It is a quick, sweet victory for the new president, and potentially a historic one. The question now is whether the $789 billion economic stimulus plan agreed to by Congressional leaders on Wednesday is the opening act for a more ambitious domestic agenda from President Obama or a harbinger of reduced expectations.
Both the substance of his first big legislative accomplishment and the way he achieved it underscored the scale of the challenges facing the nation and how different a political climate this is from the early stages of recent administrations.
While it hammered home the reality of bigger, more activist government, the economic package was not the culmination of a hard-fought ideological drive, like Lyndon B. Johnson’s civil rights and Great Society programs, or Ronald Reagan’s tax cuts, but rather a necessary and hastily patched-together response to an immediate and increasingly dire situation. On the domestic issues Mr. Obama ran and won on — health care, education, climate change, rebalancing the distribution of wealth — the legislation does little more than promise there will be more to come…
If this is the 21st-century version of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 100 Days, Mr. Obama seems to be pursuing it more as an urgent but imposed necessity than as a self-selected mission.
While he has deployed his political capital freely to win approval of the package and to begin pushing his version of a financial-system rescue, he has left little doubt that he is eager to move on to the rest of his domestic agenda. At his news conference on Monday night, Mr. Obama said with a hint of exasperation that a costly economic rescue package “wasn’t how I envisioned my presidency beginning.” Regardless of the government’s budgetary straits, Mr. Obama has signaled that he sees his other signature initiatives not just as salvageable but as more urgent than ever.
Yet since Election Night, when he warned of “setbacks and false starts” and called for “a new spirit of sacrifice,” he has assiduously managed the politics of the moment with an eye toward tempering expectations and limiting the risk to himself and his party…
“He has been very consistent, really since the night of his election victory, that it took a long time to get into this and it will take a long time to get out of it,” said William Galston, a domestic policy aide in the Clinton White House who is now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, the liberal-leaning research organization. “And there’s some evidence that the American people are prepared to be patient.” But Mr. Galston said Mr. Obama may not yet have fully absorbed the difficulties he faces in pressing for expensive policy initiatives to make health care more affordable and accessible, address global warming, provide more money for education and promote research into alternative energy sources…
“He’s going to have to fit other issues into the larger narrative of the economy,” Mr. Winston said. Mr. Obama has long since begun trying to do just that. He has been framing rising health care costs not just as a social issue, but as one affecting the viability of American industry. Cleaning up the environment and weaning the economy from its dependence on oil are opportunities to create new, well-compensated jobs. Education is an investment in the economy’s long-term competitiveness.
But those assertions will run up against a variety of countervailing forces: a rapidly rising national debt, a strain of populist anger, a smaller but energized Republican minority and divisions among Democrats about priorities, to name a few. Getting past them promises to be as tricky for Mr. Obama as was this first victory…
I find it hard to separate what I think from what Obama thinks, and freely admit that what I’m about to say may be partly the projections of my own ideas into his persona, but I think that his exasperation has to do with how he had to be to get this Bill through Congress. He put the Stimulus Package together by consensus, building his "team" of advisors around its construction. He wanted to pass the Bill by a consensus in Congress – but the truth is that this Bill had to pass. This is an emergency. Every expert with any sense in this country says it’s an emergency. Any fool on the street knows it’s an emergency. He didn’t have any choice about this legislation. And, if there’s a valid criticism of this Bill, it’s that it’s too much of a compromise – not bold enough.
What Obama ran on was changing the way that Washington does business. All he was able to do with this Bill was to partially change how the President does business – partially, because he had to "stump" to get it passed. What Obama wants to do is to build a winning team, not be a SuperStar. What he envisioned for his Presidency was team building, community organizing, "working group" formation – and instead he had to throw in some power politics to bring it home. Most great coaches are not SuperStars. They were players who learned how to build teams and how to handle SuperStars. That’s what Obama learned on the courts as a kid, and he translated it into practice as a community organizer. That’s what he wants to do in Washington – coach a winning team.
I recently talked to a young woman who is applying to Physician Assistant School. She’s a Magna Cum Laude graduate from a good University, was the captain of the Basketball Team who was honored for her "spirit and dedication." She had amazing medical experience over the years. So I asked her why she’d picked Physician Assistant Training rather than apply to Medical School? It came from an experience she had on a medical trip to a third world country. She saw that the thing that limited to amount of care they could give was not the number of doctors. It was the organization of the clinic and the amount of assistance the doctor had. The greater the organization, the greater the amount of paramedical help, the better the care. She learned the same thing on the basketball court – the better the team functioned as a team rather than as a collection of stars, the better the results. She saw "team building" as more central than individual performance.
That’s why I think Obama was exasperated. That’s the Agenda that I think he wasn’t able to work on as much as he would have liked. He had to do business more like the Bush/Cheney power play way. The "change" he wants to bring to Washington was overwhelmed by the necessity of passing this Bill. The "hope" he sees is refocusing Washington on the people’s collective business rather than the war of ideologies and interests.
Like any new "coach," his plans were met by divisiveness. That’s the way it goes. If he’s the person that I think he is, he’s going to keep trying. This wasn’t a victory from his perspective, but he gave it a good shot. I’ll bet he’ll keep at it, and I’ll also bet that he succeeds. The only obstacle he’s got is internal – does he have the staying power to keep working on convincing Washington that it is potentially bigger than the sum of its parts.
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