As a matter of principle, I try to pay as little attention as possible to polls and the ESPN-style analysis that invariably follows. Still, it’s hard not to notice that Barack Obama’s approval rating has been trending mostly downward. This is because a lot has gone wrong.

On the issues, Obama’s highest approval ratings are for education, but he’s accomplished little there. He gets decent marks for foreign policy, but due mainly to the inertia he’s accumulated by reversing his predecessor’s policies. His own efforts (as much as they can be considered his), especially in the Middle East, have been stymied by events. The Israeli-Palestinian peace talks are at a standstill and don’t look to be going anywhere. Violence in Iraq is up and the only bright spot is looming withdrawal. Afghanistan gets worse every day.

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The domestic front is no better. The economy continues to sputter. It seems that for the next year, the best-case scenarios are a decline in the rate of decline or (fingers crossed) anemic growth. Obama’s biggest problem is his foundering Healthcare reform. The Republican Party has used the issue to exhume itself. That much of their opposition is based on demagoguery (the “socialist” label) and sophistry (the “death panel” spectre) is immaterial. They’ve mobilized their base, allied themselves with conservative Democrats and accomplished a lot. A government-run alternative, once considered mandatory by the Obama Administration, looks to be bargained away for the sake of passing a bill, any bill. If that happens, the President will take a lot of heat from the liberal wing of his party. Rachel Maddow of MSNBC, in a much discussed quote, put it succinctly:

…ultimately, if the president decides that he’s going to go with a reform effort that doesn’t include a public option, what he will have done is spent a ton of political capital, riled up an incredibly angry right wing base who’s been told that this is a plot to kill grandma…and he will have achieved something that doesn’t change health care very much and that doesn’t save us very much money and won’t do very much for the American people. It’s not a very good thing to spend a lot of political capital on.

If we assume, as is increasingly likely, that a watered-down healthcare bill is passed, Obama will still be unpopular with the right (no surprise there) and possibly with the left as well. He’ll be boxed into the center and his bargaining power will diminish. Worse, midterm elections are barely a year away and Obama must be on his best political behavior, since his party will probably loose seats next November. The race for the White House will start right after and further circumscribe the new President. So Barack Obama might not accomplish much of anything in his first term, and we must face the possibility that a crucial period in our nation’s history will be one of dithering and stagnation, another way-station on the road to decline.

-Greg Waldmann

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Benny Morris, the Israeli historian, has recently written a new book about Israel and Palestine, but this one’s about the future, not the past. In the New York Times, Jeffrey Goldberg reviews One State, Two States

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and summarizes:

Morris…argues that Arab rejectionism is so profound a force that only the terminally obtuse could believe that Palestinians will ever acquiesce to a state complrised solely of the West Bank and Gaza.

Morris is a fascinating case: he’s a historian of conflict that hasn’t ended, and one he’s lived through his entire life. He’s considered the first of Israel’s “new historians,” who emerged in the late 1980’s in the midst of the first intifada to challenge the myths of Israel’s founding. But failure of the peace process and the second intifada that followed in 2000 led Morris to a radical about face – to a morbid view of the future of his country and a black view of its Palestinian counterparts.

You can actually see the change in the last chapter he tacked onto Righteous Victims when it came out in paperback in 2001, while the second intifada raged. Righteous Victims is still the best overall history of the conflict, but that last chapter should be read as the work of a different man. Editorializing also creeps into 1948, his excellent and mostly straightforward history of the first Arab-Israeli war, which I reviewed last year. Now he writes without the constraints of a historical perspective, and Goldberg rightly dismantles Morris’ new book and his “almost irretrievably dark vision of Israel’s future as a Jewish-majority state.”

Israel has just elected the right-wing Benjamin Netanyahu as Prime Minister, and he’s appointed the militant Avigdor Lieberman as his foreign minister. The terrorist group Hamas controls Gaza while the weak and corrupt Palestinian Authority dithers in the West Bank. Morris might be too close to the conflict to judge soundly, but his cynicism is understandable.

-Greg Waldmann