President Obama, And The Idea That Something Has Changed

Over the weekend, we got what I think was one of the more important articles about the current state of the Obama Presidency. And no, I'm not just tooting my own horn.

Peter Baker's profile of Obama and his economic team is full of interesting anecdotes and insights, many of which don't speak well about his eocnomic team. But for me, the key lines come early, and are about as good an indication of what we get and don't get with a President Obama as anything I've read:

Every day, in briefings, in trips around the country, in letters from the public, Obama is reminded of the many people who are still hurting. And he surely knows that if he cannot figure out in the next two years how to create jobs, he may lose his own.

Obama is fighting to keep Republicans, fresh from their fall electoral triumph, from reversing what he has started while prodding his own team to come up with something, anything, to put people back to work. “The president wanted to lower unemployment but didn’t see a way to get more money out of Congress,” one adviser who sat in on many such meetings told me. “He grew frustrated because the economic team didn’t have that magic combination.” Or as another adviser put it, “He was really frustrated that there weren’t solutions on the cheap.”

Obama has been casting about for ideas. He held two unpublicized meetings last month with outside economists, a group of liberals one day and a group of conservatives the next, soliciting suggestions while deflecting criticism. (He was “a bit defensive,” one participant told me.) He likewise met with labor leaders and convened a four-hour meeting with chief executives from Google, General Electric, Honeywell, Boeing and other corporations. Obama was so intent on the conversation that he canceled a lunch break and asked the executives to bring their chicken, fish and pasta back from a buffet so they could keep talking.

Some of those who met with him repeated the common complaint that he has yet to articulate a coherent strategy. While the policies have been “quite good,” the “public relations and related politics have not been,” Alan Blinder, the Princeton University economist and former Federal Reserve vice chairman, told me. “One damaging result of that is the American public has little to no understanding why various things were done, why they made sense, what effect they were expected to have and did have, and instead they feel ripped off.”

Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a former Congressional Budget Office director who advised John McCain during the 2008 campaign and attended another meeting with Obama last month, said the problem goes beyond public relations. “I honestly do not know where his policy rudder resides,” he told me. “I really can’t tell. What are the principles on which he operates? He’s very smart; he knows all the policy options. I just don’t know what are the criteria by which he’s picking between them.”

Sorry for the extended block (emphases mine), but I need this setion to make a point. There's a sense being put forward - certainly by his communications team and friendly voices in the media - that this year's State of the Union represents a "freah step" in the President's approach to governing, a chance to reorient his policies and his process for achieving his goals. But to me, if you want a good explanation of why nothing, really is likely to change and little is about to be accomplished, you can see it in Baker's opening anecdotes about the President's economic meetings.

Nothing's changed. The President we have is the President we got, whose flaws and weaknesses are often misdiagnosed and misunderstood. And if the President is successful in making a case for reelection - which, right now, seems entirely the plausible, likely scenario - his success with making the case will be because people will, in part, either refuse to face his flaws or to admit that he hasn't changed. But it's all there... if you just look:

• The President is still relying on a narrow circle of advisors who share his biases and general approach to politics. Count me among those who think Bill Daley is a bad choice for Chief of Staff, not because of his corporate connections (though that's bad too), but because the selection of another Chicago insider doesn't really shake up the President's need for alternative points of view. And though the President has replaced virtually his entire economic team - a telling admission of his failings as an executive - there is, so far, little to indicate that he's getting different, or better, insights out of them. Hence, I expect a State of the Union with few real advances in policy.
• The President cannot seem to move from philosophic abstractions to policy specifics. I'm inclined to stick with my mom's assessment of this - at heart, the President is an academic (making his time at the University of Chicago the best indicator of his strengths and weaknesses), and his thinking leans towards the world of interesting theories and arguments over ideas, rarely connected to pratical concerns about the way the world really works. I'm struck how Baker points to significant feedback that the President lacks specific plans and can't seem to articulate a criteria for weighing options. And this is why the question isn't "how liberal is he" or "will he cave" on a particular Democratic idea (like welfare or Social Security). The problem is more basic, and more consistent. We need specific plans. He has big ideas. The disconnect between the two is enormous. "Competitiveness" is not a plsn.
• The President can seem aloof, high handed, and touchy when challenged. The other big reason the President can't seem to adjust his policy proposals is because he seems convinced that his way of thinking about them is the only right way to get to a result. The defensiveness mentioned by meeting attendees, I think, is also reflected in the curiously unpleasant quality of his press conferences, where he either chides the question, or, as he did after the election, complains about one group or another "not getting it" on a particular issue, as he "gets it." Indeed, the reason the President's poll numbers have rebounded may have a lot to do with simply not talking off the cuff: his modest supportive majority fell off most obviously when he complained, post election, about liberals and their unrealistic expectations, turning off his base. Now... he just doesn't say that. But does he still think it? My guess would be... we won't have to wait long to find out. 

Add up those realities and I think it's hard to see how the State of the Union can represent a significant step in any direction other than reaffiriming what we already know: that the President will talk in generalizations, that his proposals will look a lot like things he's already proposed, and he will talk about "finding common ground" as long as it's in common with his own approach and his conclusions. Conservatives will loathe his ideas... and liberals will bemoan the lack of specificity and the sense that he will compromise important principles away.

I'm less worreid about the potential compromises - for instance, I think there's little reason to fear some sort of tampering with Social Security; while there's also reason to expect, depressingly, that there will also be no reforms to Medicare or Medicaid - than I am that the bigger picture will, yet again, be lost: the problem with the President, and his Presidency, is about his weaknesses as a leader and an executive, and his inability to both translate lofty ideas into specifics and to adapt to changing circumstance. These are big flaws. And nothing has changed. And nothing will change... at least, not until people take action.

Comments

[Leigh]

"I'm struck how Baker points to significant feedback that the President lacks specific plans and can't seem to articulate a criteria for weighing options."

Maybe he should take my Policy Analysis class, where students learn how to define a problem, research it, and evaluate it according to concretely defined criteria. I would be happy to have him audit the course this fall. :)