Obama Getting Lost in Details

[Cees Binkhorst]

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Groet / Cees

February 1, 2010
Letter From Washington
Obama Getting Lost in Details
By ALBERT R. HUNT

WASHINGTON — John Gardner, the estimable founder of Common Cause and
former secretary of health, education and welfare, said one of the
conditions for effectiveness in Washington is to employ “inside-outside
alliances.”

He was talking about citizen action. The need to walk that line between
outdoor politics, summoning public support with some explanatory
eloquence, and indoor politics, making the essential compromises,
cutting the deals with legislators and vested interests, that are the
essence of most democracies. This is even more applicable to governing.

President Barack Obama’s inability to practice this art over the past
year is a major factor in some of his difficulties. While winning
legislative victories on the economic stimulus and health care, the
administration allowed the opposition to define the measures.

“There’s a disconnect,” says Bill Carrick, a top Democratic strategist
in California. “They’re doing some good things, and people don’t know it.”

This isn’t simply a matter of message or public relations. Obama
advisers delude themselves when they say that most of their setbacks
stem from process issues like not televising the health care
deliberations on C-Span, a cable channel devoted to government affairs.

Mr. Obama has saturated the media with interviews — far more and diverse
than anything his predecessors did — and the public arena with speeches,
some superb. Yet he has failed to convey any overarching vision; his
initiatives aren’t centrally connective.

Thus, the stimulus bill, to most Americans, was about parochial
pork-barrel projects, not about the millions of jobs saved and the more
severe economic dislocation it avoided. To be sure, the stimulus was
bracketed between and associated with the Treasury’s Troubled Asset
Relief Program, which most Americans saw as an unconscionable bailout of
Wall Street fat cats, and the rescue of the auto industry, which remains
unpopular though it has been turning out pretty well.

To many in the public, the health care bill was more a matter of death
panels or special deals for Senator Ben Nelson of Nebraska — who gave
Democrats a crucial vote in support — or labor unions than about
insuring 30 million more Americans, or ending discrimination against
people with pre-existing conditions, or, most important, improving the
economy and creating jobs.

Deals always are cut to grease legislation — the bigger the spending or
tax measure, the more special provisions. The issue is, which dominates:
the pieces or the whole?

A telling example is Ronald Reagan’s tax cuts in 1981, the centerpiece
of that president’s agenda. He proposed huge but simple across-the-board
tax reductions intended to spur economic growth. A congressional bidding
war ensued, and the bill was laden with so many corporate loopholes and
special favors that the budget director, David Stockman, later said “the
hogs were really feeding” as it “just got out of control.” The end
product was so bad that Mr. Reagan had to increase taxes each of the
next three years.

Yet that wasn’t the message conveyed. Mr. Reagan’s optimism in
articulating the purpose overwhelmed any criticism of the particulars.

By contrast, the Obama White House, which was intimately involved in
shaping the particulars of both the stimulus and the health care bill,
became so obsessed with the inside game that it lost sight of the vision
or the narrative. Supporters had little idea what they were supposed to
be supporting.

Many Americans embrace the concept of overhauling health care and many
of the particulars of the Democrats’ plan. It is the vague Obama plan,
as defined by his opponents, that worries them, even in Massachusetts.

This discord, or disconnect, is more important for the White House to
try to address than the other suggested changes to the Obama presidency.

The political left insists the problem is the president has lost his
moorings and needs to energize the liberal base. The reality is that Mr.
Obama is no left-winger, and liberals lack a majority in the Congress
and the country.

The other side says, move to the center and eschew those far-out
policies. This is equally false. The health care measure rejects any
government option and is embraced, in varying degrees, by the drug and
insurance industries and the medical associations. They aren’t members
of any liberal cabal, and neither is Mr. Obama; he’s a pragmatic
progressive.

Well, some say, then he took on too much; he should have waited to take
on health care. The current measure’s fate hangs in the balance. But if
Mr. Obama had waited, there would have been little chance any major
effort would have been enacted in his presidency, whether it’s one or
two terms. Ask former President George W. Bush about entitlements.

The Obama slide has little to do with ideology or a too-ambitious
agenda. It is a reflection of both the difficulty of the situation he
inherited and the administration’s inability to balance conflicts, which
is what effective leaders do.

In few places is this value more necessary than the approach to big
banks and Wall Street. Anti-corporate populism is a bankrupt policy for
governance and often has a short political shelf life. Still, Mr. Obama
can ill afford to cede the very legitimate populist anger over bailouts
and bonuses and go back to business as usual on Wall Street.

On this, he is off to a good start by channeling this anxiety into more
than just a populist rant with the looming presence of Paul A. Volcker
and the “Volcker rule” on limiting banks’ risks.

The president threaded some of these needles in his State of the Union
speech last week, adhering to his basic principles and articulating them
well, while offering some concessions to political opponents. It won’t
be easy to build on that over the next few months.

It is harder, as the Obama camp is right to argue, because they
inherited from the Bush administration a terrible mess: a fragile
economy, out-of-control budget deficits and a dysfunctional and
dangerously expensive health care system. Recently, a top Obama aide
lamented to the president how much better it would be to govern in good
times.

“If it were good times,” Mr. Obama responded, “we wouldn’t be here.”

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