Now it begins.
The conventional wisdom on Obama is going negative. The Virginia and New Jersey elections were a tipping point: suddenly a lot of isolated bits of data jelled into a pattern.
Now come new economic numbers; unemployment is officially in double digits for the first time since 1983.
The next stage will come as more of the press focuses on the administration’s foreign policy problems. This is already beginning. See Joe Klein’s Time magazine piece on Hillary Clinton. Or look at this piece (courtesy of Instapundit) on the breakdown of the administration’s efforts to negotiate an agreement in Honduras. Here’s another drop in the steady drip, drip, drip: a piece on the crisis in the Middle East peace process.
Connect all these dots and you get the picture of an administration in crisis at home and abroad.
The right blogosphere is crowing about this; the left blogosphere is wringing its hands. Liberals are telling Obama he’s in trouble because he hasn’t been bold enough; conservatives tell him he’s in trouble because he is governing from the left.
Data that doesn’t support the new picture gets ignored. Take for example, the recent historic visit of Angela Merkel to Washington, where she became the first German leader since 1957 to address a joint session of Congress – and delivered an extraordinary, pro-American speech that highlights just how successfully President Obama has repaired U.S.-German relations in less than a year.
Back in the days of Obamania, Merkel’s visit would have been lavishly covered, with lots of real and virtual ink spilled to highlight the wonderful transformation in America’s world standing now that the evil Bushmonster had been banished to Texas.
And there’s another story that points the same way: “Brand America” is now number one again on a global basis. That’s not news anymore; the herd has moved on.
There’s even some massively good news on the economy that nobody seems to care about. Productivity at U.S. corporations rose at a 9.5% annual rate in the third quarter, and year on year we’ve seen the fastest increase in worker productivity since these measurements began back in 1948. Sour and gloomy as they are, commentators seem mostly focused on how productivity gains mean companies can get more work done with fewer workers, suggesting that unemployment may go a little higher and linger a little longer.
That’s true, short term, but that’s almost like reacting to the news that you’ve won the lottery by complaining about the higher income tax you now have to pay. The productivity numbers mean that the recovery in corporate profits may be more sustainable than many thought, suggesting that the stock market recovery could be real, not just a a ‘dead cat bounce.’ Better yet, it means that technology is continuing to deliver new ways of working more efficiently and productively, and that as companies master these technologies and apply these techniques, the workforce is going to become more productive – and living standards will increase.
We are probably still in the middle of the high-tech-aided transformation of the economy, one that is both accelerating the rise in our living standards and shifting the economy towards a more environmentally-sustainable growth path.
But this week, nobody cares about any of that good news. Obama is dead in the water now and anything that doesn’t fit that narrative isn’t news.
Don’t get me wrong, Obama’s problems are real. But , importantly, many of his wounds are self-inflicted. He made the mistake of giving a firm numerical target for unemployment: eight percent. He made the mistake of telling Israel, in public, that anything less than a 100% stop in settlement construction wasn’t good enough for him. Most important of all, he misread his mandate, thinking he was commissioned to bring dramatic change when voters were hoping that he’d be a safe pair of hands.
The good thing about self-inflicted wounds is that you can stop creating new ones; the good news about inexperience is that is doesn’t last.
The conventional wisdom was premature to hail President Obama as The Anointed One last winter; it is no better now as it hastens to write him off.