Obama finds patience thinning
By Anna Fifield in Washington
Published: September 6 2010 19:16 | Last updated: September 6 2010 19:16
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| Jobs drive: unemployed Americans apply for school bus work near Los Angeles at the weekend. The US jobless rate climbed to 9.6% last week |
Declaring an end to US combat operations in Iraq last week, Barack Obama told his country he would from now on devote his attention to the ailing economy, saying that restoring growth and jobs was his “central responsibility as president”.
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Some listeners may have felt they had heard this somewhere before. Mr Obama said the economy would be his top priority four months earlier – and in January before that ... and last November.
Voters are growing tired of being told that their president feels their economic pain, only to watch him devote time to issues that matter less to them: healthcare reform, financial regulation, Middle East peace.
Opinion polls show they are also growing fed up with hearing him saying the economy is on the right track when their daily lives do not bear this out. Even as the unemployment rate ticked up to 9.6 per cent last week, Mr Obama said his administration had taken steps to “break the back of this recession”.
Analysts say statements like these make Mr Obama sound “politically tone deaf”.
“I think he is really losing it,” said Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a Washington think-tank. “People are really suffering out there, so to tell them it could have been worse; that the economy is on a path to recovery – that’s going to send them up a wall.”
This week, Mr Obama is seeking to show that he is acting to fix the problem, outlining fresh plans to stimulate the economy. In Wisconsin on Monday, unveiled a $50bn infrastructure plan, saying it would create jobs from next year.
In another battleground state, Ohio, on Wednesday, Mr Obama wil call for the extension of a research and development tax credit, and press Congress to make it permanent, giving business more certainty.
But with Democrats facing large-scale losses in the November midterm elections, analysts say his efforts are too little, too late to be politically helpful.
“It’s obviously too late to do anything of a policy sort that would affect the economy,” said Thomas Mann, a congressional expert at the Washington-based Brookings Institution.
“But the point all along has been to try to shift the focus of this election from being a referendum [on the Obama administration] to being a choice [on economic policy].”
Mr Obama has increasingly talked about the election being a choice between going back to the ways of Republicans – who he says drove the economy “into a ditch” – or Democrats, who are trying to get the car back on the road.
The message is not gaining much traction among voters. Many political forecasters suggest that Republicans will win the 39 seats they need to take control of the House of Representatives, and some say they have a chance of gaining the 10 seats required to win the majority in the Senate.
“It isn’t just a matter of time. It’s a matter of objective reality – the depth of our economic woes and the lack of public patience,” said Mr Mann. “There are a lot of disheartened Democrats out there, and angry and energised Republicans.”
Indeed, Mr Obama faces resistance to his economic plans not only from Republicans but also from members of his own party, who have sought to distance themselves from his policies as the elections approach.
Tellingly, Russ Feingold, a Democratic senator for Wisconsin who voted for the initial stimulus package but now finds himself embroiled in an unexpectedly difficult battle to retain his Senate seat in November, found himself out of town when Mr Obama visited Milwaukee on Monday.
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