by Clarence Page

It's beginning to look a lot like the winter of President Barack Obama's discontent. Among other problems, his slow and steady slide in opinion polls is matching the nation's slow and steady rise in joblessness. That makes Democrats in Congress fearful of their own potential joblessness.

Among other complaints, critics have badgered him in recent weeks for "dithering" too long on Afghanistan, failing to return with big diplomatic victories from Asia and bowing too deeply before the Japanese emperor.

He has simultaneously been criticized by some for paying too much attention to overhauling health care and by others for not trying to impose more of his influence on the debate in Congress.

If it weren't for bad news, to paraphrase an old blues song, it seems like Obama wouldn't have any news at all.

A recurring theme of critics goes something like this: Last year's inspiring candidate of hope and change has lost his luster in the urgent, yet humdrum mechanics of learning how to be president.

The iconic photo-op image of Obama standing alone on the Great Wall of China has bolstered a conventional wisdom of Obama as the solitary man, moving to his own timetable, increasingly removed from the public whose votes he so vigorously sought.

But the rest of us move to our own timeclocks, too, especially in the news industry. While Obama looks at solving employment, health care and foreign policy woes over the course of weeks, months or years, we in the media have deadlines every day, feeding public anxieties with new problems to worry about.

As a result, the "dithering" charge raised by former Vice President Dick Cheney was picked up quickly as a talking point by other conservatives. But look who's talking here. After the disastrous impulses of the previous administration led to an unnecessary war in Iraq, I don't fault Obama for taking his time. A few weeks of prudent deliberation and fact-finding is a small price to pay when years of warfare hang in the balance.

Similarly, the Obama administration admits he won't make his yearend deadline to close the detention camp at Guantanamo. That's better than closing it too quickly. But while we await a resolution, he rates a grade of "incomplete" at best.

The same incomplete grade applies to most of his other major initiatives. It's too early to tell what he can accomplish with China, although he did gain some important new diplomatic cooperation with the Chinese on North Korea, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Even those modest achievements were overwhelmed by the public's perception here of Obama's deep bow to the emperor of Japan. Yet, a poll by Fox News, which members of Obama's media team has denounced as an arm of the Republican Party, found two-thirds of the public it surveyed thought it was OK for the president to bow to another leader when it is the proper custom.

Interestingly, Fox News posted the poll results on its Web site, but did not headline that news. I wonder how they would have treated it if it found two-thirds of the public opposed such a bow?

Either way, the larger question for Obama is whether Obama can recover his slip in major polls quickly enough to help his party hold onto its majority in Congress in next year's midterm elections. Recent history shows his stormy seas match the troubles that earlier presidents sailed in their first terms before they found friendlier waters, some sooner than others.

Bill Clinton's health care plan collapsed early in his first term. He failed even to get it out of committee. His party lost both houses of Congress in the 1994 midterms. Yet he managed to rebuild himself politically, despite a weakened presidency, in time to cruise to reelection in 1996.

Ronald Reagan's average job approval rating languished at 42 percent before his first midterm congressional election in 1982. Republicans lost 26 seats that November, but two years later, Reagan beat Walter F. Mondale in 49 states. Obama can only hope to be that lucky. First he's got to adjust his timeclock to ours.

 

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