A ‘pre-mortem’ for the Democrats.
Luke Sharrett / The New York Times
President
Obama with House Minority Leader John Boehner in January. View our
photo gallery to see if Obama is keeping his promises.
Obama's Promises
One day in the winter of 2005, I was in a Senate
hallway when the new guy from Illinois arrived for a vote. Sen. Barack
Obama—pop-star charisma, limitless possibility—knew his own allure.
Three years later, of course, the nation knew it, too. He won the
presidency by the largest popular-vote margin since 1988, bringing with
him the largest Democratic majorities in Congress since 1993.
But that was then. Obama’s approval rating is weak,
and many Democrats now accept the conventional wisdom that they may
lose the House, even the Senate, in November. Some reasons why were
unavoidable. The messianic hope that Obama inspired was destined to
dissipate almost as quickly as it arose. There are pendulum swings in
politics; Democrats, having taken 55 Republican House seats the last two
cycles, were bound to concede some. Most important, however,
kitchen-table realities are as grim as, or worse than, when Obama took
the oath. “Democrats are overextended in marginal districts, and the
economy is still in bad shape,” says Democratic pollster Mark Mellman.
“Those two factors are the only ones that really matter.” But aren’t
there things Obama & Co. could have done differently? Election Day
is still seven weeks away—but it’s not too early for a “pre-mortem”: Obama misread his mandate. “Obama’s 2008 victory was a personal
one,” says Bill Galston, an adviser to President Clinton. “It wasn’t a
vote for a more expansive view of the role and reach of government.” The
stimulus, on its own, wasn’t the problem. It was the thousands of
easy-to-caricature pages of new legislation that came on top of it, all
of which revived the Republicans’ “big government” narrative.
Obama—an overachiever, the guy who fills up a
second blue book on the extra-credit question—tried to do it all. His
chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, eager to please the new boss, declared
before Inauguration Day: “Never allow a crisis to go to waste. There are
opportunities to do big things.” But in doing big things, they failed
to fully attend to (and be seen attending to) the immediate
economic needs of the middle class. “There hasn’t been the laserlike
focus on the economy there could have, and should have, been,” says a
top Democratic strategist who declined to be named criticizing the White
House.
Take health-care reform. Ten years hence, perhaps,
it will be seen as the signal achievement of the Obama years. But for
now, it’s an unpopular law that took a divisive year to enact, that
liberals and conservatives loathe, that is full of bureaucratic and
fiscal IEDs, and that drained attention from dealing with the economy.
If you disagree, look at Obama’s speech last week in Cleveland. In 47
minutes, he mentioned health care for about 25 seconds.
Obama misread the clock. Obama was warned before the election
that Republicans would try to slow-walk his every nominee, but he never
figured out a way around the problem. The administration was slow to
staff up, which hampered everything, especially the impact of the
stimulus. “Shovel ready” projects identified in the spring of 2009 are
often still “unshoveled” because officials aren’t in place to approve
them, says Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute. “The
fact is,” he says, “Obama never really ran anything, even
legislatively.” Neither has his closest adviser, message guru David
Axelrod.