George Packer on Obama's Troubles

George Packer offers a thoughtful analysis of the sometimes rough transition for Barak Obama from candidate to President in his New Yorker blog. He attributes Obama's declining poll numbers to a combination of the unrealistic expectations of the Obama phenomenon, the divisive consequences of acting on controversial issues, an obstructionist GOP acting in lockstep, and Obama's deliberative style.

On expectations and reality: The Obama campaign raised enormous hopes, and in the last days before the election the candidate seemed unusually grave, as if he knew that those hopes would be impossible to meet. Once he took office, Obama’s message became less one of infinite possibilities than of shared responsibilities and sober appraisals. Obama won with the support of liberal, moderate, and conservative Democrats, moderate Republicans, independents, new voters without ideological affiliations—the biggest electoral majority in two decades. Different voters saw in this relatively unknown politician what they wanted to see. And in his first year of governing, all of them have experienced the gap between their campaign assumptions and the realities of his decisions.

On the opposition: But in the past ten months I’ve remembered how powerful a thing it is for conservatives to have a target. Post-Reagan conservatism, with its overwhelming negativity, is back to doing what it does best—without even pretending to have a viable governing agenda. I imagined that in the aftermath of their historic defeat, Republicans would spend months, if not years, engaged in a serious internal debate between reformists and purists. Instead, the party has become more monolithic and shrill than ever. And in our constitutional system, a brain-dead minority party that spouts simple-minded slogans on TV and votes in rigid unison can be a serious obstacle to achieving anything.

On Obama's style: His drawn-out review of policy in Afghanistan shows Obama in this element: informing himself extensively, relentlessly questioning, challenging assumptions, boring down into the crucial details of the subject, and then doing it all over again. His intellectual style is that of a law professor—and we’ve all recently learned how much worse we could do, how dangerous leadership by gut instinct and snap judgment can be. But as President, Obama seems, very strangely, to have forgotten that his most important constituency is not his small circle of advisers but his three hundred million countrymen.

Even given all of this, there is the sense that if even some of Obama's policies are at all successful, particularly with the economy, this will all go away.

--Ballard Burgher