How is he doing and what lies ahead? Those are among the questions being asked as Barack Obama approaches the end of his first 100 days as president. Brian Gaines and William Bernhard are professors of political science, with Gaines's expertise in polling and public opinion and Bernhard's in politics and markets. They addressed those questions in a recent presentation to parents and alums, and with News Bureau Social Science Editor Craig Chamberlain.
What do polls say about Obama's job approval as we close in on his first 100 days?
Brian Gaines: He's about where we'd expect. It's a staple of punditry that presidents get a 100-day honeymoon of high, steady approval ratings; in fact, it is typically longer. For something like six or seven months, first-term presidents seem to enjoy reduced scrutiny and some insulation from blame. With about 60 percent approval after three months, Obama is only slightly above the average for the last seven presidents in their honeymoon phases. He's doing substantially better than Bill Clinton, who had an unusually low approval rating at the start. George W. Bush, by contrast, started out pretty well despite the controversy surrounding his election. Modern presidents nearly always enjoy pretty high approval and pretty low disapproval as they take office, but see the latter climb, as fewer and fewer poll respondents say that they "don't know" if they approve of the president. That was true for Bush; so far, it is also true for Obama.
Much more so than previous presidents, Bush polarized the public along partisan lines. Republicans and Democrats were very far apart in their evaluations by 2002, and they stayed that way thereafter. Independents gradually came to resemble the Democrats more than the Republicans, which is why Bush left office with such grim numbers. Obama's approval ratings so far also show pretty high polarization, with only about 3 in 10 Republicans but 9 in 10 Democrats and 6 in 10 independents reporting approval. So it looks like polarization continues. When it comes to what moves these approval levels, crises are one of the main drivers. When there's an international crisis of some kind, like the recent incident with Somali pirates, approval tends to rise as people rally to the leader. By contrast, the economy doesn't usually have as strong an effect as many people believe. Surprisingly, presidential approval just doesn't move in very tight synchronization with fluctuations in the state of the economy, even after the honeymoon ends.
The economic crisis has dominated the first 100 days. What are Obama's biggest challenges in that area going forward?
William Bernhard: The first challenge is to reestablish trust in banks and the financial sector. For a modern economy to function, consumers and businesses make a lot of choices that are based on implicit trust. This trust is vital for the financial and banking industry to function. Concerns about one bank can lead to concerns about others, and if they contract or collapse as a result, it creates problems for other industries, as we have seen, because they can't get loans or fresh capital. Restoring trust, however, is a complicated process. There are not well-developed models for changing the psychology of markets, and these efforts are hampered by the complexity of the modern financial system. Also, some of the things you have to do to restore trust actually benefit the managers and the people who caused the mess in the first place. And that can breed a sense of hypocrisy and mistrust among the public if you push that too far.
Secondly, Obama faces a global crisis. The world is in a meltdown, and it's a very rare event when you see all these countries at the bottom of the business cycle at the same time. We need to think about working together and developing global solutions. So far, in the immediate crisis, that coordination has been pretty good, but as the free-fall phase of the crisis comes to an end, the choices become a lot more difficult. Coordinating economic policies, particularly fiscal policies, and maintaining openness is a big challenge. Obama's recent experience in Europe is a good example. He didn't get all that much of what he asked for. In Latin America, they view the crisis as being caused by the United States. And they see our response to the crisis as hypocritical because the U.S. is always preaching to those countries that they need to balance their budgets, and at the first sign of our crisis, we go on a spending spree. We also need to set up global institutions to prevent future financial instability, but I'm not too optimistic that those sorts of changes will happen. By the time we can get to the place where we can start talking about them, the crisis will largely have passed and people will say we really don't need to worry about that since it was a once in a lifetime event.
Obama's third challenge will be to build a coalition to support his policies and get people to buy in to what he's doing. Difficult economic times often breed political extremism - people turn away from traditional politics and look toward extreme parties and extreme solutions. That's true not just in other countries, but also in the U.S. President Obama and his team need to think very carefully about how they balance the technical policy solutions for the banking and the financial system with the needs of the middle and the lower middle classes who are going to deal with a lot of the costs of this adjustment. How you get people to buy into this plan is a big challenge. There are tensions between getting the system back in order and holding the financial industry accountable, and it will be interesting to see how Obama squares that circle.