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The latest hot
political topic is the “Obama paradox” – the supposedly mysterious
disconnect between the president’s achievements and his numbers. The
line goes like this: The administration has had multiple big victories
in Congress, most notably on health reform, yet President Barack
Obama’s approval rating is weak. What follows is speculation about
what’s holding his numbers down: He’s too liberal for a center-right
nation. No, he’s too intellectual, too Mr. Spock, for voters who want
more passion. And so on.

But the only real
puzzle here is the persistence of the pundit delusion, the belief that
the stuff of daily political reporting – who won the news cycle, who
had the snappiest comeback – actually matters.

This delusion is,
of course, most prevalent among pundits themselves, but it’s also
widespread among political operatives. And I’d argue that
susceptibility to the pundit delusion is part of the Obama
administration’s problem.

What political
scientists, as opposed to pundits, tell us is that it really is the
economy, stupid. Today, Ronald Reagan is often credited with godlike
political skills – but in the summer of 1982, when the U.S. economy was
performing badly, his approval rating was only 42 percent.

My Princeton
colleague Larry Bartels sums it up as follows: “Objective economic
conditions – not clever television ads, debate performances, or the
other ephemera of day-to-day campaigning – are the single most
important influence upon an incumbent president’s prospects for
re-election.” If the economy is improving strongly in the months before
an election, incumbents do well; if it’s stagnating or retrogressing,
they do badly.

Now, the fact that “ephemera” don’t matter seems reassuring, suggesting that voters aren’t swayed by cheap tricks.

Unfortunately,
however, the evidence suggests that issues don’t matter either, in part
because voters are often deeply ill informed.

Suppose, for
example, that you believed claims that voters are more concerned about
the budget deficit than they are about jobs. (That’s not actually true,
but never mind.) Even so, how much credit would you expect Democrats to
get for reducing the deficit?

None. In 1996
voters were asked whether the deficit had gone up or down under Bill
Clinton. It had, in fact, plunged – but a plurality of voters, and a
majority of Republicans said it had risen.

There’s no point
berating voters for their ignorance: people have bills to pay and
children to raise, and most don’t spend their free time studying fact
sheets. Instead, they react to what they see in their own lives and the
lives of people they know. Given the realities of a bleak employment
picture, Americans are unhappy – and they’re set to punish those in
office.

What should Obama
have done? Some political analysts, like Charlie Cook, say he made a
mistake by pursuing health reform, that he should have focused on the
economy. As far as I can tell, however, these analysts aren’t talking
about pursuing different policies – they’re saying that he should have
talked more about the subject. But what matters is actual economic
results.

The best way for
Obama to have avoided an electoral setback this fall would have been
enacting a stimulus that matched the scale of the economic crisis.
Obviously, he didn’t do that. Maybe he couldn’t have passed an
adequate-sized plan, but the fact is that he didn’t even try. True,
senior economic officials reportedly downplayed the need for a really
big effort, in effect overruling their staff; but it’s also clear that
political advisers believed that a smaller package would get more
friendly headlines, and that the administration would look better if it
won its first big congressional test.

In short, it looks
as if the administration itself was taken in by the pundit delusion,
focusing on how its policies would play in the news rather than on
their actual impact on the economy.

Republicans, by the
way, seem less susceptible to this delusion. Since Obama took office,
they have engaged in relentless obstruction, obviously unworried about
how their actions would look or be reported. And it’s working: by
blocking Democratic efforts to alleviate the economy’s woes, the GOP is
helping its chances of a big victory in November.

Can Obama do
anything in the time that remains? Midterm elections, where turnout is
crucial, aren’t quite like presidential elections, where the economy is
all. Obama’s best hope at this point is to close the “enthusiasm gap”
by taking strong stands that motivate Democrats to come out and vote.
But I don’t expect to see that happen.

What I expect,
instead, if and when the midterms go badly, is that the usual suspects
will say that it was because Obama was too liberal – when his real
mistake was doing too little to create jobs.

© 2010 New York Times News Service