How Obama can win reelection

EDITORIAL | JOSHUA GREEN

October 27, 2011|By Joshua Green, Globe Correspondent

RIGHT NOW, Barack Obama is facing increasingly long odds of being reelected. Economic recovery has stalled. Unemployment remains stuck at 9 percent. Three-quarters of Americans think the country is on the wrong track. According to Gallup, his average job approval rating has fallen steadily throughout the year, and in the quarter that just ended hit a new low of 41 percent. Only one president in the last half century, Jimmy Carter, had a lower rating at this point in his first term - and Carter, of course, didn’t win a second.

The possibility that the economy might improve enough before next November to carry Obama to another term seems less and less likely. Congress won’t help - it just rejected his jobs package. Neither will Europe, where a mounting state of crisis continues to erode confidence and unsettle markets.

If Obama is going to win another term, he’ll have to overcome the state of the economy, rather than point to it as evidence of an incipient turnaround and claim, as Ronald Reagan did in 1984, that it is once again “morning in America.’’

But the news isn’t all bad. Obama remains personally popular - remarkably so, given all this lousy news. And he continues to amass a set of accomplishments that, taken together, could supply his reelection campaign with a compelling narrative, especially after last week’s death of Libyan dictator Moammar Khadafy and the announcement that all US forces will leave Iraq by year’s end, bringing the nine-year war to a close.

Obama won’t convince anyone that he has turned the country around; but he could justifiably claim that he has fixed many of the problems bequeathed him by his predecessor, George W. Bush, and made enough meaningful progress on the remaining ones to warrant another term. At least some evidence suggests that this could succeed. Americans first turned against Bush and the Republican Party en masse over the Iraq War. Obama’s opposition to the war, and the contrast that presented with Hillary Clinton, won him the Democratic nomination and helped put him in the White House.

Fulfilling his pledge to end the war that Bush started should resonate even with voters frustrated about the economy. So should his record of dispatching terrorists and dictators. Osama bin Laden, Khadafy, and Anwar al-Awlaki have all fallen as a result of Obama’s actions. He’s not the type to drive the point home the point by donning a flight suit and landing on an aircraft carrier beneath a “Mission Accomplished’’ banner. But neither will that be necessary to remind voters that he stopped bin Laden - and Bush couldn’t.