College Street
The Return of Ari Fleischer ’82
Ari Fleischer, the man who once earned his living as President George W. Bush’s spokesman, took the stage at Dana Auditorium in October to offer his clear-eyed but distinctly Republican perspective on Barack Obama’s remarkable ascent to power and subsequent struggles in office, evidenced by his plummeting approval rating.
Zach Trenholm
In front of a packed house, Fleischer spent 90 minutes dissecting the “massive shift in voter behavior” that sent a relatively obscure U.S. senator from Illinois to the Oval Office, crediting African American voters, young voters, and wealthy graduate-degree-holding voters, who often vote Republican, for Obama’s historic win in November 2008. On the other hand, he refuted the myth that first-time voters had turned the tide, noting that all the noise about “the new voter turned out to be nothing but hype.”
Fleischer opined that reality has thrown a bucket of ice water over Democratic dreams of changing the world since the heady days of January 20, when Obama’s job approval registered 70 percent and his job disapproval stood at 10 percent. Now, after a politically brutal summer and fall, the president’s job approval rating has dropped by 20 points to 50 percent, and his job disapproval has risen to 43 percent. “That’s the third fastest drop since World War II,” he noted, adding that Bill Clinton and Gerald Ford were the only chief executives whose ratings had nosedived more precipitously.
The drop, he said, “is not because the Republicans are doing things right” but because of a phenomenon he called “spending fatigue,” occasioned first by George Bush’s financial relief package and then by the $787 billion stimulus legislation pushed through by the Obama administration. “The dissatisfaction has spread to independents,” Fleischer said.
The land mines directly in the president’s path, said Fleischer, are health-care reform and Afghanistan, predicting that if Obama fails to reform the health-care system and if he sends more troops to Afghanistan, his liberal, Democratic base may abandon him. “If the Democrats feel Obama has let them down, that won’t bode well for the party,” he said, speculating that it might mean a boon for the GOP in the 2010 elections.
But he also cautioned fellow Republicans against what Alan Greenspan once called “irrational exuberance.” “If he can get a bill passed and claim some sort of victory in health care, it will help his party tremendously,” Fleischer predicted. “If the economy comes back strong, that will make all the difference. There’s a long year to go before the next election.”
Fleischer opened the talk by tracing his conversion from his childhood in a family of “very liberal Democrats” in Westchester County, New York, to a conservative Democrat during college to a full-blown Republican once he had seen the light of Ronald Reagan. “I responded to Reagan’s vision of peace through strength,” he said, adding that his own votes are determined more by foreign policy, defense, and economic issues than by social issues, an area in which he says his views have not changed.
He demonstrated his skill as a media consultant—he now runs Ari Fleischer Sports Communication—by deftly punting questions from the audience that might bite. Fleischer came to the College on the eve of fall break at the behest of political science professor Matt Dickinson, who booked Dana instead of a larger venue in anticipation of a lower turnout. “It was my fault, I blew it,” admitted Dickinson in an apology to those who were shut out. “My students never come to class the day before vacation. How was I to know they would turn out [tonight]?”
—Sally West Johnson ’72
