Editorial Cartoon by David Horsey

The president's ambitious proposals are redefining the role of government

For most Americans, Barack Obama 's most vivid presidential moment came on election night.

He stepped before a quarter-million jubilant supporters in Chicago's Grant Park and a worldwide television audience and proclaimed that a new era of change had arrived. As the first African-American president, he had made history. As one of the youngest presidents ever elected, at 47, he promised to undertake a generational shift and move the nation from confrontation and polarization to conciliation and compromise. He went on to echo some iconic leaders from America's past--Abraham Lincoln and his mystical belief in the Union, Franklin Roosevelt and his infectious optimism, John F. Kennedy and his call to service.

All in all, it was Barack Obama at his charismatic best.

But now that he has moved past the first months in office, the narrative of Obama's actual presidency, including his policy directions, his strengths, and his weaknesses as a leader, has become more clear.

Since that electric Chicago night back in November, he has pivoted from poetry to prose, playing down charisma and emphasizing competence. And he has moved with impressive speed to focus on the nation's No. 1 problem: the recession and the collapsing financial industry, widely considered the worst economic calamity since the Depression. In the process, Obama is pushing the political pendulum from the conservative approach of Ronald Reagan, who said government was the problem, to a more liberal philosophy that holds that only Washington has the wherewithal to provide the answers.

More than anything else, he has brought big, activist government back into play.

"I'm pleased with the progress we've made, but I'm not satisfied," Obama told a town meeting in Arnold, Mo., April 29.

"I'm confident in the future, but I'm not content with the present--not when there are workers who are still out of jobs, families who still can't pay their bills; not when there are too many Americans who can't afford their heathcare."

His answer: more action by Washington.

Like most of their recent predecessors, Obama and his aides weren't fond of the 100-day yardstick for measuring a new chief executive's success, arguing that it has become artificial and outmoded since it was used to assess the start of Franklin Roosevelt's regime in 1933. Still, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs says, "We've had the most productive first 100 days probably since Roosevelt."

It remains to be seen if Obama's agenda will cure the nation's ills, but there is no doubt that he has thought big and moved fast.

Last November and December, before he took office, in a series of meetings in his hometown of Chicago, he concluded that the economy was in such peril that he would have to take drastic action. Relying on key aides, including Larry Summers (now the chief White House economic adviser) and Timothy Geithner (now treasury secretary), he fashioned a massive program involving astronomical government spending to create jobs and dramatic moves to bail out the financial industry and the nation's automakers--and moved decisively starting on Inauguration Day.

Ambitious agenda.

Working with the Democratic majority in Congress and with negligible Republican support, Obama won congressional approval for a $787 billion stimulus package and persuaded Congress to approve a $3.5 trillion budget outline for 2010 that included a $1.2 trillion deficit.

He arranged massive bailouts for failing banks and auto companies and promised much more government intervention and regulation of troubled sectors in the future.

Looking ahead, he will have an opportunity to reshape the Supreme Court by appointing a replacement for retiring Justice David Souter.

Obama also is eager to enact an overhaul of the nation's healthcare system that would move toward universal health coverage and, he hopes, lower costs.

He is pushing for a similarly historic program to limit use of fossil fuels through a "carbon tax" and other methods. There are signs that he will do this not only through sweeping legislation but by also having the Environmental Protection Agency play a larger role.

And Obama wants to reform education, which will entail pouring more money into the system. White House aides say immigration legislation could come later.

All this may be facilitated by the sudden party switch of Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania from Republican to Democrat. Specter calculated that this would help him in his 2010 re-election bid. But in the meantime, his move would give the Democrats a filibuster-proof, 60-vote majority in the Senate if Al Franken is seated from Minnesota, as expected, after ongoing legal challenges.

On foreign policy, Obama aims to pull all U.S. combat troops out of Iraq next year, although at a slower pace than he promised during the campaign. He is beefing up U.S. forces in Afghanistan, which he considers the central front in the war on terrorism.

And he is systematically reaching out to America's allies and adversaries to forge more international partnerships. This make-nice approach was on display during his trip to Port of Spain, Trinidad, in mid-April for a meeting with leaders of 33 other nations in the hemisphere. He sparked intense criticism from opponents at home when he shook hands in a chummy moment with Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, a virulent critic of the United States. Conservatives said the move showed timidity or a lack of backbone. Many Americans, however, liked his show of humility and outreach.

All the while, Obama's popularity has remained high.

Polls show that more than 60 percent of Americans approve of his job performance so far, with overwhelming support from Democrats and strong support from independents. Republicans are solidly opposed to him, but the percentage of self-identified GOP voters is declining. And for the first time in years, more Americans (50 percent) say the country is headed in the right direction than those (48 percent) who say the country is on the wrong track, according to an ABC News/Washington Post poll from late April.

It's too early to make sweeping judgments, says Rutgers political scientist Ross Baker, but he adds: "It's an auspicious debut." Baker calls the Obama presidency "ambitious" but not overreaching. "He is directing his energy discriminately. Bismarck once said he who attacks everywhere attacks nowhere. He clearly is following that dictum."

Matthew Dowd, former strategist and pollster for President George W. Bush, says Obama has shown decisiveness and competence but may be sowing the seeds of serious problems later on, such as the massive yearly deficits and the trillion-dollar debt that Obama is generating. In addition, Obama's social outreach to Republicans has not worked, and GOP leaders are turning more and more against him and what they call his "tax and spend" policies, Dowd says. The administration's economic stimulus bill gained only three Republican votes in the entire Congress.

Despite the problems, Obama will push ever more aggressively for his agenda, his aides say, because he believes that a president is most effective in his first year, when the aura of his electoral victory remains strong.

Good listener.

What his fans like is his pragmatism, his willingness to listen to criticism and learn from experience, his team approach to governing, and his flexibility, in contrast to what was perceived as George W. Bush's unilateralism and intransigence, according to pollsters and political analysts of both major parties. Obama is "totally practical, nonideological," says a White House adviser. "He is an extremely disciplined thinker--very intelligent, very efficient." But Obama admits that if the economy isn't much better in 2012, he expects that the voters will be looking to replace him. "He feels he should be judged by the success or failure of the economy," says a senior White House adviser.

One thing that has been learned about Obama is his coolness under pressure and his methodical, disciplined approach to decision making. His confidence seems preternatural. "This is why we thought he'd be good at the job," says White House spokesman Gibbs. "Calm, steady leadership is what the country is looking for at a time of crisis." Obama's authorization of a strike by Navy SEALs on pirates who had taken the captain of an American freighter hostage off the coast of Somalia in mid-April showed some of Obama's best qualities, especially his composure under fire and his decisiveness when it counts.

Not that Obama's decision-making process is always easy.

White House aides say his toughest decision so far was to release detailed memos on harsh U.S. interrogation methods for suspected terrorists, such as waterboarding, that some have labeled torture. "He struggled with it," says a senior aide who participated in the deliberations. "There were a lot of competing ideas"--and strong disagreements among his aides. Obama was trying to balance national security with the goal of showing the world that the United States has "nothing to hide" in explaining its antiterrorism policies, and to underscore that torture violates American values. In the end, Obama concluded that the harsh methods had not been more effective than other techniques. "Whether they [the harsh methods] work is unknowable," says a senior aide, adding that it was clear that al Qaeda was using the U.S. techniques as a "recruitment poster" to mobilize terrorists around the world. Besides, the aide says, most of the details were widely known before the memos were released. Obama is now allowing his Justice Department to consider whether to prosecute officials of the Bush administration who designed and authorized the harsh interrogation techniques.

But fixing the economy remains Job 1, and administration officials say that the severity of the crisis, while bad for the country, has actually propelled Obama's overall agenda. "Big change was called for, and change was the message of the campaign," the senior official says. "What impresses me is that he wants to play big."

In addition, White House officials say, the healthcare issue has increased in importance, moving from a moral issue to a moral and practical one. This represents a contrast from the Clinton administration, when overhauling the healthcare system failed under the weight of practical concerns such as whether the version pushed by Bill and Hillary Clinton in 1993 and 1994 would have the government intrude too much into the medical system. There is a deep belief among many experts that the healthcare costs are breaking the national budget and the budgets of millions of businesses, families, and individuals. Reform would be a "moral good since it's an embarrassment to have so many uninsured," the senior White House official says, "but there's now a fiscal imperative to fix it. There's a whole new momentum behind reform."

Another advantage for Obama is that the Democratic Party finally has a deep bench for filling the administration with Washington veterans. Obama has access to a pool of aides from the eight-year regime of Bill Clinton, whose policies were popular and whose presidency was widely considered a success. Even these veteran Clinton aides made mistakes at first, such as ineptly vetting some Obama cabinet members whose names had to be withdrawn amid various controversies, but the stumbles were quickly overcome.

One of Obama's biggest concerns is falling out of touch with everyday America, aides say, as he navigates a hectic schedule and deals with the limits imposed by the Secret Service on how he interacts with citizens. But he still talks to close friends via his BlackBerry, and he looks forward to reading letters from everyday citizens given to him each morning by his staff. He reads the correspondence, tucked into a purple folder, when he gets a break in the Oval Office but most frequently goes over it as a stay-in-touch ritual each night in the residence. When letters resonate with him, "he sends them around to all of us," says a member of his inner circle. He often pens a reply.

Obama also tries to maintain normalcy in a number of ways, working out at 7 a.m. in the third-floor gym of the residence, having breakfast with his wife, Michelle, and their two daughters, Malia and Sasha, and getting home in time for a family dinner.

He tries to leave Washington once a week to take soundings "outside the beltway."

Obama's workday begins at about 9:30 a.m. with national-security and economic briefings followed by a lengthy series of meetings and public appearances, punctuated by lunch -- often a cheeseburger and waffle fries.

After that, he reads memos on policy and upcoming events, which he sometimes studies until after midnight.

And it's the details of policy that absorb nearly all of his attention.

With the pace of change that Obama is setting, there's little doubt that his next 100 days will be just as important as his first.

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

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