this is an adventure » Barack Obama

Polls Illustrate Obama's Economic Policy Troubles

Benjamin Domenech — Wed, 07 Sep 2011 17:27:31 +0000

The Washington Post/ABC News poll released on Tuesday was one of a number of recent polls which show President Obama at record lows in terms of support and approval. (As Elizabeth Blackney pointed out on our podcast, the Tuesday polls were all the more troublesome for the White House given that they surveyed not likely voters, but registered voters or simply adults.) But there was one question in particular where the Washington Post poll stood out from the rest, at least for me, in terms of interest: an indication that only 17% of those surveyed thought President Obama’s economic policies were making the economy better. It’s the third question here.

Thanks to the kindness of The Fix’s Aaron Blake, who is the man, here’s some additional background on what that 17% represents in terms of a breakdown based on age, race, income, and party affiliation. In each case, for clarity’s sake I’ve removed the small percentage of didn’t know/declined to answer.

First, by age: only 22% of 18-29 year olds say Obama’s policies are improving the economy, but that’s his highest portion. He does the worst among 30-39 year olds, who are at 11%. For 40-49 it’s 21%, 50-64 it’s 18%, and 65+ it’s 14%.

Second, by race: as we’ve seen in the past when it comes to Obama’s policies, the perception is different – but perhaps not to the factor that you might expect. 36% of non-white respondents have a positive view of the president’s economic policy, while 11% of whites have that view. 62% of non-whites say Obama’s policies have made the economy worse or had no effect, and 87% of whites share that view.

Third, by income: across all incomes, the mood is dire. The positive viewpoint on Obama’s economy fluctuates only slightly, between 19% for under $50k earners, down to 12%, and back up to 19% for 100k+. However you define the middle class, it’s clear Obama has enormous dissatisfaction with his policies across all income levels.

Finally, by party affiliation. The real trouble here is not the Independents in my view, 86% of whom say Obama’s policies have made things worse or had no effect. The trouble is with Democrats, of whom 12% say Obama has made it worse, but a majority, 52%, say his policies have had no effect. That’s a total of 64% of Democrats who hold the worse/no effect view. That’s simply stunning to me, and it indicates that even if they are unwilling to part with the President when it comes to a pollster’s question, it’s a sign that they’re not willing to pretend they see good things happening in the economy either.
And that brings us to a final point: Obama’s 2008 run was one of the most exciting experiences for political supporters at the national level in American history. His passionate fanbase was engaged, active, and innovative. And looking back, it’s become clear that this passion helped disguise some of the Obama campaign’s failings in both the primary and the general. There was so much fire among his active supporters that many missteps had a much milder effect. If not just a plurality but the majority of President Obama’s partisan base now thinks that three years of his policies have had no effect on the problem, there is going to be a serious gap in energy within the Obama campaign operation, one that will be very difficult to replace.

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Obama's Terrible Poll Numbers

Benjamin Domenech — Tue, 06 Sep 2011 13:35:02 +0000

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On today’s edition of Coffee and Markets, Elizabeth Blackney and Benjamin Domenech walk through the latest poll numbers for Barack Obama. Hint: They’re really, really bad.

We’re brought to you as always by BigGovernment and Stephen Clouse and Associates. If you’d like to email us, you can do so at coffee[at]newledger.com. We hope you enjoy the show.

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Obama's Bad Poll Precedent

Benjamin Domenech — Tue, 26 Jul 2011 11:40:38 +0000

Gallup reports that President Obama’s weekly job approval rating has tied his lowest rating ever: “President Barack Obama averaged a 43% job approval rating for the week of July 18-24, tied for the lowest weekly average of his administration.”

They note that this rating puts him solidly below the ratings of Bill Clinton at the time of his government shutdown confrontation with Newt Gingrich, and his stagnation makes it look as if July will result in his lowest average rating for a single month yet. But there’s another precedent they don’t mention that should be far more troublesome to the president and his campaign staff.

Since FDR, ten incumbent presidents have run for re-election. Three were not re-elected – Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, and George H.W. Bush.

Looking at poll tracking data for all ten, and you find that most engaged in a significant trend-line in the leadup to the election – downward or upward – almost entirely tied to economic performance. H.W. Bush came off the popular post-Gulf War highs into a spiral as the economy stagnated. Reagan steadily elevated his rating from a mediocre 47% in the fall of 1983 to a robust 62% by election time, mostly by virtue of an economy soaring out of recession.

The question is, has any modern incumbent president running for re-election had a lower approval rating at the same point, roughly 16 months before the election, as Obama’s 43%?

The answer is: just one.

The White House Fumbles on Gas Prices

Benjamin Domenech — Thu, 12 May 2011 15:42:21 +0000

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On today’s edition of Coffee and Markets, as oil and gas executives testify on Capitol Hill, we’ll discuss what’s driving gas prices and other environmental issues with James Taylor of the Heartland Institute.

We’re brought to you as always by BigGovernment and Stephen Clouse and Associates. If you’d like to email us, you can do so at coffee[at]newledger.com. We hope you enjoy the show.

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The Pakistan Problem

Benjamin Domenech — Thu, 05 May 2011 15:04:50 +0000

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On today’s edition of Coffee and Markets, we’re joined by D.B. Grady, a correspondent for The Atlantic, author, paratrooper, and veteran of Afghanistan, to discuss the regional fallout from the death of Osama bin Laden in Pakistan.

We’re brought to you as always by BigGovernment and Stephen Clouse and Associates. If you’d like to email us, you can do so at coffee[at]newledger.com. We hope you enjoy the show.

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Mitt Romney's Missed Opportunity on Obamacare

Benjamin Domenech — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 22:48:07 +0000

While he’s still considered the frontrunner in many circles, Mitt Romney may already have fumbled his biggest opportunity to cement his status as a leading critic of President Barack Obama and boost his chances with the skeptical conservative base he needs to win over to have a shot at the 2012 Republican presidential nomination.

All it would’ve taken was admitting he was wrong.

Five years ago Romney strode to a dais to announce his ambitious health care plan in Boston, Ted Kennedy at his shoulder, between signs reading “Making History in Healthcare.” Romney was hailed for a rare achievement—applying pro-market views through a managed marketplace for insurance, paired with an individual mandate.

He made the case for his universal coverage plan in the pages of The Wall Street Journal: “Every uninsured citizen in Massachusetts will soon have affordable health insurance and the costs of health care will be reduced. And we will need no new taxes, no employer mandate and no government takeover to make this happen.”

Sounds like the way the Democrats later sold Obamacare, right?

Today, there is little doubt Romney’s promises were too good to be true. His policies have increased costs and wait times. Health insurance premiums rose in Massachusetts faster than anywhere else in the country—as much as 46 percent faster than the national average for some populations. Despite having harsher penalties for noninsurance than Obama’s law, Romney’s plan resulted in thousands of residents gaming the individual mandate—purchasing health insurance only when they need medical care, and dropping out when they don’t.

His exchange, which was supposed to create a streamlined marketplace for consumers, instead rocked the state’s budget with ballooning administrative costs and taxpayer subsidized coverage.

Romney’s policies increased employer-sponsored health insurance premiums, shifted costs to the private market, and led to the egregious price controls now being imposed by his successor, Democrat Gov. Deval Patrick—bringing the private insurance market to the brink of collapse.

Once viewed as Romney’s crowning achievement, this policy has become an ever-present political millstone for him. The “Romneycare” epithet drags behind the former Massachusetts governor whenever he speaks to conservatives. He has denied that his plan served as the model for Obama’s despised health care law, stripped passages about it from the reissue of his latest book, and inserted increasingly antagonistic language denying any policy ancestry for Obama’s plan.

Try as he might, of course, Romney cannot change the facts. Yet it would’ve been incredibly easy for him to change things during the debate over Obamacare, simply by admitting he had tried a policy, at the time untested, in the belief that it would work—and, sadly, it failed.

Nobody enjoys admitting a mistake, but had Romney done so during the Obamacare debate he could have vaulted to the first ranks of Obama’s critics on health policy. He could’ve spoken critically from a position of authority on the ramifications of a subsidy, exchange, and individual mandate-based system. After all, Romney had the excuse of not having known the full ramifications of the policy when he signed on, and his concepts had significant support from several large and influential groups on the center-right.

But instead of showing he had learned the right lessons from his experience, Romney stood by as Obama upped the ante—essentially taking Romneycare nationwide with larger subsidies, harsher price controls, and lower penalties for gaming the mandate. He can’t plausibly say his plan was good and Obamacare is bad.

Authentic humility is a rare virtue in modern politicians, and the vast majority of those who run for president have little of it. If Romney, the current frontrunner, misses out on the 2012 nomination, his political obituary will begin with this tale of his unwillingness to engage in honest self-assessment—his lasting inability, like so many other politicians, to admit that he just might be wrong.

Benjamin Domenech (bdomenech@heartland.org) is a research fellow at The Heartland Institute and managing editor of Health Care News. Crossposted from The Washington Examiner.

Block Grant Medicaid: Obama's Easy Path to Deficit Cutting

Benjamin Domenech — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 22:43:26 +0000

For the past several months, just about everyone in Washington, in both political parties, has talked about reducing the deficit. They all seem to understand that it’s what the American people want. And if it’s something they actually want to deliver, they have an opportunity to do so right now, to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars. They need to “block grant” Medicaid.

President Obama and his administration claim his health care law would create deficit savings of $114 billion over ten years. It was a key point of their argument during the health care debate, emphasized by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.

These claims are almost certainly false. They are based on a near-fraudulent use of smoke and mirrors, even to the point of double-counting money—a fact HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius recently admitted in a House committee hearing.

But let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that President Obama is correct and nearly every budget analyst in the nation is wrong—that his law really will save $114 billion over a decade. The White House should be very proud of this statistic. It is, even in Washington, a rather sizable number.

What, then, would the president say if he could more than double that money?

According to a newly released report from the Congressional Budget Office, the deficit savings from “block granting” just one portion of Medicaid’s services—long term care—to the states would result in savings of $287.4 billion over the course of a decade.

With this one policy step—which multiple governors are clamoring for and would represent a true triumph of centrist policy—CBO found Obama could achieve budgetary savings more than double the most generous estimates implausibly offered for his program.

What’s more, if this block-granted care came with provisions giving states flexibility in how they spend Medicaid dollars, the financial benefit for the nation could be a good deal more impressive.

Medicaid is overwhelmingly a one-size-fits-all program in which states have little ability to prevent the rapid growth of an unwieldy system which fails to deliver high quality care. Federal regulations greatly restrict states’ ability to direct funds toward the people who need them most.

Even before Obama’s law was passed, estimates showed Medicaid was on an unsustainable track. And with Obama’s dramatic expansion of the program, states are facing massive increases in costs. According to calculations by the Cato Institute, these increases in eligibility will result in a 17.1 percent hike in Medicaid costs in Florida, a 16.5 percent increase in New York, a 12.9 percent rise in Texas, and a 28.1 percent increase in Illinois.

These are costs states simply cannot afford to bear without massive increases in taxes, which would only further cripple the nation’s economy.

Obama’s attempts at triangulation since Republicans took control of the House have thus far amounted to nothing but rhetoric. It’s time he actually crossed the aisle to support a bipartisan policy which would empower states, help close their budget holes and establish himself as a true deficit cutter. Giving states the flexibility to tackle their Medicaid costs head-on would achieve all of those goals.

Crossposted from the Washington Examiner.

Elliott Abrams on Egypt: Special Podcast Preview

Benjamin Domenech — Sun, 30 Jan 2011 12:52:16 +0000

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Today we’re giving you a special advance preview of Monday’s Coffee and Markets with an interview with Elliott Abrams, a former senior national security adviser to George W. Bush and assistant secretary of state for Ronald Reagan. A leading expert on politics and the Middle East, we’ll ask him about what the future holds for Egypt, whether President Obama has had the right response to the crisis, and whether other nations will soon follow suit.

We’re brought to you as always by Stephen Clouse and Associates. You can find our iTunes feed at CoffeeandMarkets.com. If you’d like to email us, you can do so at coffee[at]newledger.com. We hope you enjoy the show.

The State of the Union and the End of Audacity

Benjamin Domenech — Wed, 26 Jan 2011 11:11:17 +0000

One of the most striking elements of President Obama’s State of the Union speech last night is how many times he passed up the opportunity to rely on the recommendations of his own advisors. On topic after topic, Obama ignored advice he had requested or been supplied, instead choosing to speak in broad language which signified little.

Perhaps we should’ve seen this coming after his series of White House meetings with business leaders, where he told economic experts inside and outside his administration, on the right and left, that their ideas were insufficient:

The ideas presented to him, though, seemed familiar and uninspired. “You know, guys,” he said, according to someone in the room, “I’ve told you before, I want you to come to me with ideas that excite me.” Nothing he was hearing excited him.

In Obama’s remarks last night, that malaise about bold new ideas seemed to carry over into remarks that, upon further consideration, were surprisingly tepid given the tenor of the times. His ideas were for the large part safe or recycled — his proposed non-discretionary non-defense spending freeze merely a “modest extension of his earlier proposal,” Sputnik line from a speech in North Carolina, and his repeated call for “winning the future” was the title of a bestselling Newt Gingrich book. The only distance Obama created from his own ideas was the rejection of the least popular part of his signature domestic policy, which is hardly an act of courage.

Of course, repetition of good ideas isn’t a bad trait. But repetition of easy lines instead of proposing hard solutions is a classic escape for the politician who craves the warm blanket of plausible deniability.

The most laughable moment in all this came when Obama called last night for finding “a bipartisan solution to strengthen Social Security for future generations.” Why, just such a proposal had been put on the table only months ago, by the President’s own deficit commission! As Reuters’ James Pethokoukis asked, “What, did Obama not check his in-box?”

Former Wyoming Senator Alan Simpson told me at the time, “I remember being in this same building back in the 1970s and we were talking about the same dang things. And if nothing changes, so will you!” I wonder why, when the very president who called for the bipartisan commission’s creation does not even think their ideas merit consideration as a viable option.

The reality is even in the third year of his presidency, we still know very little about how Obama makes decisions. We’ve seen presidents who pushed for more aggressive policy solutions to domestic problems, and always had to be restrained or walked back by their more modest underlings — yet Obama’s tendency seems to run toward the opposite goal. His foreign policy is schizophrenic at best. The health care policy that bears his name in reality bears little of his imprint. As Douglas Holtz-Eakin, the former CBO director who has emerged as one of the White House’s most perceptive critics, recently told the New York Times: “I honestly do not know where his policy rudder resides.” And Holtz-Eakin is not alone — perhaps this is why Obama himself thinks “You know, I’d make a good chief of staff.”

Ultimately, the real flaw here is one that goes well beyond personality — it is that Obama does not have a pro-growth policy solution for the country which inspires confidence. His choice of wording on a corporate tax cut could not have been more vague — and it is unlikely to unleash the kind of job growth necessary to begin the climb out of the unemployment hole. His firm commitment that he is “willing to look” at medical malpractice reform is a promise that is tired as ever, and will likely have no consequence. Announcing that a recession is over does is a line sure to get applause — but as a matter of policy, it does not put anyone on the path back to work or increase the likelihood of employers hiring again.

In retrospect, Obama’s choice of the “Sputnik moment” phrase last night to describe the challenges we face as a nation seems particularly ironic. The American response to the original Sputnik was, of course, an aggressive and innovative public-private partnership toward an audacious nationalist aim, climaxing in the moon landing a dozen years later. “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things,” JFK called out to us from Houston, “Not because they are easy, but because they are hard.”

Yet today, the man from Illinois who ran on the audacity of hope seems to have little stomach for such bold solutions. “Perhaps it would be better,” the President seems ready to suggest, “if Rice did not play Texas.”

Benjamin Domenech (bdomenech@heartland.org) is a research fellow at the Heartland Institute and managing editor of Health Care News. Originally published at The Washington Examiner.

The Cairo Effect and Egypt

Benjamin Domenech — Tue, 11 Jan 2011 18:16:13 +0000

In surveying the first two years of President Obama’s term from a foreign policy perspective, it’s striking how naive his Cairo address in 2009 seems today in light of real developments in the Muslim world. As time gives us perspective on Obama’s words, lauded by many in the American press and branded by the White House as the “Cairo Effect”, we see that instead of successfully encouraging the Muslim World to “forget their evil ways and learn to love us” (as a future president once put it) instead had an overall effect of freshly diminishing the influence of the United States, signaling an America eager to shrink from making forward-looking policy while working within a realistic framework in the region.

One example of this situation is in the nation that hosted the president’s speech: Egypt, where the repressive regime of Hosni Mubarak’s ruling National Party clearly rigged legislative elections at the end of November.

As wise observers know, oftentimes the choices made within the context of America’s engagement in the Middle East are limited to a decision between supporting clearly repressive regimes and allowing the vilest enemies of democracy and freedom to triumph — a choice in which the good is absent, and you are left with the bad and the ugly. Such is the situation in Egypt today. The recent election doesn’t pass the smell test — as Stephen McInerney, director of advocacy for the Project on Middle East Democracy, told the Weekly Standard, the Mubarak regime wasn’t “even making an effort to look good.”

Yet this repressive situation is not without justification — namely, the likelihood that a truly free election would elevate the power base of the Muslim Brotherhood, who were effectively pushed from parliament, left with just a single elected candidate.

If you are unfamiliar with the Muslim Brotherhood, perhaps it’s enough to say that their leadership in Egypt spent much of the last week attempting to blame Israel’s Mossad for a New Year’s Eve massacre of Coptic Christians outside a church in Alexandria, Egypt, as part of what one commenter branded a “Zionist conspiracy against national unity.” I encourage you to read author Claire Berlinski’s essay on the Brotherhood’s origins at Ricochet, as well as Belinski’s discussion of the views of leading Brotherhood voice Yusuf al-Qaradawi. She writes that the Brotherhood “is at its core unremittingly anti-secular, anti-Semitic, anti-democratic and anti-Western. It has fractured; there are divisions within it; like all movements it is comprised of individuals, some of whom are pleasant–but basically it has not changed.”

So what is the proper attitude toward a regime which engages in clearly anti-democratic practices in order to keep such foes from gaining a foothold? I spoke with Shadi Hamid, director of research at The Brookings Institution’s Doha Center, for his views on the matter.

“In recent years, the Egyptian regime has adopted a new, troubling character, moving from autocracy with a liberal veneer to full-blown autocracy. The most recent elections suggest the regime no longer has much interest in pretending,” Hamid told me. “In the 2005 elections, the Brotherhood won 20 percent of the seats in what seemed a victory for Egyptian Islamism. Since then, the Brotherhood has experienced the worst period of anti-Islamist repression since the 1960s. This coincides with the rise of a new faction of neo-liberal, Western-educated technocrats in the ruling party, who, somewhat ironically, seem to have less tolerance for opposition than the regime’s ‘old guard.’”

Hamid maintains that the Brotherhood and other Islamist groups are in a state of increasing crisis in response to this repression.

“The Brotherhood has struggled to respond to the regime repression and failed to articulate a clear vision for change,” Hamid told me. “The 2010 elections – quite possibly the most rigged in Egyptian history — further showed a movement hedging its bets, unsure of where to go and how to get there. Their half-hearted participation — they only ran about 130 candidates out of a possible 518 — came after difficult internal debates over whether and how to participate in elections that they knew would be worse than anything in recent memory.”

Hamid believes there is real risk of the Brotherhood uniting with the Salafi movement in Egypt, a view backed up by a recent academic study from Egyptian researcher Hossam Tammam.

“The danger is that the Brotherhood members may disengage from politics altogether and find refuge in more closed, conservative approach to religion, through, for example, joining Egypt’s increasingly influential Salafi groups,” Hamid said.

Yet natural disgust with this kind of repression has to be balanced against the concern, as Khaled Abu Toameh noted last week, that the triumph of fundamentalists would have an incredibly destructive effect:

“If Egypt falls into the hands of the Muslim fundamentalists, the first thing the new government would do is abrogate the peace treaty with Israel and close down the Israeli embassy in Cairo. This is exactly what the Islamic Revolution of the Ayatollahs did when it took over Iran. From there, the road to joining the Iranian-led axis of evil would be very short. The new regime in Cairo would distance itself from the US and the EU in favor of a political, economic and religious alliance with Iran and its proxies.”

According to Ilan Weinglass, editor of the Terror Finance Blog and a fellow at the American Center for Democracy, the regime is attempting to manipulate the power structure while keeping the Brotherhood down — learning from the experience of Hamas’ victory in Palestinian elections.

“Egypt uses the Muslim Brotherhood as a safety valve, basically allowing them a little more freedom when there’s more anger at the regime and then closing things up again before they become a threat,” Weinglass said. “It’s a problem for the general US policy of democracy promotion — a real democratic election in Egypt would lead to results we absolutely don’t want, a la Hamas in Gaza in 2006.”

This is exactly the kind of thorny foreign policy situation that demands a president with a coherent vision, one that amounts to more than just blandishments about respect and tolerance. If only America had one.

Cross-posted at the Washington Examiner.