Two hundred days after he took office, the “hiss of air escaping from the Obama balloon is audible”, says Rupert Cornwell in The Independent on Sunday. A recent Quinnipiac poll showed his approval rating has fallen from the mid-70s to 50%, shaving seven percentage points off his figures for June. The slump is attributed in particular to his Health Bill, a $1trn idea that promises affordable healthcare for all Americans but has stoked conservative fears that their country is “lurching towards socialism”, says Imre Karacs in The Times.
Healthcare reform is proving highly contentious – as it was for the Clintons in 1993-74. But Obama is attempting to do so much more, said Cornwell. There’s the ambitious green energy bill, tough new regulation of the financial markets, the overhaul of foreign policy – and all this when American is trying to extract itself from an economic slump. “In a way, it’s surprising his ratings haven’t fallen further.” Obama’s $787bn economic stimulus package has not proved an “instant miracle cure” and “trillion-dollar deficits stretch as far as the eye can see”.
“Mega-deficits are bad politics,” says Niall Ferguson in the FT, and a closer look at polls reveals that voters are especially nervous about Obama’s handling of the economy. A recent Today/Gallup poll showed that 59% of Americans think that government spending is excessive – and with good reason. The deficit this year is likely to be £1.8trn and the administration has no plan to balance the budget. Its own projections forecast a trillion-dollar deficit as far ahead as 2019. But Obama also deserves some credit.
His stimulus bill has made a “significant contribution towards stabilising the US economy” and although levels of household debt are still close to record highs and late mortgage payments and business defaults are rising, there is evidence that the economy has “passed the nadir of the ‘great recession’”. Second-quarter GDP declined by only 1% compared with a drop of 6.4% in the first quarter. House prices have stabilised, big banks are recovering and fewer jobs were lost in July than expected. Six months in, Obama looks lucky. But that could change. The “scariest possibility is that the runaway deficit leaves Obama with the worst of both worlds: exploding debt and flat-lining growth”.
In the “frenzy” of reporting about Obama’s poll numbers, it’s easy to forget that he’s only just begun, says Justin Webb in The Daily Telegraph. Obama could govern for four, quite possibly eight, years and “the truth is that, at this early stage, ‘No Drama Obama’ is doing all right. Neither as successful as his backers claim, nor as unpopular as his opponents hope, the president plods on with his domestic agenda.”
And while the Americans may have “cooled towards the president”, they aren’t exactly embracing his opponents. In a CNN survey, 44% of Americans blamed the Republicans for the nation’s economic troubles, and 23% the Democrats. The GOP has a “mountain to climb” if it is to damage the president seriously. Yes, agrees Ferguson. “Between Sarah Palin’s baffling decision to quit as governor of Alaska and Mark Sanford’s Argentine affair, the Republicans look not just leaderless but clueless.” The party has “traded in Newt Gingrich’s 1994 Contract with America for a suicide pact with itself”.