Does Obama have momentum? BRIAN HUGHES The start of President Obama’s 2015 has gone better than most of a lackluster second term, with his approval ratings rising and his White House emboldened by a series of executive actions designed to fend off questions about his relevance. Yet, as many in Washington point to a possible turnaround for Obama, much remains the same for a president in the lame-duck phase of his Oval Office tenure. Just two months ago Obama was dealt a devastating defeat in midterm elections, forcing him to face a Republican-controlled Congress in the final quarter of his presidency. Hopes for a bipartisan breakthrough on major legislation appear low. And Obama can hardly claim to have a mandate for action. The latest Gallup daily tracking poll on Monday gave Obama a 44 percent approval rating, with 49 percent disapproving of his job performance. In other words, Obama’s poll numbers were underwater again after briefly flirting with the 50 percent mark last week. Such realities could render the president’s latest round of good news a short-term blip rather than a true resurgence, some analysts cautioned, particularly with so much yet to be decided in how Obama handles an opposition Congress. “I don’t know how you measure momentum. It seems observers assign momentum. I think this is the scorekeepers in Washington talking to each other, as opposed to real change,” said Charles Walcott, a Virginia Tech political scientist and an expert on the presidency. “Obama has made a couple good moves,” Walcott added. “Give him credit for a couple good moves. But that’s it.” The president has seemingly benefited from his executive action to spare up to 5 million illegal immigrants from deportation and normalize talks with Cuba. Obama was also aided by growing public confidence in the state of the economy, with the unemployment rate falling below 6 percent, the lowest it has been since July 2008. Gasoline prices are also below $2 in many parts of the country, a development Obama would have welcomed before his party’s drubbing in November. Knowing the fluidity of polls, the White House has been careful not to gloat. But Obama’s aides clearly believe the president has put the darkest days of 2014 behind him. “I can convey to you why so many people in this building felt really optimistic heading into the holidays at the end of this year, and that is because we did feel like, over the course of the last six weeks or so of last year, that we had been able to make a lot of progress on a variety of important policy priorities that the president had identified,” White House press secretary Josh Earnest said Monday. “I do think it serves as [a] pretty useful model [to] the kind of approach that the president envisioned for the fourth quarter of his presidency,” he added. Yet, even some White House allies are preaching caution. “Don’t get cocky,” a former Democratic lawmaker told the Washington Examiner, offering advice to his fellow progressives. “We tend to get too high when things go well and too low when they don’t. After the [midterms], it was ‘all over.’ Now Obama is ‘on top. Let’s put together a few strong months before we get too giddy.” Obama is hoping that his final two years are more in the vein of Ronald Reagan than George W. Bush. The former found a way to resurrect his presidency in its final stage, while the latter faded into relative obscurity, quickly overshadowed by the looming 2008 presidential contest. Obama will try to build momentum for his reforms in advance of his Jan. 20 State of the Union address, traveling to three states this week to trumpet his economic record. He will head to Detroit Wednesday to highlight the improving auto industry, talk housing in Phoenix Thursday and end his week in Tennessee Friday, where he will discuss education and manufacturing. But Obama has been in this position before. The president rang in January in 2014 by declaring it the year of his pen and phone, effectively telling lawmakers he would enact his agenda without them. Yet, Obama’s plans were soon overtaken by a barrage of national security crises, including Russia’s annexation of the Crimea from Ukraine and tens of thousands of unaccompanied children streaming across America’s southwestern border. The spread of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria and an unprecedented Ebola threat only further contributed to the president’s political headaches. As for this year, some analysts said Obama cannot rely purely on executive action to prolong a positive political stretch. “He will quickly run out of unilateral options that work as well politically as what he’s done,” Walcott said of Obamas actions on immigration and Cuba. “He’s picked the low-hanging fruit. For him to be regarded as a remarkable late-term success, it would take something legislative. I would not want to get too taken by the improvement we’ve seen of late.”
Posted on: Tue, 06 Jan 2015 15:26:44 +0000
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