Alex Massie Alex Massie

How do you know Obama is failing? Just ask people who didn’t vote for him!

How should one measure political success? That was my first reaction to Julia Pettengill’s Standpoint article headlined Is the Obama Presidency Failing? Sensible, I suppose, for Standpoint to present this as a question to be debated, not a verdict that had already been delivered. And it’s bad luck on Ms Pettengill that her piece should have been commissioned after Scott Brown’s triumph in Massachusetts and filed before health care reform was passed. Such are the perils of journalism.

Nevertheless the article is instructive, not least because of how it is organised and the extent to which it reflects certain strands of Washington’s brand of conventional wisdom. Since the author spends much time talking to some of Obama’s conservative critics and very little time with his supporters it’s not wholly surprising that Pettengill suggests that the President is failing and that he’s doing so because he’s not “listening” to the people and because he’s far too “partisan” and “ideological”.

This reflects a curious conservative view, namely that although liberals may win elections from time to time they should never interpret those victories as any kind of a mandate for liberalism. For that matter, Pettengill never lets the reader know that on a range of issues Obama has disappointed the left just as much as he has infuriated the right. On civil liberties issues, much to the irritation of liberals and libertarians alike, his Justice Department has retained perhaps 80% of the infrastructure it inherited from the Bush administration while the health care bill, whatever else one may say of it, is a long way from being the left’s idea of a perfect or even semi-perfect bill. Indeed one can certainly make an argument that in as much as Obama’s rating have fallen this is as much a feature of liberal disenchantment as centrist disapproval.

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