Defecting From Obama
By Jack Kellywww.realclearpolitics.co mPresident Barack Obama is racing down the trail blazed by Sen. George McGovern, who in 1972 was buried by the largest popular vote landslide in American history. (President Lyndon Johnson in 1964 won a slightly higher percentage of the popular vote than Richard Nixon did in 1972, but LBJ's margin over Sen. Barry Goldwater was smaller.) Sen. McGovern was too far to the left, swing voters thought, and not very competent -- an image reinforced by the shambles his supporters made of the Democratic national convention.
Swing voters are forming a similar opinion about President Obama, who sometimes seems as if he's deliberately trying to dismantle the coalition that elected him in 2008.
• Mr. Obama won the Jewish vote by an astounding 52 percentage points. But -- thanks chiefly to his policies toward Israel and Iran -- he's lost more support among Jews (16 percentage points) than among any other ethnic group, according to a Pew survey in February.
• Mr. Obama won the Catholic vote 54 percent to 45 percent. Four years earlier, Sen. John Kerry got only 47 percent of Catholic votes -- and he's Catholic.
The president's share of the Catholic vote is sure to shrink, thanks to the administration's plans to force Catholic institutions to offer birth control and abortion-inducing drugs in their health insurance policies and to Mr. Obama's embrace of gay marriage. Pennsylvania Democratic state committeewoman Jo Ann Nardelli cited her concerns about gay marriage when she announced May 23 that she has turned Republican.
Not just Catholics are upset. In Mississippi last week, seven local elected officials cited the president's gay marriage stance as the reason they are switching from the Democratic Party to the GOP.
• People in upscale suburbs -- which have been trending Democratic since 1992 -- tend to be more liberal on social issues. Mr. Obama won half the votes of voters with household incomes of more than $100,000. But these people haven't liked Mr. Obama's economic policies or his class warfare rhetoric. They voted Republican, 58 percent to 40 percent, in 2010.
Moderate Democrats don't like the class warfare rhetoric either. Newark Mayor Cory Booker, who is black and an Obama surrogate, described as "nauseating" the president's attack ads on Bain Capital, Mitt Romney's old firm. Mr. Obama's rhetoric was criticized also by former Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell, and by former Rep. Harold Ford Jr., who is black and was the Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate in Tennessee in 2006.
Blue-collar workers whose jobs are threatened by Obama administration regulatory policies are not assuaged by anti-business rhetoric.
• In 2008, Mr. Obama's pledge to be a racial healer won him many votes. That pledge -- like most of his others -- remains unfulfilled. Former Rep. Artur Davis, who is black and was the Democratic candidate for governor of Alabama in 2010, revealed Tuesday that he may run for office in his new home state of Virginia as a Republican in part because the president has "lapsed into a bloc-by-bloc appeal to group grievances when the country is already too fractured."
• Mr. Obama lost among veterans to war hero John McCain by just 10 percentage points in 2008. This year, vets prefer Mitt Romney by 24 points, according to a fresh Gallup poll.
Heaping self-inflicted wound upon self-inflicted wound, the president has lost enthusiasm for his candidacy among environmentalists and gay marriage advocates by clumsily embracing their causes. The Democratic National Convention, to be held in Charlotte, N.C., this year, may become the biggest fiasco since the rowdy McGovern convention in Miami Beach.
Though Americans in 1972 emphatically rejected Sen. McGovern, they didn't reject the Democratic Party. The GOP gained a paltry 12 seats in the House, leaving Democrats with a post-election majority of 242-192. Democrats gained two seats in the Senate.
But if President Obama goes down this year, he'll drag lots of Democrats in Congress with him. They're identified too closely with his failed policies to avoid sharing blame. Fifty-six percent of Americans disapprove of the job House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi is doing, according to a poll by a Democratic pollster May 10. The same firm found a week later that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is under water, too, with an 18 percent approval rating.
Though few other Democrats suffered when Sen. McGovern tanked, the election produced much bitterness and recrimination within the party. Come November, those may seem to Democrats the salad days.
Jack Kelly is a columnist for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and The Blade of Toledo, Ohio.