Recently approval ratings of Barack Obama (whether President or Candidate) have dipped into the negative terrain for the first time since polling has been conducted. Much has been made about this in policy circles and the media, and as usual I think there is way too much trying to be read into the tea leaves. Sometimes a storm comes through and the wind tussles the leaves. Then everything carries on as usual. The tree still stands, the storm comes and goes. As the President said, however less metaphorically, "I have my own pollsters. It's not like I don't have pollsters." In other words, he has been perfectly aware at every decision point, at every sensitive political juncture, of the polling costs and benefits. And the President's pollsters practice the calculus of surveying with a degree of art and complexity without compare. They could provide a range of estimates for what decision ABC will do for the voting proclivities of 80 year olds with a mild head cold this week who live in Duluth and prefer to watch Cold Case instead of Law and Order. The issue just may be that weekly, or quarterly, or even annual polling may not be the correct timeframe (or tool) to measure the President’s accomplishments, or weigh his likelihood for reelection in two years. This comes from the economic principle of time inconsistency.
Wikipedia (I have always wanted to start a sentence this way) defines time inconsistency as:
In economics, dynamic inconsistency, or time inconsistency, describes a situation where a decision-maker's preferences change over time in such a way that what is preferred at one point in time is inconsistent with what is preferred at another point in time...One common way in which selves may differ in their preferences is they may be modeled as all holding the view that now has especially high value compared to any future time. As a result the present self will care too much about herself and not enough about her future selves.
And this concept applies to essentially all of the President's accomplishments. Except in reverse. Rather than the President offering us tax cuts for a year that may benefit him in the short term, but create still more debt in the long term, he has done the complete reverse- sacrificed his short term political approval rating for long term policy investments that will likely yield approval rating dividends over the years to come. Rather than giving us candy now that will make us like him for the immediate future (but perhaps resent him later when we get a stomach ache) he has made us take our medicine. The benefits won't accrue for some time, but when they do, we will realize what foresight he had.
It will take years for financial regulatory reform to go through the rulemaking process. For specific capital reserves to be decided and set aside. For derivatives to see the light of day. Economic crises happen every 10 years or so historically, so preventing or mitigating future ones is on a time scale wholly irrelevant to the election cycle. Public exchanges from the recently enacted health reform law (of private plans mind you) will not even be launched until 2014. Then it will inevitably experience some growing pains. Millions of people may not see the benefit for several years. The deficit effects won't really come on strong until 2020. EPA's efforts to begin regulating greenhouse gas emissions in 2011 will likely take years to refine and get through legal challenges. Vehicle corporate average fuel economy improvements (which haven't been increased since Jimmy Carter) will require us to buy cars with a $1000 greater sticker price. But they'll save us $3,000in gas, and untold environmental costs, over the next 5 years. All of the costs (in money and time and anxiety and burden) occur now. The benefits are in the future, a future which people, even rationally acting ones, heavily discount. So it is no wonder the President's approval ratings are dropping. But rather than be a signal of distress, I think it might just be a measure of what real political fortitude looks like.
The public may doubt Barack Obama now. But if the President achieves no more major policy victories (say in Energy/Climate, Immigration or Social Security) I think he will still be one of the most popular former Presidents in American history. Yes, up there with the likes of his political hero Lincoln. I mean, we've already run this experiment. Social security and Medicare are two of the most beloved and untouchable programs in government. But in their day too they were subject to the short term vagaries and tremors of confidence that polls are so astute at capturing. If politicians had only listened to the polls in the 1960s we probably wouldn't even have them. Sometimes, leadership means making people do what is best for them, even if it hurts in the present.
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