President Obama's Report Card - Year 1   (c) M. Ryder

President Obama never billed himself as a crisis leader. When he started his campaign for the White House, his message was not about his ability to make tough decisions under adverse conditions but about gauzy promises of transformational change and the restorative power of hope. Obama had virtually no executive experience, and, as his critics pointed out, there were serious questions about whether his background as a community organizer in Chicago, a state legislator, and, briefly, a U.S. senator had adequately prepared him for the toughest job in the world.

But since his election, Obama has been forced by circumstances to deal with one calamity after another. He is the rare president whose fate was to be plunged immediately into a vast maelstrom of bad news, and for week after seemingly endless week, he never got a breather. There was the financial meltdown that almost paralyzed the economy. The near collapse of the mortgage industry. The death spiral of the automakers. The recession that sent unemployment through the roof. Somali pirates who took an American hostage. The ongoing threat of terrorism. And, of course, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Through it all, Obama demonstrated many of the leadership traits that served previous crisis presidents well, such as poise and the willingness to make quick, bold judgments and not brood about them. But Obama's actions have also raised lingering questions about whether his decisions were hastily conceived and relied too much on government money and power. In fact, since he took office in January, Obama has begun the biggest surge of federal activism in many years, including vast spending to stimulate the economy and other programs to rescue the financial, mortgage, and auto industries. His foreign policy seems to be a confusing pastiche of feel-good calls for cooperation combined with tough rhetoric toward the rogue nations of Iran and North Korea. Just as important, Obama has taken different approaches to the wars he inherited, slowly withdrawing from Iraq as he promised during his campaign but starting a buildup in Afghanistan.

Calm and confident. Yet overall, no matter what one thinks of his specific policies, Obama has turned out to be a more sure-footed leader under pressure than his critics had anticipated, and even better than his supporters expected. "He has a set of personal qualities that lend themselves to execu-tive leadership--that sense of calm, that sense of confidence, that penetrating intelligence, the ability to pick through complex problems, and a willingness to trust others," says David Axelrod, a White House senior adviser and longtime Obama confidant. "He understands that his job is principally about making decisions and living with those decisions, and he is comfortable with that."

Axelrod sees two types of decisions that every president faces: "You have sustained, long-term challenges like the wars, and then you have short-term issues that arise."

In a recent interview in the Oval Office, Obama, seated under a portrait of George Washington, explained what is behind his decision-making process. He says that he draws on methods that have helped him succeed in the past, such as assembling the best advisers, listening to their counsel, and encouraging dissent. But at the same time he added, "I don't think anything prepares you for the presidency."

Obama said he tries to base his judgments on "information and not emotions" and echoed past commanders in chief when he noted, "I think wartime issues are always of a different nature because they're life and death." He talked somberly about meeting with wounded soldiers and the families of those killed in action, and, lowering his voice, said almost sternly, "They are paying the ultimate price for our security, and so you'd better get those decisions right. And I feel a much greater weight when it comes to questions of war."

All the while, Obama has used three principles to guide him through the tumultuous times, his advisers say. First and foremost, he tries to come up with practical solutions that have a high probability of success. Second, he wants to exhibit confidence at all times to reassure the country that he will do the right thing. Third, he seeks to communicate his vision in a compelling way, using all the tools afforded by the modern media, from the Internet to prime-time news conferences and appearances on late-night TV talk shows.

White House aides say Obama's unflappability is one of his most valuable attributes. For example, assessing the torrent of bad news on the economy earlier this year, he zeroed in on the problem methodically, like the law professor he once was, decided to greatly expand federal intervention, and moved on. When he was told in April that Somali pirates had seized a cargo ship and were holding an American hostage, he insisted on exhaustive briefings describing his options and, without qualm, ordered Navy snipers to kill the pirates. When Republican Rep. Joe Wilson shouted that Obama was a liar during the president's speech on healthcare to a joint session of Congress on September 9, Obama didn't get flustered and refused to take it personally, adding to his reputation as President Cool. "It's clear that he brings a temperament that is in many respects suited to crisis management," says Bill Galston, a political scientist at the Brookings Institution and a former White House adviser to President Bill Clinton. "He is cool, calm, and collected. He doesn't get pushed into making decisions before he thinks they ought to be made. He listens [to advice], and he has an analytical mind."

Obama's decision to rescue General Motors and Chrysler, say White House aides, demonstrated savvy and toughness in an emergency. On the morning he had set aside to decide what to do, Obama met with his economic team, led by Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and White House economics adviser Larry Summers. But, despite repeated prodding, he wasn't satisfied with his advisers' answers to questions that Obama considered crucial. He wanted to know whether the federal government could really expect to get its loan money back, whether the two companies would have a "reasonable chance to survive" with the government assistance, and whether GM and Chrysler would be willing to make the hard choices necessary to become competitive again. So he ordered his team to take a break, do more research, and come back for another meeting at the end of the day. During that final 90-minute session, he was convinced he finally had gotten the explanations he sought, and he proceeded with the bailout.

Proving ground. Obama loyalists say that they saw some of his crisis-management skills during the campaign. Axelrod, who was Obama's chief political strategist, says: "As messy and ridiculous as our nomination and election processes are, I always viewed them as proving grounds in certain ways because there's nothing but pressure, and the longer you go, the more pressure you're under. And there were many instances during the campaign in which we were tested. No matter how much you believe in someone, you never know how they're going to handle that. And as much as I admired Obama, it was a revelation to see him handle the most pressure-full moments in the campaign. Whenever we had lost and were viewed as in trouble, he was at his absolute calmest, the most focused."

But Galston adds that, to be a successful manager amid calamity, a leader also needs "a clear and steady sense of where he is going and a willingness to take some short-term heat to get there," and Obama hasn't yet proven himself in those areas.

There is also the matter of Obama's toughness--or lack of it. "To be an effective president, you must be both revered and feared by your friends as well as your foes," says Ken Duberstein, White House chief of staff for President Ronald Reagan. Duberstein declined to speculate on whether Obama has lived up to this standard, but other veterans of past administrations say that he has not. He has deferred too often to Democrats in Congress and seems too benign to scare other world leaders, including those in Russia, Iran, and North Korea, the critics say.

Presidential scholars generally rate two American presidents above all the rest as crisis leaders: Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt. Lincoln led the country through its worst crisis--the Civil War, which threatened the very survival of the United States--with a combination of perseverance, vision, and knowing when to be flexible and when to dig in his heels. For example, he was flexible in his views about abolishing slavery until well into the Civil War, when he issued the Emancipation Proclamation, but never wavered in pursuing his goal of preserving the Union. Lincoln made many mistakes, but on the profound issues of his day, he came out in the right place. Says historian James McPherson in Tried by War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander-in-Chief: "In all five functions as commander in chief--policy, national strategy, military strategy, operations, and tactics--Lincoln's conception and performance were dynamic rather than static."

Roosevelt offers a more modern standard of comparison. FDR led America through the twin calamities of the Depression and World War II in the 1930s and 1940s. Like Lincoln, he was adaptable but showed resolve when he had to, along with vision and the capacity to inspire. One of his biggest achievements was mastering the media of his time to communicate directly with the public, including his confidence-building "fireside chats" on the radio.

FDR persuaded Congress to do more in a shorter period of time than any previous chief executive, such as passing a range of public works projects that created jobs. He devised a variety of "safety nets" such as Social Security that endeared him to everyday Americans.

Obama has modeled himself to a great extent on FDR. But so far, he has won passage for only one comparably big piece of legislation--a $787 billion economic stimulus bill. Julian Zelizer, a historian at Princeton University, rates Obama's success with Congress as "middling" but says it would greatly improve if Obama could win congressional passage of an overhaul of healthcare, his top priority. FDR used radio and newspapers to inspire deep loyalty from most voters because he convinced them that he had their best interests at heart, but "Obama doesn't have that command over the public psyche," Zelizer says.

Ross Baker, a Rutgers University political scientist, sees another problem. The recent job approval trend lines for Obama have been "unfavorable," especially over the summer. "The trouble for him is that Americans want instant gratification," and so far the $787 billion stimulus package has not had a big impact for most people, Baker says. Obama is being hurt by "persistent discontent over the state of the economy," Baker notes, which reflects impatience that his economic program has failed to end the recession, especially the high unemployment rate, at 9.8 percent in September.

And even if Obama is able to pull the economy out of its slump, he is still pushing healthcare and dealing with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which leads some critics to charge that he is moving too far, too fast. Duberstein says the country is getting nervous that Obama is overreaching by pushing the federal government into too many areas of national life and, at the same time, allowing the national debt to approach an astronomical $12 trillion. "As a country, we like our progress in increments," says Duberstein. "We don't like our progress in supersize. We like to take bites of the apple. We don't like to eat the whole apple in one gulp."

Many Washington veterans say that Afghanistan will be pivotal, and a big question is whether Obama will follow the advice of his military commanders who want more U.S. troops to salvage the war. "It's the biggest looming issue out there, and we'll get a glimpse of what he is made of," says Ed Gillespie, former White House counselor to President George W. Bush. As historians point out, nothing illuminates the strengths and weaknesses of a leader as clearly as a military crisis. How Obama handles Afghanistan will perhaps stand out as his defining moment.

 

 

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(c) 2009 U.S. News & World Report

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