Obama has made many mistakes, but his predictable downfall in the midterm elections was coming even if he didn’t make any.
Tippecanoe, Indiana. Five cars, five squirrels and several birds. Last Friday, the Tippecanoe Battlefield stayed sunny and desolate. The autumn foliage was falling onto a high monument, adorned with the statue of the hero William Henry Harrison — the man who not only beat the Native Americans and their leader, the “Prophet,” but the one who also destroyed their hopes to establish a confederation of autonomic tribes in Midwest. All of this happened a long time ago — 200 years, minus a year and a week to be exact — on the morning of Nov. 7, 1811.
Harrison kept winning battles after this one, but when he was elected president of the United States in 1840, he did so with the slogan “Tippecanoe and Tyler Too”: Tippecanoe after the name of the battle that became Harrison’s nickname, and “Tyler Too” after the name of Harrison’s lucky Vice President John Tyler — lucky because Harrison died only a month after the elections. He had been the eldest president until Ronald Reagan came along, and he served in office for the shortest time when Tyler replaced him. He too was replaced four years later but not before he added an important accomplishment to his personal record: the annexation of Texas to the United States.
In the elections of 1840, Harrison got the better of the president in office, Martin Van Buren, a political whiz known as the “Little Magician” on account of his short stature. Why, and how had the Magician lost? It was mainly due to the severe economic crisis originating from the policy of his predecessor, President Andrew Jackson. Van Buren was blamed for not doing enough in order to curb the crisis, but in fact he was beaten politically because of circumstances that were not likely to be in his control. That’s the nature of elections. Commentators ascribe an exaggerated significance to their results, while the loser’s outcome is attributed to grave mistakes. And sure thing, presidents make mistakes, but defeats are sometimes a result of natural circumstances more than a problem in policies or political planning.
It’s worth recalling this story the day before the midterm elections in the United States — a moment before the flood of commentators who are going to attribute this dramatic loss to President Obama, who will say that the mandate for action is taken away from him, and who will prophesy his premature political death. Yes, Obama has made a lot of mistakes. He did not communicate properly with the voters and has lost many of them. But it is best to remember that he would have suffered defeat in any case, even if he had not made many mistakes.
There Is No Connection Between What Obama Has Done and What the Voters Will Do
Even if he were not a leftist, arrogant, defeatist and disconnected. This happened to almost every president in his first midterm elections (George Bush of 2002 was the only exception of the last few decades because of the terrorist attacks of 2001). And one way or another, theoretical models presented in the last few months predicted that Democrats would lose more than 50 seats in the House of Representatives, no matter what Obama would do or with no regard to his approval rating. The political and economic situation simply requires such a defeat. And the reasons are the following.
The Democrats have a large majority in Congress, and the greater the majority, the greater the number of seats in danger. What the Democrats have gained, thanks to Bush’s lack of popularity in 2006 and in 2008, they will now lose to the rival party. And more: For the midterm elections, it’s much harder to bring to the polls those voters who elected Obama in 2008 — young people and minorities. Those voting are whiter and older, with whom Obama had less success from the very beginning.
And data revealed that a significant connection was found between the size of the defeat in the elections and the growth of income per person. The more that people perceive their personal financial situation to be worse than in years past, the more likely they will vote for the party that is not in power in this kind of elections.
All of this does not mean that there is no connection between what Obama has done and what the voters in America will do tomorrow. Presidents whose percentage of support stays higher than 50 percent lose fewer mandates on average in the middle of the term. And on the other hand, the percentage of support for the president is to a great extent an outcome of the economic situation. Anyway, the big question that should be asked in the morning the day after tomorrow, before crowning Obama a total failure, must be this one: Did he have a chance to pull the United States out of the economic crisis in a year and a half of his being in power? Anyone who thinks that the answer is yes should lay the failure on the shoulders of the president; whoever thinks that it’s not should understand that the Democratic loss tomorrow could not have been prevented and that Obama now has a long time to fix it.
Among the numerous articles dealing with the mid-term elections, this one offers an interesting point of view about president Obama’s fate. The economic heritage that president Obama found when he entered the White House was the outcome of many years of improper economic policy that led America to the current economic crisis. It was impossible to resolve this crisis in the period of under two years he spent in office before the mid-term elections. That’s why it was quite obvious that president Obama would be “punished” in the mid-term elections, although it wasn’t him who led America (and the world) to this crisis. Anyway, the big question one must ask is whether Obama’s economic policy will bring America to a better situation before the 2012 elections. Many experts doubt this, and if they are right, Obama – and the Democrats – will face a really big challenge in the next presidential elections.