Jonathan Alter of Newsweek doesn’t understand why voters aren’t lining up to praise the president.
With Wall Street reform added to health care, President Obama is now
two-for-two on his major domestic initiatives. If you include big bills
expanding college loans and cracking down on credit-card companies
(further strengthened in the new Dodd-Frank financial legislation), he?s
four-for-four. Throw in the Recovery Act, which included more public
investment than even Franklin Roosevelt managed in his first year, and a
half dozen other meaty bills and you?ve got a legislative record that?s
already historic. Oh, and Obama (with Ben Bernanke) prevented another
Great Depression, then got almost all the bailout money back.
Perhaps if Alter flipped a couple of pages in his own magazine, he’d learn from fellow left-leaning columnist Howard Fineman‘s more level-headed assessment, which focuses on the response of independent male voters, or “indie men.”
The Democrats? support among this group has fallen to as low as 35
percent in some polls. The reasons are clear. They do not believe that
Obama?s actions have produced results?and for these practical voters,
nothing else matters. The $787 billion stimulus bill is widely regarded
as an expensive, unfocused dud, even when measured against the cautious
claims the Obama camp originally made for it. Health-care reform
remains, for most voters, a 2,000-page, impenetrable, and largely
irrelevant mystery. The BP oil spill has hurt Obama?s ability to fend
off GOP charges that he?s ineffective as a leader.
