Below The Beltway

The Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson says that Wednesday’s protests, while not anything near an immediate threat to the President’s political power, do contain a warning that he’d do well to head:

[T]he polls also point to what looks like a reservoir of simmering discontent. For example, according to a CBS News-New York Times survey released last week, 47 percent of respondents were willing to believe that the Obama administration’s bailout assistance to the banks would ultimately benefit all Americans, as opposed to 40 percent who believed the money would just benefit the banks. But in that same poll, 58 percent of respondents said they disapproved of the administration’s plans to provide financial aid to the banks. In other words: Maybe this is necessary, but we don’t like it. Among self-described independent voters, 68 percent disapproved of how the administration was bailing out the banks.

I dwell on this one question buried deep inside one poll because I think it contains a quiet warning — the same message that could be discerned amid the random noise of the Howard Beale shoutfests. When the economy begins to rebound, Wall Street will come back first — already, we’re seeing some big banks, still bloated with taxpayer funds, reporting healthy profits. After recovery begins, unemployment will almost certainly continue to rise for months until it hits its peak. The mad-as-hell faction may thrive and multiply.

A growing sense of us vs. them, of the little guy vs. the big guy, is out there waiting to be exploited by anyone clever enough to fashion a sophisticated populist critique of the Obama administration’s policies. I know it seems crazy to use words like “clever” and “sophisticated” in connection with today’s Republican Party, but stranger things have happened.

One could have said the same thing about the Democrats after their three-in-a-row losses in Presidential races from 1980 through 1988, and yet look what happened to them. Moreover, the American public has a long history of blaming the guy in the White House for whatever they think is wrong with the country — just ask George W. Bush — and Obama would be a fool if he didn’t think that he could suffer the same fate.