It must be tough to be Barack Obama.
For one thing, being the leader of the free world can’t be easy, especially when you’re confronted with two wars, terrorists foreign and domestic, increasing political polarization and the largest recession in decades.
And then there’s the opposition.
Republicans in Congress have proven exceptionally adept at making life difficult for the president—a political strategy that might not be the most admirable, but that certainly seems to be working.
Nothing can be as frustrating to Obama as his allies on the left. Anticipating large losses in the upcoming midterm elections, progressives have asserted that it’s Obama’s fault for not being aggressive enough in his liberalism. With friends like these.
There are a lot of things to be said about Obama, and regular readers of my column know that I’ve said an awful lot of them. But only the most cuckoo, deranged, out-of-their-mind commentators can possibly think his problem is that he’s been too moderate.
One of Obama’s first acts in office was to pass a stimulus bill brimming with long-cherished Democratic priorities, the whole of which cost almost a trillion dollars. That alone would have established him as the most liberal president in decades. But that was nothing compared to his most significant legislative accomplishment to date: health care reform, which is easily the biggest liberal triumph in over 40 years.
It’s precisely because of these mammoth achievements that Obama’s party is in such dire straits. The stimulus was highly unpopular; a CBS News/The New York Times poll conducted a year after the bill was passed found that only six percent of those surveyed believed the stimulus had created jobs up to that point, and that 48 percent thought it never would. But it’s the health care bill that is the single most important contributing factor to the expected Democratic losses.
Time after time, in poll after poll, Americans emphatically told their leaders that they did not want the health care bill. In the midst of the health care fight, a special election was held in Massachusetts to fill the late Ted Kennedy’s U.S. Senate seat. The bluest state in the Union went Republican and elected Scott Brown, erasing the Democrats’ filibuster-proof majority in the Senate. Exit polling found that a full 42 percent of voters in that election said they cast their vote specifically to block the health care bill. Democrats ignored the clear will of the American people and passed the bill anyway.
In some ways, Obama deserves respect for sticking to his legislative agenda when it was so clearly unpopular. Leaders are made great by doing what they think is right even when it is difficult to do so. Obama certainly fits that mold.
Obama may well lose his majorities in Congress on Tuesday. If he does, he will bear much of the blame. But he will have lost not for abandoning his principles, but for standing by them. Liberals can ask for no more.
Nathaniel French is a senior theater major. He can be reached for comment at [email protected].
