Campaign Notes: Lame duck season

By John Barron

Fourteen months out from the next Presidential election and America’s 44th President Barack Obama is a lame duck, according to those at Fox News. And if you watch Fox, as many conservatives do, you would be convinced of Obama’s unpopularity, incompetence, and the inevitability of his defeat next year.

Fox News’s Sean Hannity told me with absolute certainty during a recent interview that Obama is the worst president America has ever had.

Even worse than Jimmy Carter, Hannity said.

Obama’s worse because he’s made things worse, when he promised things would be better. He’s a lame duck, Hannity says.

But would people like Sean Hannity be saying Obama’s a great President if unemployment was at 6 per cent, not 9.1 per cent, or somehow gets near there by next November? Not likely.

Hannity also points out Obama foisted the “Obama Care” healthcare reforms on Americans, which most polls show the majority still doesn’t want. But Hannity and other Obama critics overlook the other polls that point out the majority does in fact want healthcare reform, just that some want it to go further than “Obama Care” does.

Following the Republican presidential candidates around the Midwest last month, it occurred to me that the last time I heard so many people speaking so contemptuously about an “incompetent” president they were sure would be booted out after one term was in late 2004. Back then, it was Democrats. In the days leading up to that year’s presidential contest between President George W. Bush and Senator John Kerry, I reported from Kerry’s hometown of Boston. Everyone was proclaiming there were just hours to go until “the end of an error” — when the injustice done to Al Gore in 2000 and the wars and terror that had befallen America would be righted at the ballot box.

Ask those Democrats and they were sure that George W. Bush was the worst President ever and already a “lame duck.” Never mind the bipartisan support for the Patriot Act, the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars, and the likelihood Al Gore would have probably responded to 9/11 in about the same way Bush did. It seemed that nobody who listened to NPR or read the New York Times could conceive Bush would get a second term. When he did they were sure they’d been cheated again and considered moving to Canada or Australia.

Sure enough, within months of being sworn-in for a second term, George W. Bush quickly developed a (metaphoric) limp when Congress told him where he could shove his Social Security reform. And he was paralysed from the neck down (again metaphorically) after his perceived indifference to the suffering in New Orleans post-Katrina. That political capital he famously “earned and intended to spend” turned out to be chump change.

Is Obama now a lame duck? Well history shows it’s a pronouncement that is never so much wrong as premature. So if, despite the certainty of Hannity and others, Obama somehow manages to salvage a victory on November 6th 2012, you can bet on or about Wednesday, November 7th they’ll be checking that duck for signs of a limp all over again. There aren’t a lot of great second term American presidencies. Congress, the media, and voters already have half on eye looking down the road — as do the next batch of Presidential hopefuls.

And in the meantime we are left to ponder the fact that a duck’s natural waddle and a lame limp are pretty hard to distinguish anyway, and that may just be the way nature intended it for ducks and Presidents alike.

6 September 2011