Obama Looks for a Rebound
Clarence Page

 

President Obama

"Never let a serious crisis go to waste," White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel said a few days after President Barack Obama's election. A year into the Obama presidency, the crisis appears in many political ways to have been wasted.

A timely wake-up call came last week on the final night of Obama's first year in office. Republican Scott Brown's come-from-behind victory in Massachusetts cost Democrats their 60-seat majority in the Senate.

After similar setbacks for Obama-backed candidates in Virginia and New Jersey governor races, the loss in overwhelmingly Democratic Massachusetts was particularly jarring. Brown could not have won without disenchanted Democrats who either sat out the race or crossed over to help Brown win -- saying in many cases that they wanted to "send a message" to Washington.

In an interview with ABC's George Stephanopoulos, Obama appeared to get the message: He admitted that his administration got so busy that it lost touch and left the public with "a feeling of remoteness and detachment." Gee, do ya think?

What a difference a year makes. Remember Obama's inaugural address? "Now there are some who question the scale of our ambitions," he said. "What the cynics fail to understand is that the ground has shifted beneath them."

A year later, the ground has shifted beneath him, too. Unemployment has hit 26-year highs, two of the biggest carmakers have declared bankruptcy, and the president's healthcare bill became hung up in the ugly sausage-making process of haggling, partisan sniping, backroom deals and other "old ways of doing politics" that candidate Obama promised to change. His approval ratings have slid from almost 70 percent in his first weeks to about 50 percent. Happy first year, Mr. President.

What went wrong? In some ways, Team Obama fell prey to the same hubris revealed in the early days of Presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton and the conservative "revolution" of House Speaker Newt Gingrich in 1994. They thought their electoral victories represented big shifts in the political paradigm, perhaps for decades to come. Instead, their tidal waves look like ripples in America's constantly shifting political tides.

And even Obama seems to realize there's substance to the rap from his critics that he's been too aloof from everyday concerns of economically anxious Americans: "If there's one thing that I regret this year," he said, it is that "we were so busy just getting stuff done and dealing with the immediate crises ... that I think we lost some of that sense of speaking directly to the American people about what their core values are and why we have to make sure those institutions are matching up with those values." Indeed, how hard you're working doesn't matter much unless the public sees some good results or, at least, knows you're working hard on getting good results.

Obama's economic stimulus package cushioned the impact of the Great Recession -- more, it appeared, for bonus-hungry Wall Streeters than for the nation's growing ranks of jobless. Health care stalled in mid-summer as Senate Democrats tried unsuccessfully to win at least a few Republican votes.

In polls, moderate Obama voters shifted to the right, if only to "send a message" to Washington. Progressive-wing Democrats, already disappointed by Obama's hawkish foreign policy and Wall Street coziness are outraged by compromises like the cave-in on a health care public option.

But as Democrats scramble to reassess and make course corrections, they'll be missing a truly historic opportunity if they don't support a scaled-back version, if it comes to that, of the present bloated and complicated package. Future lawmakers can return to it later, once it's enacted and the public has a chance to get comfortable with it.

By contrast, if Democrats try instead to ram a huge, complicated health care overhaul to passage against the current tide of public suspicions, they will only unite Republican opposition, a task Republican leaders have been remarkably unable to do on their own.

And if the Democrats' big push for health care reforms fails now, it won't just be the economic crisis that will look wasted in Obama's first year. So will the entire year.

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Obama Looks for a Rebound | Clarence Page

 

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