Barack Obama is on his way to Europe for the G20 summit but, now that the honeymoon period is over, is he trying to do too much, too soon, asks DENIS STAUNTON
WHEN BARACK OBAMA visits Europe next week on his first major trip abroad as president, he will tackle the global economic crisis in London, meet Nato allies in Strasbourg, deliver a major foreign-policy speech in Prague and make an address to the Muslim world in Turkey.
It’s a formidable agenda but it might feel like a holiday for Obama after the heart-stopping pace of his first two months in Washington, during which his every word, gesture and inflection has been studied for evidence that his presidency is a soaring triumph or a grim disappointment.
“You know, one day I’m a genius; one day I’m a bum,” he told a group of Democratic supporters this week. “Every day there’s a new winner, a new loser.”
Dealing with wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, a financial meltdown and the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, Obama was always going to face a full plate of problems as president. He has chosen to take on more challenges immediately, however, including the introduction of universal healthcare, education reform and a revolution in energy policy. He wants to start a dialogue with Iran after a 30-year standoff, “reset” the US relationship with Russia, and make a serious attempt at finding peace in the Middle East.
After three decades during which fiscal conservatives “starved the beast” of federal government by cutting taxes, the United States has a president who is willing to spend money on government programmes – lots of it. His mammoth $3.6 trillion (€2.7 trillion) budget plan, which is now going through Congress, aims to do nothing less than reshape the American economy by making it more sustainable, innovative and equitable.
“We’re asking a lot of him and he is demanding more of himself,” says Stephen Hess, Washington’s foremost expert on presidential transitions. Hess worked in the White House with Dwight D Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford.
“I think it’s rather refreshing that he’s choosing to go ahead with all the things he promised in the campaign. Not every politician likes to do that.”
Obama likes to complain about the cable-news culture but he is well on his way to becoming the most televised president in history. This week alone, he gave extended interviews to CBS’s 60 Minutes and the sports network ESPN; he also held a one-hour press conference live on primetime across all channels and answered questions for 90 minutes in an online “virtual town hall”.
Everywhere he goes, a pool of reporters follows and every public statement, from his remarks this week on Greek Independence Day to speeches at Democratic fundraisers, is broadcast live.
Unlike many of his predecessors, Obama gets out and about in Washington, watching a basketball game at the Verizon Center and taking his family to the Kennedy Center twice – to see the Alvin Ailey dance company and for a concert in honour of senator Edward Kennedy. He has eaten a chilli dog at Ben’s Chili Bowl, his wife has taken their daughters for a hamburger at Five Guys, and the president and first lady have dined together at a number of the city’s restaurants.
Last week, Michelle Obama dug up the south lawn of the White House to make a vegetable garden that will be cultivated by children from a local school. The first lady has served meals in a soup kitchen and visited some of Washington's poorest, most crime-ridden neighbourhoods, which are so neglected that murders there rate no more than a paragraph in the Metro section of the Washington Post.
The Obamas start their day early by working out together in the White House gym. The president usually sees his daughters Sasha and Malia when they come home from school and the family has dinner together most evenings.
“They are adapting remarkably in ways that I just would not have expected,” Obama said of his daughters this week. “What’s interesting is actually how unimpressed they are with it. I mean, they’re going to school. They are unchanged. They’re the same sweet, engaging, happy, unpretentious kids that they were.”
APART FROM daily briefings on national security and the economy, Obama tries to avoid formal meetings, preferring to drop in on staffers in their offices unannounced if he has a question. He takes long, solitary walks in the White House grounds and stays up late into the night reading lengthy briefing papers on everything from the military capability of Afghan forces to the intricacies of the financial markets.
“You get a little time to read history or, you know, policy books that are of interest,” he told 60 Minutes. “But there’s a huge amount of information that has to be digested, especially right now.”
After a presidential campaign that was notable for its smooth management and lack of drama, Obama’s presidency hit some early bumps as he sought to get his White House team into place. Treasury secretary Timothy Geithner was confirmed by the Senate despite his admission that he had failed to pay all his taxes, but Obama lost one of his most valued advisers, former Senate majority leader Tom Daschle, during the vetting process.
Daschle withdrew as health and human services director after it emerged that he too had underpaid his taxes and that he has been receiving hefty payments from the healthcare industry.
“Once that happened and the tax problems of his appointees became fodder for the late-night comedians, he just tightened up on all of the vetting. The White House brought in more people and now it’s so slow,” says Hess.
One reason the administration remains woefully understaffed is strict new rules Obama introduced to restrict the role of lobbyists and block the revolving door of government and lobbying jobs. Many experienced and talented people in Washington who might otherwise consider public service are unwilling to sign a pledge that would bar them from returning to lobbying while Obama remains in power.
The president has beefed up his staff by appointing policy tsars and special envoys who don’t need congressional approval and answer directly to him.
“These are very good people. They don’t get confirmed by the Senate, they don’t go through the same delays that domestic appointments are going through. It can play havoc within the organisation once it’s all sorted out but in the meantime, he’s got George Mitchell in the Middle East and Richard Holbrooke in Afghanistan and Dennis Ross waiting to go into Iran. So that’s how you fill the gaps,” says Hess.
“But it’s a style – not only with all these special envoys but all of these tsars that he’s created in the White House – that he thinks that if he just brings in enough good people, he can let them bang their heads against each other and he’ll pick up the strand because, you know, he’s a professor of law at the University of Chicago. He’s going to have to sort this out over time or else he’s just got everybody stacked up at the top. He’s got enough good economists now working for him to staff the economics department at MIT.”
Obama’s most dramatic political stumble came when he sought Republican support for an $800 billion (€600 billion) economic stimulus package last month, driving up to Capitol Hill for lunch with opposition leaders and inviting them to watch the Super Bowl at the White House. The stimulus bill was approved by Congress but without a single Republican vote in the House of Representatives and with just three in the Senate.
Conservative talk-show host Rush Limbaugh was vilified by Democrats when he declared that he wanted Obama to fail but Hess believes that Limbaugh was expressing a political reality that the president was slow to recognise.
“The Republicans or any opposition party in our system essentially gets back in office when the other team trips or finds some sinkhole and falls in it. And this happens all the time,” he says.
“It happened with Clinton. He had a good majority in 1992/93 and then lost Congress in 1994 after bungling the healthcare proposal. So in a sense, they’re not going to get back into office because of the glories of the Republican party, which are not looked upon fondly by the American people, but by the failures of the Obama people. It’s a vulture approach to life but Rush Limbaugh is not wrong. It will be the failure of Obama, if there is one, that will bring them back.”
Obama now recognises that he can’t expect support from more than a handful of Republicans but his policy agenda also faces a threat from a group of conservative Democrats, led by Indiana’s Evan Bayh in the Senate. Bayh has expressed misgivings about key elements of the president’s budget proposal, notably his plan for a cap-and-trade system to reduce carbon emissions that the Indiana senator fears will put industrial states at an unfair disadvantage.
BOTH IN DOMESTIC and foreign policy, Obama has shown an unusual grasp of the interplay between policy areas, using action in one field to lay the ground for achievements in another. He has made a delicate and complex series of diplomatic moves to entice Russia away from an enabling role towards Iran, which in turn could help the US achieve its goals in Afghanistan and improve prospects for peace between Israelis and Palestinians.
Unlike his predecessors, Obama now uses the country’s official title of “the Islamic Republic of Iran”, a signal to the leadership in Tehran that Washington has abandoned any idea of regime change there.
The challenges facing the US remain enormous and Obama’s critics who complain that the president is trying to do too much, too soon may yet be proven right. His approval rating has dipped slightly since taking office but Obama remains hugely popular and Hess believes the American people are still prepared to give their president the benefit of the doubt.
“He won in part because he wasn’t George W Bush but also because everybody thought he agreed with them. We’re getting to see where he is. He’s not an ideologue. He’s a very practical politician moving in a fairly traditional Democratic sense, slightly left of centre – certainly not disturbed in the slightest by the size of government,” he says.
“Obama has a good deal of wiggle room because, first of all, he did very well in the election – he got larger majorities in Congress than most presidents coming in. And people are scared. They want him to succeed. They’re giving him a little more elbow room in that regard but how long this lasts, I don’t know.”
ON THE AGENDA TOP FIVE ISSUES
1 The financial meltdownObama hopes to get credit flowing again by taking bad loans and other toxic assets off banks' balance sheets and restoring confidence in the financial system.
2 The economic downturnWith the economy shrinking and unemployment climbing, Obama hopes an $800 billion injection of cash will get things moving again.
3 The budgetAt $3.6 trillion, Obama's is the biggest budget in US history, making Republicans and conservative Democrats anxious about mounting deficits.
4 The warsUS troops have a plan to withdraw from Iraq but Obama is sending more to Afghanistan as the conflict there worsens.
5 HealthcareMore than 40 million Americans without health insurance hope the president can push through a plan to make medical care available to all.