by Jules Witcover

On two major issues, one domestic and one foreign, President Barack Obama has demonstrated how, in the wake of his midterm election defeat, political reality has obliged him to subordinate party ideology to getting things done.

In his deal with the Republican congressional leadership extending the Bush tax cuts for two years, he brushed aside the howls of protest from the liberal Democrats over continuing the unconscionable income tax and revived estate tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans.

At the same time, in the president's year-end review of the troop-surge strategy in Afghanistan he adopted a year ago to the dismay of many of the same Democrats, he merely paid lip service to getting out of the nine-year war there.

In saying his strategy to start withdrawing U.S. troops next July was "on track," he explicitly observed that the conditions on the ground that would permit it remained "fragile and reversible." To the anti-war Democrats in Congress, this sounded distinctly ominous and a clear buy-in to the Pentagon insistence that the July force reduction be "conditions-based" and hence minimal.

Taken together, these two Obama actions signaled a determination to accept continuing dissatisfaction within the progressive wing of his own party, in order to chart a more pragmatic course for the remaining two years of his term.

In strictly political terms, they translate into a calculated decision to move more to the center in response to the November election demand for an end to Washington stalemate, in a bid to win back lost independent and Republican support.

To placate the disaffected liberals, Obama has vowed to continue his fight against Bush tax cuts for the rich in the next election in 2012, which of course is expected to be the occasion of his bid for re-election. Also, by that time if the war in Afghanistan is looking no better, these liberals can be expected to be even more disaffected from him.

Still, the prospects of Obama's re-election are likely to be contingent more on the state of the economy at home in 2012 than on either the fate of the Bush tax cuts or the pace of U.S. troop withdrawals from Afghanistan.

In the stealth stimulus involved in the tax deal, which importantly includes the extension of unemployment benefits and 2 percent cut in Social Security paycheck deductions, the Obama administration is counting on getting a further boost toward economic recovery. It comes at a time any second stimulus package from Congress bearing the name was considered out of the question.

As for the war, Obama, from all he said in releasing the year-end Afghan review, indicates he has swallowed the caveat of Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and the generals -- that the troop pullout will be governed by conditions on the ground.

But public opinion at home is hardening against the war, with about 60 percent of Americans surveyed in the latest Washington Post/ABC News Poll saying they think the U.S. involvement is now a mistake. By 2012, the war is much more likely to be an election issue than it was this year, when for all evidence it was practically nonexistent.

So sour is opinion at home toward the war, and both at home and in Afghanistan itself toward the troublesome and corrupt regime of President Hamid Karzai, that a decision by Obama to sharply reduce the American commitment by then, or even end it, could enhance his re-election chances.

The fighting in Afghanistan has already gone on longer than any previous American war. Unless progress against the Taliban insurgency has not improved dramatically by 2012, and with the al-Qaida threat still essentially from Pakistan, Obama could reasonably declare then that United States had done all it could.

He could still leave American noncombat forces in Afghanistan for the training of local security forces and continue targeting air power against the al-Qaida safe havens in Pakistan.

If all this were to happen, current punditry predictions of a one-term presidency for him might well fade. His midterm adjustments may infuriate the liberals, but they could keep his second-term prospects alive.

 

Jules Witcover's latest book is Joe Biden: A Life of Trial and Redemption (William Morrow).

 

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A Tractable and Pragmatic President | Politics

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