Obama’s Darker Future

President Obama deserves much credit for killing Osama bin Laden, “America’s Most Wanted.” Does that additionally make his re-election likely? After 40 days, maybe not so much. The above graph shows the “RealClearPolitics” average of Obama’s approval rating since April 18. He's still ahead of where he was April 30, the day before Osama died, but well down from the peak of the “bin Laden bounce,” which by now has mostly dissipated.

Democrats have thought that in addition to the “bin Laden bounce,” Obama will benefit from the weakness of his Republican opposition. Republicans believe the election will be about Obama’s record. Former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan writes that in the face of our looming debt crisis, Obama would have his way politically if he agrees to real budget cuts. Says Noonan,

He could claim to have been conciliatory, looking out for the national interest. The left won't like it, but the center will. And he will have shown he can work closely and in good faith with Republicans, who control the House.

Obama the winner. But Noonan doesn’t think it will happen.

He really dislikes the other side, and can't fake it. This is peculiar in a politician, the not faking it. But he doesn't bother to show warmth and high regard. And so appeals to patriotism -- "Come on guys, we have to save this thing" -- ring hollow from him. In this he is the un-Clinton. Bill Clinton understood why conservatives think what they think because he was raised in the South. He was surrounded by them, and he wasn't by nature an ideologue.

Obama is different. . .not a warm-blooded animal but a cool, chill character, a fish who sits deep in the tank and stares, stilly, at the other fish. He doesn't know how to confuse his foes with "outreach," with phone calls, jokes, affection. . . And because he can't confuse them or reach them they more readily coalesce around their own explanation of him: socialist, destroyer.

Clare Booth Luce [observed] that all presidents have a sentence: "He fought to hold the union together and end slavery." "He brought Americans through economic collapse and a world war." You didn't have to be told it was Lincoln, or FDR.

Republicans now think they know [Obama’s sentence]: He made it worse.

“He made it worse.”