One year ago, millions jammed Washington to celebrate the inauguration of Barack Hussein Obama as the 44th president of the United States. Despite a widespread belief that the nation was on the wrong track amid recession and wars, the mood was nearly euphoric at the possibility of a new beginning. The president had campaigned on the promise of a new kind of politics, and in that moment, it felt possible.
It would be unrealistic to use that moment to measure where President Obama is today. We are simply too independent-minded a people to feel that way about our leaders for long. Even so, the contrast is striking. The big political news of the week was not the accomplishments of President Obama's first year but of the victory of Republican Scott Brown in the race for the Massachusetts U.S. Senate seat previously held by Sen. Edward M. Kennedy. Plenty of factors other than President Obama affected voters' choices in Massachusetts - not the least of which being what was by all accounts a terrible campaign by the Democrat in the race - but it is impossible to dismiss.
Were the famously liberal voters of Massachusetts sending a message that they disapprove of President Obama or of the health care reform in which he has invested so much political capital? Not directly. The president and health care reform (which in many ways resembles what Massachusetts already has) are both popular in Massachusetts. More likely, the lesson of Massachusetts and of the political unrest around the country is that people are fed up with Washington in a way that transcends individual issues or politicians. President Obama promised to tackle the economy, the environment and health care; he promised to restore respect for America in the world, to restore the rule of law in our treatment of foreign detainees and to withdraw from Iraq. He has made progress on them all. But his failure on one promise - to change the culture of Washington - has tainted in the public mind everything else he has done.
There's an old expression that you campaign in poetry but you govern in prose, and that is probably more true of President Obama than anyone in recent memory. As transcendently inspiring a figure as he was on the campaign trail, he has proved a supremely pragmatic president. He is willing to make whatever compromises are necessary to move forward with his goals.
On health care, he cut deals with the insurance and pharmaceutical industries, hospitals and individual members of Congress. The result is a bill that accomplishes important goals - preventing insurance companies from denying coverage for pre-existing conditions; providing subsidies to expand coverage to millions of uninsured Americans; and setting up insurance exchanges to make it easier for individuals and small businesses to purchase and keep coverage. But it is a bill that no one would have set out to create. Compromise and horse-trading might be smart things to do in the long run, but they are not easy to get excited about.
Americans have no patience for it right now. We all recognize that the nation is facing challenges the likes of which we haven't seen in generations, and the one thing the public seems unwilling to accept is the idea that people are using the opportunity to get theirs. People were nervous about the size of the economic stimulus package the president pushed through last February, but what really sparked outrage was the fact that it was laden with pet projects congressmen and senators slipped in to shore up their political standing at home. The public didn't like the idea of bailing out the financial sector and the auto companies, but they might have accepted its necessity if not for Wall Street's utter lack of repentance about its bonus-happy ways. Public support for the health bill survived the silliness of the death panel claims of August, but it went south fast with the deals the White House and congressional leaders made to secure the votes of reluctant senators. These are the kinds of things that are usually dismissed by the observation that people don't really want to know how laws and sausage are made, but it seems that Americans have lost their taste for sausage.
So what is the Obama administration to do? According to Gallup, President Obama, at 50 percent, has the second-lowest approval rating of any modern president at this point in his term. But the problem is less his priorities than what he has done to move those priorities through Congress. The public doesn't like how Congress conducts business, and the president is suffering for agreeing to play the Capitol Hill game.
The immediate matter at hand is the health care bill. Mr. Brown has pledged to use his vote to block the legislation, which he can do because he gives the Republicans enough votes to maintain a filibuster. Democrats are considering two basic ways of responding: either by seeing what they can squeeze through using parliamentary tricks; or retrenching and proposing a more modest reform.
The latter approach is unlikely to work - nothing about how Republicans have behaved since President Obama took office suggests they would be willing to vote for the Apple Pie Appreciation Act if he were to propose it. The former is unlikely to win Democrats any points in the eyes of the public right now, but it might be the only viable option. For all the failings of the Senate health bill, it would still represent a monumental step forward from the status quo, and its failure would likely mean it would be a decade or more before anyone is willing to take up the issue again. Democratic members of Congress seem convinced that the bill's failure would be a bigger disaster for them politically than its success would be, but the consequences of failure for ordinary Americans would be much worse.
President Obama seems intent on scoring a victory on health care and then pivoting quickly to a focus on creating more jobs. That's the right priority, but it won't be sufficient to win the public's support unless he also makes good on his promises to change Washington. When it comes to making deals to get his jobs program through Congress, President Obama needs to start saying no. He needs to take a stronger stance on earmark reform, and he needs to follow through on all his promises to make the legislative process more transparent. And most of all, he needs to convince members of Congress that the gravity of the problems we face - and the mood of the voting public - demand a new way of doing business. Members of Congress are used to preserving their parochial political interests, but doing so is no longer in their parochial political interests.
Can the president recover from the political hole he finds himself in? Consider one fact: The president whose approval rating was worse than President Obama's at this point was Ronald Reagan. How a presidency begins, it seems, does not determine how it ends.
Readers respond He has bankrupted the country and ensured that our grandchildren will never have economic freedom, took over major industries, ran over the constitution, lied non-stop, broke every major campaign promise, weakened our national defense, indebted us to China for who knows how long, spent $787 billion on liberal pet projects, lost 4.5 million jobs and failed to listen to the American people. All in all, a huge colossal failure - F - for his first year.
Carlhk1
My thought is that President Obama considers health care reform, even the watered down version that's still trying to survive, as too important not to pass, so he was willing to over compromise. But he needs to stand firm and not compromise on job creation, Wall Street reform and environmental issues.
I have been impressed with his thoughtful decisiveness in all things involving defense and diplomacy so far.
Level Headed