A year has passed since Americans elected Barack Obama as the 44th U.S. president. Political analyst Michael Barone of Fox News and The Washington Examiner says many of the voters who supported Obama in November 2008 appear to question his policies one year later. Barone recently addressed a John Locke Foundation Headliner luncheon in Raleigh on the topic “Obama’s America: Working Out As Planned?” He also discussed the current state of American politics with Mitch Kokai for Carolina Journal Radio. (Click here to find a station near you or to learn about the weekly CJ Radio podcast.)
Kokai: You’re known as a political “numbers guy.” What are the numbers you’re looking at now?
Barone: Well, the numbers I think I’m paying most attention to are the numbers that try to give us an indication of enthusiasm — not just who supports the president, who opposes him, who approves, who disapproves, but who strongly supports and strongly opposes — because what we’ve see in this decade is a vast increase in turnout. Turnout in our presidential elections went up from 105 million [in 2000] to 122 million in 2004 and 131 million in 2008. Enthusiasm drives turnout. That can be negative enthusiasm. You hate George Bush or whatever. It could be positive enthusiasm. You’re crazy about Barack Obama. And what we’ve seen … since Obama’s been president is that the balance of enthusiasm has changed from what it was last year. Last year, the balance of enthusiasm really favored the Democrats. Republicans were down in the dumps. The Democrats were enthusiastic. Now it seems to be the other way around. Opponents of the Democrats’ big-government programs have the enthusiasm. They’re generating the turnout at the tea party movement, which they created spontaneously, [and] the town hall meetings. And we see it in polling evidence in terms of strong disapproval of the president and his policies, in terms of strong disapproval of a lot of the Democratic officials, including your governor here in your state of North Carolina.
The enthusiasm quotient favoring the Democrats is very low. Now that doesn’t automatically favor the Republican Party. Voters still have a pretty dim view of the Republican Party. But they’re really scared about these Democratic proposals and about the fact that we are embarked on a path — as the Congressional Budget Office tells us — of doubling the national debt as a percentage of the economy over the next 10 years, from about 40 percent up to about 80 percent. That’s up to World War II levels. I think a lot of voters are saying, “We’re facing some problems here, but this isn’t World War II.”
Kokai: Based on your knowledge of political history, what do those trends tell us about the future?
Barone: Well, I think the biggest lesson we’ve learned this year is that the Democrats, the analysts, the people in the mainstream media who told us that economic distress produces a demand for big government have been proven wrong. At least, that’s not necessarily so. They drew that lesson from the New Deal histories, the very eloquent versions of which were best-sellers for many years, and which peddled Franklin Roosevelt’s view of the 1930s. We had economic distress then, and supposedly we had big approval of big government. There’s some data you can support in that. They overlook the fact that other English-speaking countries went the other way. At the same time Americans were voting for a big-government party in the 1930s, voters in Canada, Britain, and Australia were voting against big-government parties.
What we’ve seen now is that basic attitudes of Americans on the balance between markets and government have not changed, except that they may have gone a little more toward trusting markets and a little less toward trusting government than they were a few years ago. This is the opposite of what a lot of the liberal elites believed and claimed, and it’s pretty clear from the data, from the public resistance to a lot of the big-government programs — whether it’s the stimulus, whether it’s the cap and trade or as its opponents call it the cap-and-tax plan, the Democrats’ health care plans, the plans to effectively abolish the secret ballot in unionization elections — there’s been a lot of pushback from the voters. They don’t like these things. They don’t really feel, even though we’ve been in a deep recession and had a real crisis in financial markets, that we ought to be going to a much bigger government.
Kokai: You mentioned that current trends might not necessarily mean great news for Republicans. What’s the message for conservatives?
Barone: What the numbers tell me is that economic distress has not produced a demand for bigger government, that Americans’ feelings tending to oppose big government [in a] complex sort of way, continue to be roughly what they were before — if anything, a little less favorable toward big government than we’ve seen in the past. You can chart different views on different issues. I think right now if you’re looking at elections in calendar years 2009 [and] 2010, that’s pretty good news for the Republicans because they’re the opposition party. The Democrats have big majorities nationally and in North Carolina state government. Voters may want to overturn some of those, or at least reduce those majorities. I think in the longer run, for 2012 and years later, Republicans are going to have to come up with more articulated policies and programs. There are some Republicans out there that have done so. Their policies have not attracted much attention, if only because they don’t have much chance of being enacted at all. They’ve got to do more in that direction positively to show that they can be responsible stewards of governmental positions, rather than just replacements for Democrats that voters may have become discontent with.
Kokai: What political events will you be watching closely?
Barone: I’m going to obviously be looking at the Virginia and New Jersey governor elections. And one of the things I’m going to be looking [at] there is turnout. The most important thing, in many ways, is enthusiasm. When you’ve got a situation where the electorate is capable of expanding a lot if people are enthusiastic for one side or against one side, there’s a big premium on the side that has enthusiasm. So I’m going to be looking at who’s turning out in large numbers, who’s not turning out in large numbers, have we had a sea change of opinion since 2008 — as I think we have had — and what that may bode for the future.
Kokai: Looking to 2010 and even ahead to 2012, are there some policy proposals conservatives could pursue that would have a chance for success?
Barone: One of the problems that conservatives have had — it was emblematic of the 2008 election — Barack Obama got the support of young voters, 66 [percent] to 32 [percent]. I think there’s a real tension between the views of young voters in the way they live their lives and the Obama program. In their own lives, this is a mouse-click generation. This is a YouTube and MySpace and Facebook generation. It’s a generation where they have their own iPods, their own playlists of music. They don’t listen to somebody else’s Top 40. Yet the Obama programs are all about jamming you into a government health care plan, jamming you into a labor union that’s run by a bunch of ACORN allies, jamming you into a cap-and-trade proposal that favors lobbying interests, and so forth. I think that’s at odds, and I think that what Republicans have to come up with — particularly if they want to appeal to these young voters — is a program that says here are public policies that enable you to choose your future. These policies — offering an array of market-oriented health insurance reforms, rather than a one-size-fits-all government plan — this helps you choose your future and choose to be the kind of person and achieve the kind of things that you want to achieve in your lives. I think the Republicans need to get in touch with these young voters, and I think “Choose Your Future” is a theme that might work for them.