove, with much of it relying on the largely unverifiable claim that jobs have been "saved," which has an almost evangelical ring to it — but, if they are right, the president's got a helluva publicity problem.

And it is a perception to which Obama himself appears to contribute willingly, sometimes eagerly. There is a growing disconnect between this president and the people that Obama is unable — or unwilling — to see. Sometimes — the mosque near ground zero controversy is a good, and timely, example — he seems determined to take a position that is practically guaranteed to antagonize the most people.

To be fair, though — even though it is part of the overall picture — that doesn't specifically address the economy in general or joblessness in particular. But, for that matter, neither did Obama last Labor Day.

It seemed like the ideal time to encourage — or even inspire — the jobless, maybe talk about what he was doing to promote job creation. At the very least, it was a time to reassure the unemployed that he hadn't forgotten that they were hurting and he was doing everything he could to relieve their pain.

But he never did. His focus on that day was on campaigning for health care reform and preparing to address the school children of America.

When you narrow it down to that, however, it's more of the same. He claims that he's been working on and promoting job creation since Day One, but many of the unemployed have seen no evidence of it. They don't know if he's arrogant or flippant or if he takes it for granted that the voters will never turn on him, that they will always adore him as they did in 2008.

But, whichever it is, he's living in a fool's paradise.

You can be sure that the voters do know that, nationally, unemployment is at 9.6%. It was about three percentage points lower when Obama was elected.

Even those voters who are the least knowledgeable of economic theories can tell you that doesn't sound like progress, never mind those who have gone farther in their economic studies than the principles of supply and demand.

Yet I continue to hear the same excuses I've heard since 2008 — this is Bush's fault and all criticism of Obama is based in racism.

The voters can't hold Obama responsible this year. He isn't on the ballot. But more than one–third of the Senate seats, all of the House seats and three–quarters of the governorships are on the ballot. And many of those jobs are currently held by Democrats.

It's no surprise that Congress gets low marks from voters. Congress always gets low marks from voters. But who is affected the most really depends on which party is in the majority. And, with so many Democrats holding congressional offices, a big thumbs down from the voters in 2010 is an expression of dissatisfaction with the Democrats that seems likely to be transferred to the ballot box.

It's really pretty simple, isn't it?

So, Democrats, let me ask you this. How's that working for you?

I can tell you what the latest congressional approval ratings say:

• Let's start with the best news for Congress. It comes from the Associated Press/GfK, which reports that 24% of respondents approve of the job Congress is doing. That's a pretty significant drop, though, from the response to polls three and four months after Obama took the oath of office — when nearly 40% of respondents approved of the job Congress was doing.
  
  That might not sound great, especially compared to the 60s Obama was receiving around the same time — but, in the context of the history of this kind of polling, you can take my word for it. It's pretty impressive.


• CBS News chose to emphasize the fact that, in its recent poll, Obama's job aproval rating went up slightly.
  
  But, while you had to hunt for it, the poll found that only 22% approved of Congress' job performance.


• The NBC News/Wall Street Journal survey has been polling cell phone users only.
  
  The fact that those respondents are all cell phone users suggests that they are among the most receptive to emerging technology, but they haven't been as receptive to Congress, with only 21% approving of the job Congress was doing.
  
  And these surveys have consistently shown that the cell phone users are unimpressed with the direction of the country. Currently, the survey reports, 58% believe the country is going in the wrong direction.


• Gallup's findings were even more discouraging, in part because Gallup's surveys usually are the most reliable.
  
  And Gallup found that only 19% approved of the job Congress was doing.
  
  Like Associated Press/GfK, Gallup found much higher approval ratings for Congress in the spring of 2009, but that approval has declined steadily ever since.
  
  On the plus side, 19% approval represents an improvement over Gallup's finding from last spring. But it shows virtually no change in Congress' rating this summer.

I guess the bottom line is that, if you're out of work, you're on your own. Brush up on your Dylan.

If you've got a job, do whatever you have to do to keep it — even if you hate it.

And if you're a congressional Democrat running for re–election, you've got plenty of problems. Many of those Democrats, I am convinced, will not be successful in November. Make room in the unemployment line.

In the meantime, maybe Obama will say something — anything — about joblessness on Labor Day.

But don't hold your breath.

An Early Glance at the Senate Races

We're well into the nominating season for the 2010 midterm elections.

Some people have suggested that 2010 will be an anti–incumbent year, although there hasn't really been much evidence of this in the primaries — as cable TV's Rachel Maddow pointed out recently.

But political parties rarely reject incumbents. Instead, if an incumbent is going to be denied another term, it is likely to happen in the general election.

My argument — which, I must admit, was somewhat discredited by the results in Arkansas this month, although I'm sticking with it for now — has been that the parties, of late, have been pulled to greater extremes and nominate candidates who represent those views. Rarely, it seems, does a party nominate a self–proclaimed centrist for anything other than the presidency (and the "centrist" presidential candidates often turn out to be a lot less centrist than advertised).

Since there are no presidential nominations to be won this year, states will be holding their primaries through the summer months, even into the autumn, and we won't know until perhaps mid– to late September the identities of all the candidates who have been chosen by their parties to run for governor, senator, congressman. Voters in three states — the Carolinas and Utah — are going to the polls today.

My guess — keep in mind that we are barely past the first official day of summer, more than four months from Election Day — is that most of the nominees are going to reflect the views and values of the national party leadership. There will be some exceptions, but not many.

And, even though more Americans identify themselves as independents than Democrats or Republicans, most will have to choose between the candidates who were nominated by the two parties.

If the nation's independents truly are centrists, the elections may be decided by something as simple as which way the political wind is blowing.

And the prevailing wind seems to be blowing from the right.

Gallup reports that Republicans are very enthusiastic about voting in the midterm elections. Their level of enthusiasm smashes the numbers shown by either party since Gallup first asked respondents about their enthusiasm in 1994.

If Gallup's numbers imply anything, it is that enthusiasm usually translates to turnout because the party that has more enthusiastic members usually does better. And when one party has the edge in enthusiasm, it becomes a numbers game. If certain groups show up in greater numbers than other groups, their agenda, whatever it may be, is likely to prevail. And a party's agenda typically is embodied in its nominees.

If the majorities in either chamber are diminished, Barack Obama and the Democrats will have more difficulty enacting their initiatives than they have had in the first 1½ years of the Obama presidency — when the numbers in both chambers have been so favorable to the Democrats that it is hard to understand why anything in their 2008 platform has not been voted into law.

It is good news that jobs are being added to the economy, but the pace is too slow for many Americans who have already been asked to be patient long enough. Right now, it is barely keeping pace with the growth of the working–age population. Admittedly, that's better than the constantly–losing–enormous–amounts–of–ground cycle that we were in, but we aren't reclaiming those jobs we lost or creating jobs to replace them nearly as rapidly as we lost them.

Think about it. Millions of Americans have been left jobless since the recession began in December 2007, and we are often reminded that the number of long–term unemployed (six months or more) is higher than it has ever been.

I think it is safe to assume that many of the long–term unemployed have been out of work since before Obama was elected president. For them, the prospect of a "lost decade" is not theoretical. It is frighteningly real.

And it's the kind of reality that influences a working man's vote. A working man who isn't working has time on his hands to think about his predicament. Democrats tell him, "It was Bush's fault that you lost your job," and he may agree with them.

But that man who is unemployed and may have a family to feed and clothe may then reply, "But I voted for your guy to fix things. And things aren't fixed."

The fact is that the Democrats can continue to control the agenda in the House, even if their majority is reduced. But Senate Democrats will be in serious trouble if they don't have the votes to break a Republican filibuster.

So, barring the kind of political tidal wave that swept in Republican majorities in both houses of Congress in 1994, this year's Senate races hold the keys to federal legislative power in the next two years.

Midterms typically go against the party in power — especially if the party in power seems to be controlled by events and not in control of events. How Democrats are perceived in November may well depend on how (and if) the oil spill in the Gulf is resolved or how many more jobs have been added to the economy (and whether enough have been added to bring unemployment down significantly) — or events yet to come.

Things may be better or worse — or unchanged — by the time the voters go to the polls this fall. Many had already come of age or were coming of age when Ronald Reagan summarized the perpetual question facing Americans — are you better off than you were four years ago? For far too many, the answer to that question seems likely to be a resounding "No!" (Interestingly, Bob Herbert of the New York Times warns today that "the greatness of the United States ... is steadily slipping away.")

With that in mind, here are the Senate seats I think Democrats are most likely to lose in November. A lot can happen in 4½ months, but if nothing of any positive significance occurs — like a dramatic decline in the unemployment rate — these are the seats Democrats need to worry about.

• Arkansas: Democratic Sen. Blanche Lincoln won the battle with Lt. Gov. Bill Halter, but I think she will lose the war.
  
  Different polls report different results, of course, but Arkansas has been trending more to the right in recent years, and I'm inclined to believe the GOP will take Lincoln's seat in November. The only poll I've seen so far since the June 8 runoff showed Lincoln's opponent, Rep. John Boozman, leading by nearly two to one. His margin was smaller in a couple of polls I saw before the runoff — one co–sponsored by liberal–leaning Daily Kos, the other commissioned by Arkansas News Bureau — but Boozman seems likely to win Arkansas in what is shaping up to be a Republican year.


• Colorado: When Barack Obama picked Democratic Sen. Ken Salazar to be his secretary of the Interior, Colorado's governor picked Michael Bennet to complete Salazar's term, which is about to conclude. According to a Denver Post survey, Bennet and Republican Ken Buck are likely to win their parties' nominations and face each other in the fall.
  
  If that comes to pass, the same survey (which concluded last week) suggests Buck has a slight advantage that almost falls within the margin of error.
  
  Elections often seem to be close in Colorado. I'm guessing this one will be, too.


• Delaware: The seat that was once held by Vice President Joe Biden was expected to remain in the family, but Biden's son decided not to enter the race.
  
  I haven't seen any polls lately, but I've heard and read commentaries that suggested that Republicans are favored to win the seat.


• Illinois: Does it seem strange that Obama's old Senate seat is in jeopardy? Perhaps. But the corrupt governor, who was responsible for appointing Obama's replacement, did the new president no favors by virtually auctioning the seat to the highest bidder. And then Obama's replacement made the situation worse with his own ethical issues.
  
  The good news for Democrats is that the replacement won't be on the ballot. That's also the bad news. Because, although the seat is currently held by the Democrats, it is an open seat — and that, I'm guessing, will work in the favor of the Republicans.


• Indiana: It was my opinion, when I watched the election returns in November 2008, that Indiana's support for Obama was an aberration. Indiana has a long Republican history, and it makes sense that Republican Dan Coats enjoys a solid lead over Democrat Brad Ellsworth — Rasmussen says he's up by 14 points — in the campaign for the seat being vacated by Democrat Evan Bayh.


• Nevada: Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is in trouble, and everyone seems to know it.
  
  His opponent, a Christian conservative and a darling of the Tea Partiers, Sharron Angle, leads him by 11 points, says Rasmussen in a survey that was published a couple of weeks ago.


• Pennsylvania: Here is a rare example of an incumbent being voted out by his party. But that isn't the whole story. Arlen Specter had been a member of the Republican Party most of his adult life. But he switched parties last year and ran for the Democratic nomination this year. He wasn't the first party switcher to run into problems with his new party. He wasn't even the first this year. Alabama Rep. Parker Griffith suffered the same fate when he left the Democrats to join the Republicans.
  
  Anyway, Joe Sestak, the guy who beat Specter in the Democratic primary, is even with Republican Pat Toomey, according to Public Policy Polling. Rasmussen says Toomey has a seven–point lead. Daily Kos' findings are nearly a month old, but they showed Sestak with a narrow lead.
  
  I anticipate a close race.

Well, the Democrats currently hold 59 seats in the Senate so they could lose all seven of those seats and still maintain a majority. But such a majority would have much more in common with the majority Democrats enjoyed following the 2006 midterms, not the "filibuster–proof" majority they had when Al Franken was declared the winner in Minnesota at the end of June last year — and then lost when Republicans won Ted Kennedy's Senate seat in January's special election.

As I say, events in the next four months will influence things in ways we can't imagine right now, but, assuming nothing changes dramatically, Republicans will need to win three additional seats to seize control of the chamber. Is that possible?

On the surface, I would say no. A couple of seats that are currently held by women — Barbara Boxer of California and Patty Murray of Washington — could be in jeopardy. Recent polls suggest that both Boxer and Murray have seen early leads shrink in recent weeks.

And Republicans are not free of anxiety seats, either. Take, for example, the Ohio Senate seat currently held by George Voinovich, who is retiring. A couple of weeks ago, Rasmussen reported a tie between Republican Rob Portman and Democrat Lee Fisher. If Republicans lose that seat, it means one more seat will be needed to accomplish a takeover.

Presumably, the same thing could be said of Florida's race for a Republican–held Senate seat. At one time, Gov. Charlie Crist was a candidate for the Republican nomination. But, apparently convinced he could not win, Crist withdrew and decided to run as an independent. Now, Rasmussen reports that Crist is locked in a tight race with his former GOP rival, Marco Rubio.

In Florida, the Democrat appears to be far behind. And, given his background, I would expect Crist to vote far more often with the Republicans than the Democrats if he should win the election. So, while it is possible the Republican Party will lose technical control of the seat, it is unlikely that the Republican philosophy will lose control of it.

But, even if the Republicans hold on to Voinovich's seat in Ohio, and Boxer and Murray are upset in California and Washington, that would mean a 50–50 split. Joe Biden would get the deciding vote, which would give the Democrats the same kind of control over the Senate that the Republicans had in the first few months of George W. Bush's presidency.

Republicans would still need one more seat, but where would they get it? Wisconsin, perhaps. Democratic Sen. Russ Feingold appears to face a stiffer challenge from Ron Johnson than Bob Westlake, but Feingold won't know the identity of his opponent until the primary is held in September. Feingold is accustomed to tight races. He is seeking his fourth term; in his previous three victories, his share of the vote was 53% (in 1992), 51% (in 1998) and 55% (in 2004).

Other than the Wisconsin seat, I can't really think of any Democrat–held seats that would make viable targets for Republicans, but that, I suppose, can change, depending on whether the voters think they are better off now than they were a few years ago.

Still, there is that Gallup survey that shows enthusiasm at an astonishingly high level for Republicans this year. Maybe that will affect the outcome in Wisconsin — or in Connecticut, where Chris Dodd's seat is up for grabs.

But even a tidal wave of voter discontent seems unlikely to dislodge any other Democratic senators in 2010 — at the present time.

We'll see how things look at the end of the summer, when we probably will have some answers to some questions, such as ...

• Has the leak been plugged in the Gulf?


• If it has, how is the cleanup progressing?


• Is the economy still adding jobs ... or has it been stumbling?


• Is the American military presence in Iraq really winding down?


• And what about the military mission in Afghanistan?

At National Review, Jim Geraghty wonders if Democrats can re–create the magic that led to Obama's victory two years ago.

It's still a little early to reach a conclusion on that, and there is plenty of time for both parties to influence the answer, but, right now, I would have to say that answer will be the same as it was to Reagan's question 30 years ago.