"America is soothed by no-drama Obama"

Andrew Sullivan (Sunday London Times):

The president’s cautious, mollifying approach is winning ever more support--As I sat watching President Barack Obama’s 100 days press conference I realised, after only a few minutes, I was bored. What a wonderful feeling. It’s not something I have experienced for many years when contemplating the government of the United States. Every time I began to feel twitches of irritation or anxiety or engagement, the president soothed them away with a flow of reasoned and unemotional responses. The one network that decided not to run the press conference beat the president in the ratings with a drama. That said a lot. Obama is no drama.

That seems to me to be the upshot of his first 100 days. It is far too soon to know if his strategy of easing the banks out of their toxic assets will work, if his recasting of America’s image abroad will result in real changes for the better, if his decision to expose the torture policies of the past without aggressively seeking accountability will hold up over time. It’s too soon to know if he will secure healthcare reform in this Congress, or if he can get his carbon trading bill and immigration reform passed. Events, dear reader, events have yet to have their say. But there does seem to be a palpable shift in the underlying shape of American politics three months in. Almost all of it is in Obama’s direction.

The polling tells you something important. His approval ratings have actually gone up since he took office. Take away the party labels and, in the latest Gallup poll, Obama is winning the support of 90% of liberals with 7% against but, much more significantly, he is winning self-described “moderates” by a massive 73% to 19%. Even conservatives are split on him — with 42% approving and 53% disapproving; 41% of weekly church-goers approved of him just before the election — and now that number has risen to 57%. That’s a direct hit at the core Republican appeal.

In the critical battle for image and comfort, Obama has trounced his opponents without aggressively attacking them. And they have done themselves in, to a large extent, by prematurely attacking him. Few events revealed this as starkly as the veteran Republican senator Arlen Specter’s decision last week to become a Democrat.

Specter has long been a genuine maverick, with a deep legal mind and quirky temperament. But he’s also an opportunist and a realist. As a moderate Republican — pro-choice on abortion, sympathetic to gay rights, happy to have the stimulus money for his swing state, Pennsylvania — he has long antagonised the fire-breathers in his party. They found a more conservative candidate to challenge him in the primary he’d have to win if he is to be re-elected in 2010; the polls show Specter would be beaten easily. More than 200,000 Pennsylvanians switched from Republican to Democrat in recent years and the remaining core of Republican primary voters is much more to the right than in the past. As for Tories after 1997, defeat has meant empowerment for the most hardline elements in the party. So Specter, facing rejection at home, jumped before he was pushed overboard.

Behind Specter is a raft of recent polling on policy questions that shows how effective Obama has been in moving the US out of the Bush era, especially among the young. A clear majority now favours immigration reform that includes some version of amnesty for illegal immigrants already in America. A huge majority of even Republican voters — 64% — now favours regulation of greenhouse gases. For the first time in any national poll, ABC News last week found supporters of marriage rights for gay couples outnumbered opponents. Even on a question such as marijuana decriminalisation, the public is now close to evenly split: 52% against to 46% in favour. These are seismic shifts from only a few years ago.

Black Americans are, predictably, monolithic in their support for the first black president. More significantly, Hispanics have emerged as an unexpected Obama strength. He has an 85% approval rate in that demographic, which, if it holds for his party, all but guarantees further Republican collapse in the southwest and west. A recent survey of voter participation in the 2008 election reveals the significance of this huge gap: some 22% of all voters were black, Hispanic or Asian last year, compared with 13% 20 years earlier. Karl Rove and George Bush knew this and adopted plans to win over black and Hispanic voters. But they failed — and Obama rubbed it in.

Every now and again conservative writers let their frustration show. Last week Byron York, the respected conservative reporter, penned an atypically sloppy sentence: “Obama’s sky-high ratings among African-Americans make some of his positions appear a bit more popular overall than they actually are.” What he meant was: than they actually are among whites alone. And he’s right about that. If today’s America were racially that of 1958, Obama would have only about a 60% approval rating rather than a whopping 68%. The biggest factor? The Latino factor. Wonder why Obama spent so much time in Trinidad hobnobbing with Latin and South American leaders two weeks ago? He knows the new face of the country he is now leading.

Will this endure? I cannot know. Obama is riding his honeymoon and his big picture ratings are not outside historical norms. Racial and generational dynamics have propelled him further upward and may be distorting the overall picture. But first impressions matter; and the calm and confidence Obama has displayed in testing times strike me as real achievements. He got lucky as well. Shooting three pirates in the head on the high seas is more good fortune than Jimmy Carter ever had. But there is also a stylistic conservatism in a still small-c conservative country that should not be underestimated.

A true conservative likes his government boring. Obama’s instincts — placating the CIA staff in person while doing his duty in exposing past abuses, defending American exceptionalism abroad while actually listening as a peer to his global confrères, criticising the banks while giving them a chance to rescue themselves — are cautious, mollifying ones. He understands, I think, that the role of the president is to preside and guide, not grab and push. He is comfortable in institutions and it shows. It’s an ocean liner he is captaining, as he keeps telling us, not a speedboat. This eschewal of the quick rhetorical jab or news cycle victory in favour of a long-term readjustment is soothing to the nerves and curiously bolstering of the spirit.

The American people are wise enough to sense this. And they want more of it. What they want less of, so far as we can tell, is the shrill siren of the current opposition.

Barack Obama