How Obama Can Win Back America

How Obama Can Win Back America

A Commentary by Thomas Kleine-Brockhoff

A little contrition is not enough. Barack Obama appeared saddened by the Democratic Party's historic fiasco this week, but he has not understood the real message of the election. His policies are too liberal for America. If he wants to get reelected in 2012, he will need to find his way to the center.

Little suggests that Barack Obama will respond to his party's dramatic defeat by taking serious action. The next day, one would have expected a meek president to address the people and say: "I understand."

Fair enough, Obama did express some of the obligatory contrition.

It was a full hour into his address to the American people, when he finally admitted that he had suffered a "shellacking" and, in the stress of the job, lost "contact" with the people. An ability to change course is not one of Obama's strengths.

Some people who know him say he is too principled a man to allow himself to be forced into adopting a new political line. But cosmetic changes will not be enough. Obama will have to alter the tone and substance of his presidency. Anything less will mean that he misunderstood the message of the vote.

It wouldn't be the first time that Obama was off the mark, either.

He is not simply a president who has been punished a little bit. Voters have basically triggered a blood bath. The massacre is worse than that of 1994 and 1946, when the Democrats lost more than 50 seats each time. Among the living members of Congress today, no one can recall a time in which so few Democrats sat in the House of Representatives.

In the recent past, the Democrats controlled the House of Representatives, the Senate and the White House three times: from 1977 to 1980, 1993 to 1994 and 2009 to 2010. The Democrats faced landslide defeats in Congress within four years of their success in all cases. Only once did they retain control of the White House another time around. That was in 1996 when the great communicator Bill Clinton was at the helm and captured the center of the country through his centrist politics.

Lessons could be learned from his experience.

Anything but Bush

Obama was propelled into office on a leap of faith. A considerable majority of the country wished this man success and wanted to let him get to work. But since then something has happened, and there is more to it than just a rise in the unemployment figures, a factor Obama named on Wednesday as a reason for his punishment. But the root causes of his defeat reach back two years to his electoral victory. Even back then the president may have misunderstood his mandate and his country. Tuesday's election allows us to look at recent history as if under a microscope.

When he took office, Obama's motto was ABB, or "Anything but Bush." It is not unusual for an incumbent to want to distinguish oneself from a predecessor. But another acronym was used in the Obama White House, too. ABC stood for "Anything but Clinton." Obama's inner circle saw Clinton as the man who made baby steps, who lost himself in his search for compromise, and who only ever made a few inches progress.

Obama proclaimed he wanted to be a "transformative president." That is reasonable given that he took office during an era of massive challenges, in which brisk reforms seemed necessary. It was always assumed that the people were prepared to make the tough journey with him.

That was how Obama got started, believing all the while that his mandate gave him legitimacy. Hadn't his battle cry for change been an announcement of the reforms the country would soon undertake? But even then there was an another way of looking at things: People just wanted a change of government. Bush and his crew should go -- nothing less, but also nothing more.

The central axis of American politics lies considerably to the right of the German median. As if he had not noticed the central characteristic of America's political arena, Obama "passed much more liberal legislation at the outset of his term than his immediate Democratic predecessors, Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter," Nicolas Lemann of Columbia University wrote in the New Yorker. Obama wanted to be bold and use the political momentum.

It took less than a year for resistance to form.

A Lack of Understanding for the Man on the Street

Simply put, the Democratic Party is a fusion of the trade union-orientated industrial workers and progressive urbanites. In that sense they are similar to Germany's Social Democratic Party, which also has to mediate tensions between the working class and the urban middle class within its rank and file.
Obama, without a doubt, is part of the progressive camp. He is a typical urbanite, too. During the presidential primary, Hillary Clinton brutally laid open the weakness of her opponent: his lack of understanding and empathy for the man on the street. She even said that she had seen him express arrogance and disdain.

In a brilliant essay, Henry Olsen of the conservative American Enterprise Institute think tank described the values of the US working class: They believe in advancement through hard work and they are not envious of Bill Gates' billions. Instead they believe that their own children could become just as wealthy. They themselves, on the other hand, are seized by fears of losing their own position and they recognize the risk to their jobs, especially in a crisis like this. They believe that people should live within their means, and that's why they find it hard to understand why a government can borrow in a massive and unrestricted way.

Despite modest means, they are proud of what they have achieved and in that sense they are in no way people who "get bitter" and "cling to guns or religion" as Barack Obama once said. That kind of condescension angers them deeply. Stability is important to them. They are averse to risks and especially to rapid change. In other words, averse to the change that the transformative presidency of Obama and the promise of urban progressivism.

Some figures illustrate why Obama's party lost by such large margins:

Not since 1984 have so few union members voted for the Democrats.
The Republicans won among voters without a college education, unlike in 2006 and 2008.
The Catholics, who because of their large wave of immigration during the 19th century form the core of the industrial working class, have bolted to the Republican Party in droves, with an increase of 12 percent. The consequence is the mass die-out of Democratic candidates in the old industrial states from Pennsylvania to Ohio, and as far west as Missouri. The Democrats have mostly remained popular in the urban zones along the coasts -- too few to form a majority.
The fact that the working class is walking away from the Democrats is not a new phenomenon. During the 1980s, the so-called Reagan Democrats voted for the Republican Party in droves. Now they have revolted against President Obama. The societal coalition that swept him into office has shattered.

And that's why a little bit of an upturn in the economy and a few tactical compromises in the arm-wrestling with the Republicans won't be enough for the president. Obama will have to rebuild his diverse alliance and he will have to start with the blue-collar workers. And that will include finding a new respect for and closeness to them.

It will also require policies that:

put jobs and America's industrial rebirth at the center of the agenda
make reducing debt and creating responsible budgets priorities
reduce the trade deficit
modernize infrastructure
To get re-elected in 2012, Obama should not run away from a painful interpretation of his party's 2010 election loss. There are signs of hope for him: It is likely that it was not Obama personally whom voters rejected, but simply his progressive agenda. It is also likely that voters have simply rejected the Democratic Party rather than giving the Republicans a clear mandate.

But it is easy to confuse what a mandate means. And that is a misunderstanding Obama knows well.

The Democrats faced landslide defeats in Congress within four years of their success in all cases.

That ought to be an indicator of a problem.