What can be said, at this midterm point, of the Obama administration’s place in the larger context of American political history?

The first thing to note is how much of it is familiar. Like his predecessors, Obama is subject to the constraints of Congress, the parties, and public opinion. He has been hobbled by his administration’s limited experience and competence. And he has fallen prey to the unexpected events and unintended consequences that plague every presidency. His 2010 shellacking is slightly less than what hit Roosevelt in 1938 (R+71). But it is more than what hit Hoover in 1930 (D+52), Truman in 1946 (R+55), Eisenhower in 1958 (D+47), Johnson in 1966 (R+47), Nixon in 1974 (D+43), or Clinton in 1994 (R+54).

The difference: Of the presidents listed above, only Hoover and Clinton were just two years out from their initial elections. It may be said that compared with them, Obama has racked up an impressive legislative record. The stimulus, Obamacare, and financial reform are substantial achievements, whatever the ultimate judgment on their desirability may be. But they do not add up to a program like the New Deal or the Great Society. Nor is there any sign that Obama is putting together a new political coalition with staying power, as FDR and Reagan did.

Surely this is not the fault of a hostile media, or of Obama’s lack of communication skills. He racked up 411 speeches, comments, and public remarks in his first year, though he held only five formal press conferences. FDR limited himself to four fireside chats in 1933. But he held a thousand press conferences in his presidency. Obama clearly prefers an oratorical to a Socratic form of communicating with the public.

Obama’s disappointing midterm standing is the product of two political realities. One is the lack of fit between his major domestic policies and mainstream public opinion. The other is the character of modern American politics, with its tension between most voters, who prefer moderate governance, and a political class that favors take-no-prisoners line-drawing.

The stimulus and its fiscal companion, the 2010 budget, injected several trillion dollars of additional spending into the economy to generate jobs and, as Congressman David Obey put it, “transform our economy with science and technology.” But the jobs haven’t come. And the energy and transportation revolutions are still not much more than pie-in-the-sky aspirations.

The contrast with the New Deal’s relief-and-recovery programs is stark. In its first year, Harry Hopkins’ Federal Emergency Relief Agency aided some 17 million needy Americans. Harold Ickes’ Public Works Administration launched projects in 2,068 of the nation’s 2,071 counties, and it ultimately constructed the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Hoover Dam, 78,000 bridges, and 40,000 public buildings.

Obamacare raised a storm of controversy and has a cloudy future, in stark contrast with FDR’s Social Security and LBJ’s Medicare. Its biggest drawback is that it has been inserted into a system of health care that covers some 80 percent of the population, most of whom are reasonably satisfied with their coverage. The health-care issues that most Americans care about are coverage and cost. Obamacare’s massive, incomprehensible retooling was not necessary to extend coverage. And few seriously believe that its cumbersome apparatus will be a model of cost-cutting efficiency. Finley Peter Dunne’s comic character Mr. Dooley once sighed: “I wisht I was a German, and believed in machinery.” Few Americans do.

#more#Financial reform is on its face a more attractive achievement. But like the others, its real impact has yet to be seen, and its complexity mutes its public appeal.

Obama’s administrative style adds to his problems. Like Carter and Bush, he has relied heavily on a small group of home-town familiars. They are perhaps no worse, but not much better, than their predecessors. Nor is his cabinet a “gathering of all the talents.” Aside from an absence of appointees with business experience, and an unusual number of “czars” not subject to congressional confirmation hearings, the Obama White House is most striking for its ordinariness. Where is the equivalent of the yeasty (if erratic) New Dealers?

Why did Obama, for all his vaulting ambition to be a president in the FDR-LBJ mode, create “the most Congress-centric administration in modern history”? The obvious answer is that in an era of all but complete partisan divide on large issues, there is no other way of governing. This is reinforced by a political culture in which the media, advocacy groups, and the blogosphere — none with a noticeable stake in moderation and compromise — are major players.

Congressmen and senators today are autonomous political entrepreneurs. And their leadership is skewed to the left. Of the 21 top House committee chairs in the current Congress, 16 represent districts that gave Obama more than 70 percent of the vote. In this they resemble the regnant Southern Democrats of the mid 20th century: more representative of a segment of their party than of mainstream public opinion.

Popular politics has also undergone a sea change. Traditional measures of party identification — region, class, religion, ethnicity — have been in flux for more than half a century. The Catholic vote is a relic of the past, as is the working-class vote. While 18-to-24-year-olds were Ronald Reagan’s strongest supporters in 1984, they were John Kerry’s strongest supporters in 2008. “Independents” are an ever-more decisive element in American politics. No wonder programmatic presidencies (Obama’s New Foundation hardly ranks with FDR’s New Deal and LBJ’s Great Society) and normal majority parties are fading away.

Finally, the 2010 election made clear how wide the disparity is between a program that suits Obama’s elite-liberal/left base, and the preferences of a moderate-to-conservative nation. In the words of an Obama supporter, “The Thirties or the Sixties it ain’t.”

In his great novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera saw “being” — life — as unconnected to the past or the future, to other people or agendas. It is weightless, unbearably “light.” Governing is quite the opposite: It is heavy with links to the past, locked into institutions and interests, vulnerable to contingency — in short, it is unbearably “heavy.” Obama is learning (or should be learning) the hard way, as did his predecessors, just how heavy governance is. But in a democracy, that is as it should be.

— Morton Keller, director of the Hoover Institution’s Working Group on Political Junctures in American Politics and Government, is the author of The Unbearable Heaviness of Governing: The Obama Administration in Historical Perspective, which has just been published by the Hoover Institution Press.