President Obama has been criticized, blamed and pilloried over the years, but he seems to be suffering from a new affliction. He feels misunderstood.
Obama is embarking on a legacy-burnishing media tour, giving lengthy magazine interviews and addresses in which he has mourned the American public’s lack of awareness of his big wins in foreign and economic policy and bemoaned his inability to better communicate those achievements in a fractured media environment.
Saving the world economy from a Great Depression — that was pretty good, he deadpanned recently.
Yet as Obama complains of being ignored by voters, they are weighing in on his presidency too — and appear to be more pleased than ever with him. Obama’s favorability is on the rise and he is now the most popular American politician being tracked by polls. With approval ratings in the low 50s, he is more popular than President Reagan was during his final year in office. One survey last week even showed that Americans’ approval of his much-derided strategy to fight Islamic State increased significantly in the last six months.
The disconnect between Obama’s complaints and the public’s acceptance of him shows the perils of more than a decade in the Washington bubble. As much as aides insist Obama is focused on the long term, his laments show he seems to be absorbing Washington-flavored criticism anyway — the kind that his opponents find a reason to make no matter what he does.
Obama surely understands that he is on his set-the-record-straight mission at a time when Americans have an increasingly positive view of him and his policies, said James Thurber, a presidential historian at American University and author of two books about the Obama presidency. Nonetheless, he would like more support for his policies and presidency, Thurber said.
The midterm election of 2010, when Republicans took over the House and the tea party influence began to fuel a staunch opposition to Obama’s agenda, helped create the political environment in which Obama has been trying to tell the story of his presidency.
Ever since, Obama has been in a defensive position trying to protect the gains — and sell the merits — of his first two years in office, when he passed healthcare reform and the economic stimulus.
But Americans just don’t get his economic achievements, he insisted to the New York Times Magazine last month.
If you ask the average person on the streets, ‘Have deficits gone down or up under Obama?’ Probably 70% would say they’ve gone up, Obama said with some justifiable exasperation, according to the magazine, because the deficit has declined during his presidency.
