By Edward Luce
Published: March 26 2010 22:11
Sign of the times: Barack Obama puts his signature to the health reform bill at the White House, the pursuit of which consumed most of his first 15 months as president
Coinciding with the first hint of Washington’s spring cherry blossom, Monday morning found the White House in a playful mood. “I thought we were supposed to be idiots,” said a senior official just a few hours after the historic passage of Barack Obama’s signature health reform bill. “Now all of a sudden we are geniuses?”
As Republicans have been doing their best to demonstrate all week, Washington is not a very bipartisan town nowadays. But it could be described as bipolar. One minute the president is ushering in a new age of progressive politics. The next he is a failed hope-monger who lacks the spine to finish the job.
In his latest incarnation, Mr Obama is a strategic maestro who had foreseen the past triumphant week, which was by far the best of his presidency. The truth is a little more prosaic. It is easy to forget but until late January, when Democrats were knocked sideways by the surprise defeat of their Senate candidate in Massachusetts, healthcare reform was on a comfortable trajectory to enactment. It had already been passed by both houses of Congress and they were expected to thrash out a unified product some time in February.
Then the bombshell hit. Most Washington insiders saw the loss of Edward Kennedy’s seat as a disaster for the president because it crystallised how far opinion had turned against him. It also deprived his party of its controlling super-majority in the Senate. Republicans were already unified against any big Obama initiatives. Now they could filibuster whatever he threw at them.
But a small number saw the Massachusetts defeat as a timely jolt for a party that looked to be sleepwalking towards a Bill Clinton-style disaster at the midterm elections in November. They may have been right. After a few days of panic, the White House emerged with a game plan and a new sense of resolve. “This was the cold shower that President Obama needed,” said a senior outside adviser. “It forced him to raise his game.”
More is known about Mr Obama today than a few weeks ago. As was the case during his campaign, he can drift for long patches. Then something happens – Hillary Clinton crowns herself the inevitable winner in the primaries, or Benjamin Netanyahu, Israeli prime minister, insults the administration once too often – and a more purposeful Mr Obama emerges.
The Massachusetts defeat was such a moment. It turned him from America’s lecturer-in-chief, who had even his most ardent supporters nodding off mid-paragraph, into the robust campaigner who could electrify his troops. Having allowed Congress to manage the healthcare bill for its first nine months, Mr Obama in early February finally took day-to-day control.
He led from behind the scenes, holding decisive strategy sessions with Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House of Representatives, and Harry Reid, Senate leader. He has also made more use of his cabinet, including Kathleen Sebelius, health secretary. And he led in public, flying to carefully located town hall events in districts represented by wavering Democrats. By showing spine, Mr Obama made it easier for Democrats in marginal seats to show spine as well.
At his rousing pep talk to Democrats on Capitol Hill before last weekend’s vote, Mr Obama appealed to what may have originally motivated lawmakers to enter politics. “Every once in a while, you have a chance to vindicate all those best hopes you had about yourself,” he said. “This is one of those times where you can honestly say to yourself, doggone it, this is exactly why I came here.”
So what happens next? Three consequences are apparent. First, Mr Obama seems to be getting better at governing. That bodes well for his ability to push through other reforms, including the re-regulation of Wall Street, the next item on his list. Given what the past week has done for his approval ratings, which have shot up, he might also prove an asset for Democrats on the campaign trail in November. They will need him.
“The lesson from the last few weeks is that President Obama should not delegate too much of the initiative to Congress,” says Simon Rosenberg, head of NDN, formerly the New Democrat Network, a Washington think-tank. “If he leads from the front good things are more likely to happen.”
Second, success at home helps abroad. It may have been a coincidence but it seemed fitting that Mr Obama on Wednesday pulled off his most tangible foreign policy success yet – reaching the new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty with Russia to make deep cuts in the countries’ nuclear arsenals – the day after he signed healthcare reform into law.
Likewise, the evening he signed healthcare, he showed relish, and invested a certain amount of thought, in fashioning a humiliation for Mr Netanyahu. It was a rare glimpse of him behaving as an alpha male in response to someone who had treated him as a pushover, most recently in a speech in Washington on Monday, by openly mocking Mr Obama’s desire for a settlements freeze in Jerusalem.
The president’s revenge the following evening was perhaps rendered with the swagger of a man who had a few hours before enacted a reform that eluded all his Democratic predecessors. Then again, maybe not. “I think it’s safe to say that Obama really, really dislikes Netanyahu,” says an unpaid White House foreign policy adviser. In a calculated snub, the Israeli prime minister was ushered into the White House for a meeting with no photographers to record it. After 90 minutes of unfriendly discussion, he was left to stew in the Roosevelt room with his advisers while Mr Obama went and ate supper alone (his family was in New York). They then resumed their meeting.
It may sound trivial. But by the standards of diplomacy, particularly those of US-Israeli diplomacy, Mr Obama’s behaviour was rude. It was read as such in Israel – with quite a lot of Israelis approving, according to the country’s media.
More generally, Mr Obama’s success with healthcare at home ought to increase respect for him abroad. Leaders of 12 countries, from the UK’s Gordon Brown to the king of Saudi Arabia, rang to congratulate him this week.
“The critique of Obama has always been that he is ‘soft’,” says David Rothkopf, formerly a senior official in the Clinton administration. “As Joe Biden predicted would happen, everyone has been testing Obama – the Russians, the Chinese, the Republicans, Democratic senators, Hamid Karzai, Netanyahu, you name it. Gradually they are finding out that he can sometimes show mettle. Obama is genuinely evolving as a president.”
The third consequence, and in some respects cause, of Mr Obama’s healthcare victory is the at least temporary capture of the Republican party by its radical wing. At a dinner in Washington this week, Newt Gingrich, the former Speaker and likely 2012 presidential candidate, described Mr Obama’s bill as the biggest threat to the “American way of life since the 1850s” when the country was heading for civil war.
Others, perhaps only sketchily aware of Adolf Hitler’s career, which is not remembered for efforts to extend healthcare to the uninsured, continue to toss around words such as “Gestapo” and “fascist”. John Boehner, the House Republican leader, saw the passage of what by normal standards should be seen as a centrist bill as “Armageddon”. Meanwhile, according to a Harris poll this week, 24 per cent of Republicans think Mr Obama “may be the anti-Christ”.
The Republicans will probably regain their balance. But the apoplexy of recent days suggests they could take time to graduate from the anger and denial stages of loss. It also suggests they will continue trying to block most of Mr Obama’s initiatives. As one of his advisers says: “With enemies like these, who needs friends?”
Democrats could still face big losses in November. And Mr Obama has few tools with which to reduce joblessness rapidly – still the electorate’s overriding concern. Likewise, he may fail to persuade voters it was worth devoting most of his first 15 months to healthcare, particularly since its benefits will only slowly become apparent.
But whatever happens in the midterms, he now understands how presidencies have their highs and their lows. Perhaps that realisation among friends and foes alike will temper the mood swings as his term goes on.
“People will wake up one morning and realise that the healthcare bill hasn’t brought socialism to America,” says David Gergen, adviser to four former presidents. “And Democrats will wake up to realise we have not magically solved all our healthcare problems. People should calm down a little. There has been a tendency to exaggerate recently.”
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2010.
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