Robert Showah
Opinion Editor
After President George W. Bush, we entered a new era of presidential criticism. Bush was called some pretty nasty things during his presidency, including Hitler, which all presidents are called at least once. But during these tumultuous times, the media and the American people seem to be stuck in overdrive. Despite holding fair approval with the American people, President Barack Obama is being criticized much the same way Bush was in his final two years in office.
It is not as though we have an “unpopular” president. His approval rating sits in the mid-40s, much like former presidents Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton. All three former presidents adopted national concerns of various urgency, though nothing similar to Obama’s concerns. Obama faces the greatest economic depression since the 1930s, unpopular wars overseas, and health care reform that he selflessly brought upon himself to get accomplished, despite the echoes of political suicide by pundits.
Yet even after all of this, not to mention the enormity of the financial reform law passed earlier this year, the president is favored by a historically average percentage of Americans at this time in a presidency.
Perhaps the numbers are the same, but the passionate approval or disapproval of the president’s job is more strongly held this time around, hence the Tea Party movement.
One can cite data all day, but what matters is what the people think and how this president’s actions are being presented through headlines, televisions and word-of-mouth. Since we live in a democracy, what the people think is important, even though many do not have a damn clue about a lot of issues, like health care.
During the health care debate last July, a Washington Post poll asked people if they could correctly identify the definition of a public option from a list of definitions. About two-thirds either didn’t know or incorrectly identified “public option.” Despite this, in the subsequent months after, news organizations were citing Gallup polls that showed a slim plurality of Americans opposed to the reform they didn’t know anything about.
Then there was the oil spill. After concerns were raised that the president had not been doing enough by the media, he called a meeting with BP executives for them to set up a $20 billion escrow account to compensate Gulf businesses impacted by the spill. Moments after, headlines rang with the question concerning the government’s over-reaching hand. It’s worth noting that the media’s twisted coverage was reflective of the public’s contradictory opinion. Polls indicated that Americans overwhelmingly disapproved of BP’s recovery efforts, but did not want the government in charge, but also wanted more done by the president.
Perhaps it was President Bush’s handling of the Iraq War that created this hypercritical atmosphere among the media and even Republicans. After knocking Bush for the better half of his presidency over the Iraq War, they figured they should give this president a few doses of the same medicine, warranted or not.
Last week, the president announced the end of combat operations in Iraq, a war many Americans were waiting to conclude. After the speech, there was much talk about the president being unclear and vague. The president had one eager objective: Get Iraq out of my presidency. What more the president could have done during the speech, I am not sure. It was the best speech one could have made without dismissing General David Petraeus’ efforts while withdrawing from an unpopular war Americans want out of, especially at a time when the Iraqi army’s ability to defend the country is questionable. That’s not easy to do, much less explain to the public.
Next year, a precipitous withdrawal from Afghanistan is expected. This was another increasingly unpopular war, originally meant to gain revenge for 9/11. It has turned into a stalled conflict where much is not improving and where Americans have forgotten the mission.
Then there is the economy. As the national unemployment rate sits at 9.6 percent, Republicans are using the figure against Democrats this fall. The most intriguing criticism of the economy relates to people’s incredibly short memory. “The worst economic crisis since the Great Depression” is not political rhetoric. It’s the truth. Yet we expect our recovery to coincide with a presidential term. This will take more than two years to recover from. Let’s keep that well in mind.
There are always distracting criticisms like the Ground Zero mosque, which was an issue the president was allegedly unclear on. Maybe it was unclear to the uninformed, but the president made his stance known. While not commenting on the wisdom of building a mosque next to Ground Zero, the president defended the general freedom to practice one’s religion.
There are lots of legitimate, policy criticisms about this president, though only the kind that cannot be articulated in sixty seconds for the American people to digest and for the media to cover without their ratings tanking even more.
The fact that this president is steadily becoming unable to blame his predecessor should encourage the public to keep in mind that he is president during the most uncertain and troubling times in modern American history, that he ought to not receive blame nor praise for everything that goes well or poorly, and that he, along with his predecessor, is able to take vacations because he is a human being as well.