Penchuk.com

It’s all over the news these days, even CNN.  Obama’s popularity is falling and his unfavorable numbers are rising.  He’s facing large problems ranging from unemployment, war in Afghanistan, his health care initiatives, and a plodding economy.  If he doesn’t change course soon, I wouldn’t be surprised to see his favorability ratings slide further.

Here’s how I think we got here.  First, Obama came in to office with huge momentum, hope and an overall belief that change was good.  He immediately went about campaigning for his stimulus program.  Since it was so large and so controversial, he had a difficult job to sell it.  He did so by talking down the economy.  In an op-ed back in February, 2009, Obama wrote:

Because each day we wait to begin the work of turning our economy around, more people lose their jobs, their savings and their homes. And if nothing is done, this recession might linger for years. Our economy will lose 5 million more jobs. Unemployment will approach double digits. Our nation will sink deeper into a crisis that, at some point, we may not be able to reverse.

Translation:  pass the stimulus or we’re screwed.  Essentially, his comments added to the overall belief in a poor economy and violated his campaign trademark:  Hope.  One thing I learned from my economics classes back at ol’ Skidmore was that the economy is heavily influenced by opinion and psychology.  If you feel things are good, they probably are.  Same thing for a bad outlook.  As head cheerleader, the president didn’t help.  So, once the stimulus passed, Obama moved on to health care and started pushing massive changes to the system.  The issue at hand, however, is still the economy.  That’s the biggest problem the country is facing.  Obama hurt himself by firmly establishing the belief that things were so bad that it’s taking a long time for things to get better.  Perhaps unwittingly, he destroyed hope.

So here we are in September, 6 months after the stimulus and the numbers don’t lie.  Things are, by far, worse than they were. The economy may be a turning a corner but it hasn’t yet.  I just got a news update via email saying that back-t0-school sales across the country fell flat and that sales numbers are down.  Not good.

Today’s WSJ has a column by Karl Rove in which he writes:

Mr. Obama’s problems are legion. To start with, the president is focusing on health care when the economy and jobs are nearly everyone’s top issue. Voters increasingly believe Mr. Obama took his eye off the ball.

In addition, Mr. Obama is trying to overhaul health care without being able to tap into widespread public unhappiness. Nearly nine out of 10 Americans say they have coverage—and large majorities of them are happy with it.

That’s exactly right.  The biggest issue at hand is the economy and jobs should be the number one priority.  Yet, Obama is seemingly 100% focused on health care reform.  Guess what?  If someone unemployed gets a job, they typically get health care and as the polls show, they’re typically happy with it.  This puts Obama in a catch-22.  If the economy gets better, jobs will follow and health care will become less of an issue.  If the economy doesn’t get better, Obama can push health care, but his favorability ratings will continue to fall because the unemployed can’t get jobs.

In the end, this tells me that there has been a strategic error made in pursuing health care reform.  I don’t want to write about the pros and cons of the various proposals out there (at least in this post), but would suggest that it should be shelved temporarily so that he can turn the economy around.  He needs to start being the head cheerleader and be relentlessly optimistic.  Use the bully pulpit to start highlighting economic success around the country.  If he does that, he’ll be seen as the leader of the economic turnaround and you’ll see his popularity rise.