By Dax-Devlon Ross

“When the going gets tough,” neuroscientist Tali Sharot writes in her 2011 book The Optimism Bias, “we desperately start searching for the silver lining.” Sharot believes that optimism bias — “the inclination to overestimate the likelihood of encountering positive events in the future and to underestimate the likelihood of experiencing negative events” — leads us to miscalculate our decisions. These miscalculations in turn cause us to regret our decisions. After reading Sharot’s book I thought about President Obama. Had he been hurt by the optimism we felt when he took office three years ago? 

In the fall of 2008 Americans were enduring an unprecedented bout of public despair. The economy was tanking, two wars were spiraling, the environment was collapsing and the American people (not to mention people all over the globe) were in desperate need of a glimmer of light. We found it in Barack Obama. He inspired us. He comforted us. He even gave us reason to feel proud to be Americans. In a CBS/NY Times poll published less than a month before the ‘08 election, a record low 7% of Americans said the country was “going in the right direction.” As President-elect Obama prepared to take office three months later, another CBS/NYT poll revealed that 80% of Americans were optimistic about the next four years with him in office, 68% felt he would be a better-than-average president, 71% believed the economy would improve during his first year in office, and 61% said the country would be better in shape in five  years. A week after Obama finished his first 100 days in office the CBS/NYT poll returned to Americans with the same question it asked in late 2008. This time around 41 percent said the country was headed in the right direction—a 34% gain in six months. Substantively speaking little had changed. We were still in a recession. The wars were still going on. And yet the public mood was irrefutably different. 

The optimism was unprecedented and, as we would come to discover, short-lived. By November 2009, the president’s approval ratings had slid from 66% to 52%. His 38% approval rating this past fall was 12 points below the average for presidents at the same juncture across time. And as Obama’s approval ratings receded, so too did the wave of optimism that had swept him into office. When a CNN/ORC poll asked Americans how well they thought things would be going in the country at the end of 2009, 2010 and 2011, respondents replied with increased negativity each year. The 36% who said “badly” in 2009 crept up to 42% in 2010 and 55% this past fall. Similarly, an annual Gallup Poll of Americans’ optimism about the future for youth plummeted from 59% two months after Mr. Obama took office to a record low 44% two years later.

What’s curious is that even as Obama’s numbers fell, Americans’ optimism about their personal fortunes remained strong and steady. An AP-GFK poll released in December 2011 reported that 78% of Americans were optimistic for the upcoming year, a  figure wholly consistent with what the CNN/ORC poll found when it asked respondents how well things are going today for them personally. In every single poll from 2009 through 2011 an impressive 78% reported “Fairly well” or “Very well”.

Does this mean we chose poorly? That Obama has been a disappointment? Or does it beg a different question: Did we underestimate the damage and overestimate his ability to fix it overnight?

Sharot would argue that, in general, we harbor positive illusions about ourselves and our lives. The economy may be in free fall, but the future has better plans for us. In fact, among those surveyed by Gallup about the dismal future of youth, high-income earners — those with presumably the most wealth and access — were the most pessimistic. According to Sharot, this is precisely how optimism bias operates. Public pessimism feeds our sense of exceptionalism relative to others which in turn feeds our optimism about our own lives. And so and so forth.

I would argue that the collision of social, historical, and economic forces that brought that particular moment into being are rare. The optimism that carried Obama into office wasn’t just biased toward a rosy future; it was a statistical outlier. And once that crisis was averted, order generally restored, and our markets substantially stabilized, public pessimism didn’t just recover; it recoiled with a vengeance. And its main target was the man whose very image was at one point synonymous with hope.

It’s been said that Americans are suffering from Obama fatigue. I don’t buy it. What we’re suffering from is optimism withdrawal. Now that the president’s mere presence doesn’t provide the same “high” anymore, we sulk, we groan, we nitpick, we even picket. I remember thinking this while reading Drew Westin’s well-circulated New York Times essay, “What Happened to Obama?”, last summer. In Westin’s view Obama’s refusal to tell Americans a story like FDR or MLK was his primary failure. What the president did in his very first State of the Union Address was level with us. He stood before America and said we’d lived through an era “where too often, short-term gains were prized over long-term prosperity; where we failed to look beyond the next payment, the next quarter, or the next election.” Rather than coddle us, he leveled with us. We’d let our optimism run amuck. And for too long that same reckless optimism — the sense that everything should be fixed by now — has hijacked the conversation about an accomplished presidency that has advanced legislation to assist working people, women, people of color, gay and lesbian citizens, veterans, and younger Americans, and would have been unthinkable under McCain. (If you’re interested, an exhaustive list of the current administration’s achievements so far can be accessed on The PCTC (Please … Cut The Crap!) Blog.) Now the president is setting his sights on ensuring the 1% contribute their fair share. And through it all he’s continued to champion a bipartisan message that unites rather than divides the country. What more do we expect? Or are we just hellbent on perpetual dissatisfaction?

The breakthroughs in cognitive science are showing us who we are and how we operate in a language that is irrefutably honest. A lot of what we think we know about ourselves, our actions and our motivations just isn’t true. Memory is faulty. Bias is pervasive. Self-deception runs deep. And as difficult as it may be to wrap our brains around the implications of this growing body of knowledge, it’s important that we do so before we make a disastrous mistake just because we hope a quick fix can save the day. There is no silver bullet. We got lucky with Obama. Frankly, I’m encouraged by the direction our imperfect country is headed in. I may not see the end of the corporate state or Wall Street greed just yet, but the signs of economic recovery are real. Unemployment claims are down, the most recent jobs report showed notable growth and home sales are up. On balance the world is a safer, freer and more just than it was four years ago. That. Ain’t. Bad. If it means we can live long enough to fight for the better tomorrows we all eagerly anticipate and rightfully deserve, than I’ll take it. Yes, indeed.