Foxnews

By Chris Stirewalt

Obama Embraces National Decline Narrative

"The way I think about it is, you know, this is a great, great country that had gotten a little soft and, you know, we didn't have that same competitive edge that we needed over the last couple of decades. We need to get back on track."

-- President Obama arguing for his third stimulus package in an interview with NBC affiliate WESH of Orlando, Fla.

Vice President Joe Biden told a public radio station in Miami that while the state of the economy might be the fault of the previous Republican administration, the public is still understandably angry at the party in power for the dismal state of the economy.

His message to his interviewer and a liberal audience: Blaming Bush isn’t helping and is “not relevant” right now, so cut it out.

Biden, though, offered hope to his audience that the time would come again soon in which Democrats could profitably attack Republicans on the economy.

“Right now -- understandably, totally legitimate -- this is a referendum on Obama and Biden and the nature and state of the economy. It's soon going to be a choice," Biden told public broadcasting listeners.

Biden’s implicit promise is that once he and Obama have a Republican with whom to draw contrasts, it will be easier to remind Americans which party is really to blame for the sour situation of the nation. The vice president summed up the Obama 2012 message: We may be no picnic, but the other guys are worse.

It’s an improbable-seeming strategy in which voters must first be convinced that the current president and his team did the best they could in dire circumstances and that while things are bad now, they could have been much worse.

While the vice president was reaching out to the base in Florida, President Obama was talking to a larger audience in the Sunshine State in an interview with the NBC affiliate from Orlando as part of his effort to shore up his deteriorating status in the swing state.

In the interview, Obama shed some light on how he aims to pull off the “it could have been worse” pitch for 2012. The answer seems to be that the administration will embrace the idea of America as a declining power as a way to lower the expectations for his governance.

Telling the TV station that America has gotten “a little soft” over the past two decades, Obama promised that his program will help burn off the flab and pump up the national fitness. By spending money to shore up government payrolls at stimulus levels and fund public works projects the president aims to rebuild the nation’s muscle tone while simultaneously burning off some of the fat by pumping up the tax rates on those earning over $200,000.

The president as personal trainer concept is an idea that means Obama must convince voters that they really are out of shape and that their country has gone to pot. This declinist sentiment is common across the political spectrum as figures on the left like New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg openly ponder the chances for the unemployed rioting in the streets of the nation’s largest city and those on the right frequently express their worry that the country is following the same path to ruin that Europe has followed.

Embracing this same declinist line of thinking has electoral appeal for Obama because it allows Obama to argue that he has not succeeded in office because the problems are simply too big. It wasn’t just the Panic of 2008 but decades (including under Bill Clinton) of the government failing to spend enough on public works and being too easy on fat cat capitalists.

As Peggy Noonan points out today, in Ron Suskind’s new book “Confidence Men,” the president is seen obsessing over the failure of him and his team to establish a “narrative” for the electorate that would explain the continually weak economy, the seemingly unrelated move to enact a national health law and other controversial polices.

“We didn't have a clean story that we wanted to tell against which we would measure various actions,” Obama is quoted as saying.

Declinism could be this kind of “clean story” for Obama, one that would set new a new threshold for presidential performance. If the American people can be convinced that the nation really has been heading for a fall all these years and Obama, like the rest of them, is a victim of generational failure, it would take pressure off the president. And, if they can then be convinced that the root cause is a lack of domestic spending and low taxes on the wealthy, Obama could dramatically reverse his own declining fortunes.

The problem for Obama is that most declinists today attribute the end of American awesomeness to many causes other than insufficient domestic spending and too-low tax rates. Many are concerned that Americans have lost what the Founders called “virtue,” the good character required for a people to be self-governing. Many others believe that the flabbiness that most imperils the nation is that of an unaffordable government that taxes and spends beyond healthy levels.

For Obama to shift the blame to infrastructure and low taxes will be a difficult lift, especially since his first two stimuli are now widely seen as failures. While the administration argues that they prevented a disaster, voters aren’t sure that they were better than nothing.

But by far the biggest problem for a declinist president is that voters will more deeply associate him with that decline. Obama is looking to tell a “clean story” that casts blame back over a generation, not just his presidential predecessor, and in that way lower the expectations for his own tenure. But voters, who disapprove of Obama’s performance at increasingly higher levels, may just conclude that the dude is a downer.

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