Disillusioned voters turn on Obama

Barack Obama will spend the next two years grappling with a hostile Congress after the Senate falls to the Republicans. Emily Hohler reports.

Emily Hohler
By
published
in Features

Make no mistake, says Edward Luce in the FT. The US electorate rejected President Barack Obama on Tuesday. He will now spend his final two years in office "grappling" with a hostile Republican Congress, after they gained a Senate majority in the mid-term elections.

The defeat means that, like his predecessors, Ronald Reagan and George W Bush, Obama has succumbed to the Six-Year Itch as "disappointed voters punish him for failing in his leadership at home and abroad".

There is often a "sneaking suspicion" that the mid-terms are irrelevant, says Gideon Rachman, also in the FT. The turn out was low, at around 40%. The Republicans have won the Senate and now control both houses of Congress, making it difficult for Obama to pass legislation, but "not much was happening anyway".

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Without control of the House or a super-majority in the Senate, Obama has had his hands tied for years. Even with this result, the Republicans won't be able to get much done either, since Obama will be able to veto any legislation they pass. This presents an opportunity for a "rare outbreak of cooperation".

For example, Republicans are more likely to support Obama on big new trade deals with Europe and Asia(the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership and the Trans-Pacific Partnership, respectively) than Democrats.

"But don't count on it." It's not clear what sort of compromises Obama will be willing to make and the Republicans will be loath to give him "anything that looks like a victory".

These "dull" elections matter "not one jot", says Justin Webb in The Times. Americans "despise the whole political class" and don't trust them to "lift the mood of national gloom".

It's telling that despite the Republicans' gains, just prior to the mid-terms the party had an approval rating in an NBC poll of just 29%. The Republicans complain but don't offer solutions to health-care reforms, foreign affairs or any other issues.

Meanwhile, Obama is "electorally toxic"; such is his unpopularity that "very few" Democrats trying to hang on to their seats wanted him to drop by and campaign for them. He seems to be "genuinely semi-detached from the politics of the nation".

This was a mid-term poll that pitted "unloved politicians against other unloved politicians and a president who seems to feel as if he is the unloved-in-chief. A perfect storm of ennui in a nation where cheery problem solving is was its most attractive trait."

Emily Hohler
Emily Hohler
Politics editor

Emily has worked as a journalist for more than thirty years and was formerly Assistant Editor of MoneyWeek, which she helped launch in 2000. Prior to this, she was Deputy Features Editor of The Times and a Commissioning Editor for The Independent on Sunday and The Daily Telegraph. She has written for most of the national newspapers including The Times, the Daily and Sunday Telegraph, The Evening Standard and The Daily Mail, She interviewed celebrities weekly for The Sunday Telegraph and wrote a regular column for The Evening Standard. As Political Editor of MoneyWeek, Emily has covered subjects from Brexit to the Gaza war.

Aside from her writing, Emily trained as Nutritional Therapist following her son's diagnosis with Type 1 diabetes in 2011 and now works as a practitioner for Nature Doc, offering one-to-one consultations and running workshops in Oxfordshire.

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