Barack Obama looks like he will succeed where three Democratic presidents, Harry Truman, Jimmy Carter, and Bill Clinton, so famously failed--by passing health care reform. That is an achievement for which posterity will likely reward him. But it may not help him and his party avoid setbacks at the polls.



Consider the danger signs slowly accumulating. The off-year gubernatorial elections in New Jersey and Virginia are usually a harbinger of political success or failure for the party in power. When Republicans George Allen and Christine Todd Whitman won those races in November 1993, it was a clear indication of trouble ahead for the Democrats nationally. Currently, Republicans are leading in the polls in both states--states that Obama won in 2008.

Then there are Obama’s approval ratings and what they portend for the 2010 midterms. In January, when he gave his inaugural address, Obama enjoyed a 69 percent approval rating, with just 13 percent disapproving. Since late August, his approval numbers have been hovering around 50 percent, and his disapproval numbers have been mostly in the low forties. Clinton’s ratings suffered a similar decline in his first year, and it spelled disaster for the 1994 congressional elections. The same thing appears to be happening again: If current polls hold up, Democrats could fail to keep Senate seats in Nevada, Colorado, Illinois, and Connecticut next year. Political analyst Charlie Cook has recently estimated that the Democrats could lose more than 20 House seats.

Are these signs of voter discontent the result of tactical errors by Obama? Would the numbers look different if he had given his impassioned defense of national health care in February, or if he and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner had been tougher on the banks earlier this year? Perhaps these tactics would have led to a temporary bounce in Obama’s popularity, but they would not have changed its overall trajectory. That’s because Obama’s fortunes are being driven mainly by one thing: not health care, but the economy.

To understand the lockstep relationship between Obama’s popularity and the state of the economy, it helps to look at two previous presidents who, like Obama, confronted a failing economy: Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan.