How Is America Doing? Terribly. Why Obama Will Lose.

From the latest “How We’re Doing” survey on the state of the U.S. published by the Brookings Institution emerges a highly pessimistic view of the nation’s future as well as concrete data on the depth of the economic and social crisis. “The can-do country is convinced that it can’t.”

Set aside the last-minute polls and the seat-by-seat House and Senate projections on the predicted Democratic losses. To understand the political earthquake foreseen for tomorrow in America, one must go beyond politics. The most complete review of the real state of the nation is contained in the “How We’re Doing” survey. This has been brought up to date by the Brookings Institution, an authoritative think tank close to the government, now in its sixth edition. Yesterday, the final verdict came out.

A troubling portrait: If America has ceased to be the land of optimism, it has good reasons for this, arising from the real state of affairs. There are 14 well-chosen statistics measuring the pulse of the economic and social situation. Extremely feeble GDP growth, barely two percent, is a historical anomaly compared to other post-recession periods.

Even more significant is the state of the labor market: The true unemployment rate amounts to 16.8 percent if one adds to the officially unemployed those people who, out of despair, have stopped looking for work or who have resigned themselves to part-time work or odd jobs but would prefer a “real” job. In fully 23 states, nearly half of the total, unemployment continues to rise. Houses, the principal repository of family savings, have lost 33 percent of their value.

The mood of consumers, measured by Reuters and the University of Michigan, has fallen to its autumn 2009 level, at the height of the crisis. It is the same for the Small-Business Optimism Index, which has again declined to its 2009 level.

The decisive data pertains to the overall outlook of Americans and their vision of the future. And it is here that an exceptional change has been measured: The nation that for generations amazed the entire world by its ability to “think positive” and maintain an unlimited confidence in its own capability, is completely unrecognizable. Only 20 percent of its citizens are satisfied with what America is today. And only 39 percent “Feel things in this country are generally going in the right direction.”

The three researchers who carried out the Brookings Institution survey — Karen Dynan, Ted Gayer and Darrell West — summarized the feelings of voters who tomorrow will go to the polls: “[T]he prospects for a rapid recovery are dim. A high degree of uncertainty surrounds both our economic future and some issues of policy. Congress and the administration have not resolved whether, or to what degree, to allow the Bush tax cuts to expire as scheduled by year’s end. The nation lacks long-term plans to address its deep debt. There has been little clarity on how or if the government will take on energy supply, climate change and immigration.”

It is inevitable that such a syndrome would be reflected in a desire to punish those in power. The favorable rating of Barack Obama has fallen from 54 percent a year ago to 45 percent today. Voters don’t even give him credit for having stopped the recession. On the contrary, explain the Brookings researchers, “Less than a third of voters felt the economic stimulus money hit the mark … and 68 percent believed federal dollars were wasted.”

The Washington Post, a newspaper by no means hostile to the Obama administration, summarized the dominant atmosphere on the eve of the legislative elections in the following manner: “The country is, first and foremost, fighting a war … Defeating America’s enemies will require long-term, difficult engagements in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan and elsewhere, lengthy engagements for which Obama has inadequately prepared Americans. The country also is spiraling dangerously into debt. Unchecked, deficits will depress Americans’ standard of living and erode U.S. leadership abroad … Then there’s the entrenched poverty of the black underclass, high levels of unemployment that may or may not be cyclical, decaying infrastructure, inadequate investments in science, a warming climate.” This is a dramatic list, more than sufficient to justify the depressive state — in the clinical sense — of the national mood.

Time Magazine chose to dedicate a recent cover to the optimism of reason. The title was “How to Restore the American Dream.” But the hope doesn’t extend beyond the title. The image in the background projects the opposite message: The photo of a house surrounded by weeds and a peeling picket fence, the symbol of millions of houses abandoned due to the mortgage crisis and judicial foreclosures.

Time’s lead story was entrusted to its most prestigious columnist, Fareed Zakaria, a major figure in American journalism but of Indian origin. And here is what Zakaria has to say: “But when I travel from America to India these days, as I did recently, it’s as if the world has been turned upside down. Indians are brimming with hope and faith in the future . . .[By contrast] 63 percent of Americans said they did not think they would be able to maintain their current standard of living. Perhaps most troubling, Americans are strikingly fatalistic about their prospects. The can-do country is convinced that it can’t.” Fatalism? This was not a term that one associated with the DNA of the USA.

It is a dramatic reversal of the most famous slogan used by Obama in his triumphal campaign in 2008: “Yes, We Can.” What is described by the Brookings Institution, the Washington Post and Time is an America of “No, We Can’t,” a nation turned upside down in only two years. In the face of such a profound and radical change in the environment, it is inevitable that the political grand jury would begin proceedings against Obama.

The charges are diametrically opposed, irreconcilable. From the left, he is reproached for having made too many compromises, that he betrayed the ideals of change: health care reform, new regulations for Wall Street, Afghanistan and other such disappointments. The right portrays him as a radical ideologue of public intervention who has dissipated resources, ballooned the federal bureaucracy and mortgaged the future of the country beneath a mountain of debt.

We will hear these arguments repeated ad nauseam in the coming days. But the political judgment on the last two years is not necessarily the best method for understanding the two years to come.

Wednesday morning, as soon as the results of the midterm elections are clear, will in fact be the first day of the 2012 presidential election campaign. A battle in which, yet again, everything will depend on the economy. The Pulitzer prize-winning columnist David Broder summarizes it as follows: “But if Obama cannot spur that growth by 2012, he is unlikely to be re-elected. The lingering effects of the recession that accompanied him to the White House will probably doom him … Economists struggle to analyze [the business cycle], but they almost inevitably conclude that it cannot be rushed and almost [always] resists political command … In this regard, Obama has no advantage over any other pol. Even in analyzing the tidal force correctly, he cannot control it.”

However, the Republicans should be careful not to overestimate the importance of their victory tomorrow. The Brookings survey is clear: Americans distrust Congress as a whole (right and left) even more than they do the president: Only 19 percent offer a favorable judgment on Congress.

And the day after tomorrow? Gridlock, or government paralysis, is the most common scenario for the coming two years: a game of reciprocal vetoes between Democrats and Republicans who are continually more polarized toward the extremes. Not the ideal recipe for a country that has lost its faith in the future.