Obama faces a 2012 political environment that's significantly tougher than 2008. Obama's big drags

The politics of the debt fight were a drag for President Barack Obama, yanking his popularity to new lows. Here’s an even bigger drag: Obama emerges from the months-long fracas weaker — and facing much deeper and more durable political obstacles — than his own advisers ever imagined.

The consensus has been that for all his problems, Obama is so skilled a politician — and the eventual GOP nominee so flawed or hapless — that he’d most likely be reelected.


Don’t buy into it.

This breezy certitude fails to reckon with how weak his fundamentals are a year out from the general election. Gallup pegs his approval rating at a discouraging 42 percent, with his standing among independents falling 9 points in four weeks.

His economic stats are even worse. The nation has 2.5 million fewer jobs today than the day Obama took office, a fact you’re sure to hear the Republicans repeat. Consumer confidence is scraping levels not seen since March 2009.

Where’s the bright spot? Hard to see. Obama has few, if any, domestic achievements that enjoy broad public support. No one assumes employment, growth or housing prices to pick up much, if at all — something Obama is essentially powerless to change. And the political environment and electoral map are significantly tougher than in 2008, especially in true up-for-grabs states.

“The historical precedents of what happens to incumbent presidents in these economic circumstances are not positive or encouraging,” said Geoff Garin, a top Democratic pollster. “There has been a false sense of confidence among a lot of Democratic activists.”

Obama advisers acknowledge the challenges posed by the economy but argue that voters will like his rescue of the auto industry, signing of Wall Street reform, championing of new restrictions on credit-card issuers, repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell,” investments in clean energy and victory on insurance protection for people with pre-existing conditions.

“We’re spending the year building infrastructure in the states to ensure that we can compete on the widest playing field possible in 2012,” said Ben LaBolt, press secretary for Obama’s reelection campaign. “We are evaluating potential pickup opportunities [like Arizona and Georgia], and believe there are many paths to victory.”

Privately, however, Obama’s team is concerned about the factors beyond its control, talking of an imminent need to retool their economic message and strategy heading into 2012. Absent the president’s ability to defy political gravity, one Obama adviser conceded, “The numbers add up to defeat.”

Based on interviews with a wide array of top government and political officials, here’s why the adviser might be on the something:

MALAISE

Fast-forward a year or so, when voters are starting to tune in, and the Republican nominee will be able to pluck economic data — not spin, empirical data — to make the following case against Obama:

“We were promised hope and change — but instead life has been a drag in the Obama years. Millions of people lost jobs, saw the value of their house drop every month he’s been in office, never realized the economic growth he promised and were so cash-strapped they couldn’t buy the big-ticket items they were used to.”

No Republican has harnessed all the available data to make the broader case against the president.

One will. And Obama’s advisers don’t expect the data points to change much by the time the attacks start rolling in.

The White House anticipates unemployment at 8.25 percent, and Goldman Sachs and others warn the number could be higher — close to 9 percent, which would mean no net job growth after the biggest stimulus package in the history of the world. No president has won reelection when unemployment was higher than 7.2 percent in 50 years.

Median home values have declined every month Obama has been in office, too, according to Zillow, which monitors real estate markets. The site’s chief economist now predicts home value won’t bottom out until 2012 “or later.” So, the one asset Americans relied on for wealth — and until the crash, for spending money — will be the biggest concern for many.

And because economic growth never lived up to the expectations set early by different White House officials at different times — remember “the summer of recovery”? — voters simply don’t have the money or confidence to buy big things like they used to.

The auto industry is on pace to sell nearly 30 percent fewer new cars than it did a decade ago, and the sales of stoves and ovens haven’t been this low since 1992, according to David Leonhardt, The New York Times columnist who often defends the Obama administration's economic policies. He provided Republicans some handy stats last month in a column with the stark conclusion: “We are living through a tremendous bust.”

Democratic Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley worries that Obama will be blamed for a “jobs crisis” — and that he realized the danger too late. “The president’s reelection depends on people understanding that he wakes up every day searching for ways, and fighting as hard as he can, to save and create jobs,” O’Malley said in a phone interview. “If the president has made a mistake, it’s that he hasn’t gone far enough on reinvestment and stimulus and recovery.”

Obama will argue — and he will be correct — that he alone isn’t to blame for any of this. And by the fall of 2012, the economy should be gaining steam as the economic cycle turns upward. A late recovery, however, might be too late to matter, just as it was for the first George Bush. But you go to the campaign with the economic facts you have, not the ones you want.

BLOAT

The backdrop for the economic debate has been, is and will remain the broader argument about the size of government — and debt.

The new litmus tests for GOP presidential candidates are the Paul Ryan Medicare plan and repealing the Obama health care plan, both of which go straight to the heart of this philosophical fight about the scope of government. For that reason alone, it is unimaginable that debt doesn’t become an even bigger issue in the presidential election.

The size-of-government spat is a hard one for the president to win.

By the time the next election rolls around, the government will have taken on almost $7 trillion in debt under Obama. It’s hard to explain away a number so big.

Republicans will find clever ways to make that number more digestible, including handy stats such as reducing that amount to $22,500 in new debt for every man, woman and child in the nation — enough to pay for a new Toyota Corolla for each of them.

Or look at it from another vantage point.

In the past four years, the average voter has grown more dependent on government for his or her income than at any point since at least 1929, when such numbers were first tracked.

This means Social Security, Medicare and unemployment are the big income drivers — not new jobs and bigger salaries.

“The big issue for him will be whether people see light at the end of the tunnel when they ultimately vote,” Democratic Washington Gov. Christine Gregoire said in a telephone interview. “The people in my state want to hear that there is a good and bright and sound future. The average person is really concerned.”

White House officials agree, which is one reason they are willing to take on their liberal base to get a deal on debt now — and tax reform in the next six months.

THE MAP

All of these points meet on the electoral map, which isn’t looking great for Obama.

The country seems to hate all of Washington, where as in 2008 it was much more down on the GOP and the Bush years.

And putting aside the bleak psychological climate Obama faces as he starts his run, the physical terrain — the states needed to add up to 270 electoral votes — looks more difficult than Democratic officials had expected even a few months ago. Obama’s electoral map from 2008 will be tough to duplicate, with all three perennial bellwethers — Ohio, Florida and Pennsylvania — once again up for grabs.

The states Obama won in 2008 have lost six electoral votes, complicating his quest. And in most of the nine states Obama won that Sen. John Kerry lost in 2004 — Indiana, North Carolina, Ohio, Florida, Iowa, New Mexico, Nevada, Virginia and Colorado — Democrats took a drubbing in the midterms. One poll has half the voters in Ohio down on Obama’s job performance, for instance.

Democrats say they are encouraged that the Republican governors in three critical states — Rick Scott in Florida, John Kasich in Ohio and Scott Walker in Wisconsin — have taken a hit in polls in recent months and look as if they may be less help to the Republican nominee than they would be if they were politically stronger.

Looking at Obama’s 2008 swing-state wins, Democrats have all but given up on Indiana and know that he will have trouble keeping two other traditionally red states, Virginia and North Carolina; may have been hurt in Florida by unhappiness in the Jewish community about Obama’s handling of Israel; and will have a dogfight for the Rust Belt prizes of Ohio, Pennsylvania and Michigan (where one respected state poll had him narrowly lagging Romney). Obama’s reelection strategy depends on running strong in the Mountain West, most critically in Colorado.

But without at least a couple of the traditional bellwether states, Obama will be a one-term president.



THE OBAMA LEGACY

A big hurdle for the president is the unpopularity of the very policies that his team thought would be big accomplishments in the first term.

Obama delivered on his promise to help prevent an economic collapse early on, help save the auto industry, crack down on Wall Street and then enact the most sweeping expansion of government-supported health care coverage since the 1960s. It’s not clear he’s getting much of a political boost for any of it.

A top Democratic strategist who is close to the White House said that Obama’s first-term record “is going to be, on balance, probably a liability” for his reelection, partly “because of the failure to sell and explain the things that they were doing.”

“I believe history will judge what they did to be correct,” the strategist said. “But the failure to communicate why they were doing it has meant that there is such confusion. … It’s ground he’s going to have to make up, rather than things he’s going to be able to run on.”

Polls show his economic policy, the health care law and the auto bailout get positive reviews from fewer than half of voters. Hard to see how that changes.

Mark Penn, chief strategy for Hillary Clinton in 2008 and CEO Worldwide of Burson-Marsteller, said “the biggest problem is that he has not accumulated enough domestic accomplishments that people can easily recall. He either has to start accumulating them as [President Bill] Clinton did — and a budget deal is a big opportunity — or he has to convince people that he has the right policies overall — they just haven’t worked yet.”



INDEPENDENT ANGST

Even in good times, Obama would have a tough reelection. The 2008 election — featuring a weak GOP candidate, in a terrible political environment for Republicans — obscured the inescapable fact of modern politics: This is a 50-50 nation, controlled at the presidential level by independents.

Obama gets this. There is a reason he shifted so quickly to being a Bill Clinton centrist after the 2010 congressional defeats. He knows the key to reelection is winning back the independent voters who helped elect him — and then bolted in the face of his health care push. It helps explain why after largely ignoring debt in the first two years — then again after his own debt commission offered a clear path in November, then again with State of the Union speech, then again with his first proposed budget for next year — he became the champion of a $4 trillion debt reduction plan. It’s called survival politics.

He entered office with 62 percent support among independents. But they took flight in the spring of 2009 — and have never returned. Those voters helped Republicans win the off-year gubernatorial races in New Jersey and Virginia, now-Sen. Scott Brown’s race in Massachusetts a few months later, ultimately control of the House — and, more important but less talked-about, many state legislatures around the country.

Make no mistake: Obama brings some advantages to the race, not least of which is the continued strong support of black and Hispanic voters and young people. Voters generally seem to find him likable and hard-working and uniformly give him higher marks than Republicans in Congress.

Obama will do his best to paint his opponent as extreme — if not personally, then as the head of a party beholden to the tea party. The GOP candidate will be implicitly asking these independent voters to, in effect, reverse the history they made just four years earlier and vote out the first African-American president in U.S. history.

At the same time, he’s been mired in the low 40s in the Gallup Poll for more than two years, with episodic bumps (including after the bin Laden killing) that prove fleeting. As president, Obama will have opportunities to boost his standing and a big megaphone to try to win over voters to his side, but this could just as easily remain the same or worsen as the economy drags.



REPUBLICAN STRENGTH

Bill Burton, the former White House official who now runs the pro-Obama super-PAC known as Priorities USA Action, nicely sums up the dominant strand of Democratic thinking these days.

The president faces “pretty tremendous headwinds,” Burton said, but Republicans will never nominate a broadly appealing candidate who can “make an effective argument on the economy.”

That might be wishful thinking.

There is broad agreement among the most powerful Republicans that they need to nominate a candidate who doesn’t get spooled up over social issues but instead focuses maniacally on the economy and size of government. This helps explain Mitt Romney’s early success, despite running a rather dull campaign. Numerous social conservatives have told POLITICO they are happy to stand down on distracting social fights if they get an authentic conservative who can prevail in the economic fight.

It is true Romney and other GOP candidates still trail Obama, and likely will, well into next year. But a Gallup Poll from last month shows how that could change once the messy primary season ends, and the Republican nominee darts back to the middle. The poll found Obama trailing a generic Republican, 47-39.

Another assumption among top Democrats is that Obama, who will very likely raise between $750 million and $1 billion for various parts of his reelection efforts, will benefit decisively from the use of overwhelming force, burying his opponent with ads before lift-off.

No doubt, the most recent fundraising data support this theory. Obama easily outraised the GOP field combined.

One comforting possibility to Democrats is that the GOP’s supposed savior might end up being Texas Gov. Rick Perry, a candidate who surely would remind middle-of-the-road voters of another Texas governor who just exited the political scene and whom they were happy to see gone.

But two things trouble Democratic insiders.

First, it is clear many of the most prolific GOP fundraisers are sitting on the sidelines — but only for now. Operatives in both parties paid close attention to a smart story by USA Today showing that only one in five of John McCain’s elite fundraisers is working on behalf of a current GOP candidate. The same is true for many of former President George W. Bush’s elite money men and women.

This provides plenty of room for a new, more broadly electable, establishment-backed candidate such as New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie to jump in, or for Romney or another current candidate to eventually pull this hugely influential group off the sidelines.

The second troubling sign is a persistent — and probably irreparable — rift between Obama and many small and large business leaders. The White House worked hard after the 2010 elections at reconciliation, but there are few signs it worked.

Several top CEOs have said they and others will get into this race in a big way eventually, often by exploiting the Supreme Court ruling that allows them to funnel unlimited sums of money into presidential politics without fingerprints. At a private meeting the billionaire founder of Home Depot arranged last week between wealthy donors, including some Democrats, and Christie, the main rant in the room was that Obama was hostile to free markets and needed to be stopped.

If rich business leaders get off the sidelines, the big financial edge everyone expects Obama to enjoy could be a mirage.

Obama’s political advisers are sounding this alarm to any liberal donor who will listen, worried that their own biggest contributors are growing complacent. But its been hard to re-create the magic of 2008 — which just might be Obama’s biggest problem.