President Obama didn't get much time last week to savor the gauzy one-year-after retrospectives of his 2008 election victory, with its 53% of the popular vote and 365 electoral votes. He had other numbers to think about.
On Friday, the Labor Department announced that unemployment hit a 26-year high of 10.2% last month. Earlier last week, in Virginia and New Jersey -- states that were Obama's last year -- Republicans won gubernatorial seats by margins of about 17% and 5%, respectively. And the president's own approval rating, a dizzying 78% when he was inaugurated, has fallen to a prosaic 50%.
State and local elections often turn on local circumstances, and there were plenty of those to muddy the message from Tuesday's election. But there's nothing complicated about the mood in the rest of the nation. Voters in 50 states are unhappy about the economy, angry about partisanship in Washington and disappointed in Obama's failure to live up to their inflated expectations.
For Democrats, the unemployment number was the week's most alarming. It now becomes the Republicans' chief argument that Obama's policies have failed -- never mind that their own alternative, a smaller economic stimulus, would have done no better.
"Tell me what the unemployment rate is in 2010 and I'll tell you how that election turns out," Republican strategist David Winston said. "When unemployment hits a certain level, it's the only domestic issue that matters."
In the first months of his presidency, Winston noted, Obama focused like a laser on the economy, and his approval ratings were high. But during the last six months, his agenda has been more fragmented as he's tackled healthcare, climate change and Afghanistan.
Some White House aides say that there's nothing here that a couple of million new jobs won't fix. But Obama didn't run for president only to fix the economy. Candidate Obama's promise was to move American politics beyond its normal limits.
On that count, two more numbers should give the president pause. When the Gallup Poll asked voters last month if Obama had kept "the promises he made during his presidential campaign," only 48% said yes. And when the pollsters asked whether voters considered Obama a liberal or a moderate, 54% called him a liberal -- a big jump from the 43% who gave that answer on election day in 2008.
