A few weeks ago, the hashtag #hemadeitworse enjoyed a brief stint on Twitter. It was an attempt to figure out a way to reframe improving economic numbers and remove blame of the economic collapse from the Bush years. "Okay," a conservative could respond to a liberal argument that Obama inherited a terrible economy, "but he made it worse." "Sure," you could say to falling unemployment numbers, "but he made it worse."
The tag didn't take because it was a weak argument; nobody puts a Mitt Romney in the White House because the incumbent maybe-kinda slowed an economic recovery, we dunno. But the effort was a window into conservative attempts to justify their disapproval of Barack Obama no matter what he does, especially as his policies show signs of working.
And now we come to Peggy Noonan, a former Obama fan whose editorial in the Wall Street Journal solved this problem in the simplest way possible: you don't have to disapprove of Obama, you just have to really, really dislike him.
Here's her first graph:
Something's happening to President Obama's relationship with those who are inclined not to like his policies. They are now inclined not to like him. His supporters would say, "Nothing new there," but actually I think there is. I'm referring to the broad, stable, nonradical, non-birther right. Among them the level of dislike for the president has ratcheted up sharply the past few months.
It's not that more people are disapproving of Obama--we have statistical proof that the opposite is happening--but the people who don't agree with him now dislike him him. Noonan thinks this is a big deal and she states flat out that "it's his fault, too." So nyah.
Noonan locates this shift at the contraception mandate:
The shift started on Jan. 20, with the mandate that agencies of the Catholic Church would have to provide services the church finds morally repugnant. The public reaction? "You're kidding me. That's not just bad judgment and a lack of civic tact, it's not even constitutional!"
That didn't happen. Obama's contraception mandate was popular, and the Republicans fully lost the battle over it. Moreover, the outrage Noonan cites was actually just a group of bishops speaking on behalf of a conservative strain of Catholics; there are no signs it ever existed among what Noonan alternately calls the broad electorate, or, simply, "the public." Noonan simply disagreed with Obama's policy, and tries to smuggle this fact into an imaginary public recoiling of the policy's bad vibe.
Noonan goes on to list Obama's hot-mic gaffe, and his weighing in, very minimally, on the Trayvon Martin shooting, which riled conservatives up for some reason. (Most thought it appalling he said anything at all; Noonan thought it was "insufficient to the moment;" I guess you can't win for losing.) She refers to the president as "creepy," "devious" and "dishonest." She calls his health care law, the one that would provide insurance for 30 million people, "so hollow, so careless." She makes it clear these are instances not of "political misfeasance but malfeasance." His team weren't wrong in their decisions, they were wrong in their hearts:
They know Chicago, the machine, the ethnic realities. They know Democratic Party politics. They know the books they've read, largely written by people like them—bright, credentialed, intellectually cloistered. But there always seems a lack of lived experience among them.
If the problem is not the substance of the Obama administration's policies but the defects of their creators--their perceived deviousness or carelessness or intellectual perch--one can continue to dislike them in the face of any and all consequences. It doesn't matter if the health care law is ruled constitutional, it's hollow; it's still hollow even if health care rates go down and people with preexisting conditions get insurance; and it will always be careless, even if 30 million people get insurance. It won't matter if the economy improves; the stimulus was achieved dishonestly, or deviously, or creepily.
Noonan just gave everybody on the right license to sink comfortably into their own cognitive dissonance. You don't have to disapprove of the president or his policies, and somehow incorporate evidence of their successes into your worldview; you just have to dislike him. And if anybody attempts to prove you otherwise, you can just shrug and say, "He made it worse," even as it gets better.
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Related: New Poll: The More Liberal Obama Gets, the More Popular
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