Obama’s challenge: schmooze or lose

On January 3rd, 2008, Barack Obama scored a surprise victory, coming from behind to win the Iowa caucus in the race to become the Democratic presidential nominee. It propelled the junior senator from Illinois on his history-making road to the White House.

Swept up by a large turnout of young and first-time voters, Obama's win was described in the 2008 campaign book Game Change as "one of those rare moments in political life in which the world shifts on its axis – and everyone is watching". On a promise of hope and change he showed his ability to inspire and get out voters normally turned off by politics.

Obama went on to carry the swing state on the United States’ great farming plains in the 2008 presidential election and his 2012 re-election. In an emotional speech at the end of his campaign two years ago he asked Iowans to help him “finish what we started”.

That stump speech was the president’s last visit to the Hawkeye State.

Flash forward to November 4th, 2014. Joni Ernst, the Harley-driving, gun-loving, hog-castrating Iraq War veteran, became Iowa's first female Republican ever elected to the Senate or House of Representatives. Her win marked the culmination of a Republican rout of the Democrats in one of the worst midterms for a president in modern times.

Suffering from the six-year itch that usually hurts the president’s party in second-term elections, Obama, whose popularity is near record lows, saw his party lose the Senate and, with it, outright control of Congress. Republicans strengthened their majority in the House and beat Democrats in governorship races in states that hadn’t voted Republican in decades.

Cruelly playing on Obama's iconic 2008 campaign poster, the tabloid New York Daily News ran a version on Wednesday's front page, saying that "his hope turned to" – in a big headline – "NOPE".

The United States is unhappy. Exit polls showed that almost six in 10 voters were displeased or angry with Obama and Republican leaders, but they took their protest vote out on Democrats, exacerbated for the party by the large number of candidates running in red, conservative states.

Ernst’s “Squeal” television ad, in which she spoke about how neutering pigs while growing up on an Iowa farm gave her the experience to cut “pork” – political slang for government overspending – became the best known of these elections.

The message captured public frustration with the toxic partisan environment that has stalled Washington’s legislative machine. The 113th Congress is on track to be the least productive in 60 years. “We are heading to Washington and we are going to make ’em squeal,” Ernst said in her victory speech.

Midterm drubbing

In a strange press conference on Wednesday, his first since the midterm drubbing, Obama shrugged off Democratic losses, saying that the political establishment was to blame, not him.

Accepting that Americans wanted national politicians to “get the job done”, the president offered an olive branch to the ascendant Republican leadership in Congress and the party’s presumptive new Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky. He said he was willing to compromise on issues they can agree on but, in an ominous sign, said he would act alone if they couldn’t agree.

"I would enjoy having some Kentucky bourbon with Mitch McConnell," he said, backtracking on a dig at the GOP leader last year, when he told people who want him to spend more time with Congress, "Why don't you get a drink with Mitch McConnell."

But the spirited partisanship is likely to continue. Obama said he intends to proceed with executive actions to allow millions of illegal immigrants to stay in the US, a move that McConnell has warned would be “like waving a red flag in front of a bull”.

Republicans see Obama’s postelection stance as a repudiation of midterm voters. They criticise him for offering compromise with one hand while slapping the party with the other.

The two sides may find agreement on energy policy, such as construction of the Keystone oil pipeline from Canada, as well as international trade deals and corporate-tax reform. But they will certainly clash on Republican attempts to roll back Obamacare, the president’s signature healthcare law.

In his final two years Obama faces his greatest domestic challenge. If he is to complete the large amount of unfinished business on his ambitious progressive agenda – among it overhauling the immigration system and raising the minimum wage – he must do something he has been unable to do over six years in the White House: schmooze with Republicans and do deals. He needs to pour that bourbon.

All wonder whether Obama’s lunch for Republican and Democratic congressional leaders at the White House yesterday signals a new charm offensive by the president.

“There will be a lot of happy talk about co-operation after the election, but I expect deep gridlock on all the big policy matters,” says Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia’s centre for politics. “There is simply too great an ideological gulf between President Obama and the GOP majority in Congress.”

Obama has struggled even with a Democrat-led Senate. He couldn’t unite all Democratic senators on new gun controls last year, four months after the Newtown massacre, one of the United States’ worst gun atrocities, in which 20 schoolchildren and six teachers were killed.

The most Republican-dominated Congress since the 1920s will mean ugly congressional investigations and presidential vetoes of Republican-passed bills. This lame- duck Congress could extend into Obama’s final two years, raising the question of whether the Obama presidency, at least from his own legislative perspective, is as good as over.

“He is not a cooked duck, but he is a lame duck – he still has executive powers,” says James Thurber, a professor of government at American University in Washington DC. “Every president is in this situation at the end of two terms. But when you have both houses against you, it makes it very difficult. He may begin to use the bully pulpit more effectively, but he has been quite bad at using credible arguments to change people’s opinions.”

Criticism of Obama's inability to bridge the ideological divide with Republicans have come from his own camp. Leon Panetta, the president's former CIA director, writes in his recent memoir, Worthy Fights, that Obama's "most conspicuous weakness" was his "frustrating reticence to engage his opponents and rally support for his cause". "He sometimes lack fire," Panetta said. "Too often, in my view, the president relies on the logic of a law professor than the passion of a leader."

In a new book, the US political commentator Chuck Todd, host of Meet the Press, on NBC, unpicks "the promise versus the reality of Obama" and concludes that the 44th US president will be seen as a man "whose potential wasn't realised", who "wanted to soar above partisanship" but will be remembered "as a nadir of partisan relations".

Motivated by boredom

To guarantee a legacy as a great progressive president, can a man who once said that he ran for the White House only because he was bored in the Senate do deals with ideological opponents in Congress?

“In politics you have to get your fingernails dirty. He doesn’t like getting his fingernails dirty,” says the Republican strategist John Feehery, a former spokesman for the one-time House speaker Dennis Hastert.

Obama’s legacy as the first African- American president is assured. Beyond that it will rest on his legislative achievements in his first two years – at least domestically, if he makes little more progress.

In those first two years Obama signed 338 pieces of legislation, including the Affordable Care Act, the most sweeping piece of social legislation in generations, and the Dodd-Frank financial reforms following the financial crisis. Significantly, they were passed when his own party was calling the shots in both houses of Congress.

It has been downhill since 2010, when the Republicans won control of the House of Representatives. Obama’s presidential support score – a political batting average that gauges what presidents want and what presidents get – fell off a cliff, from 97 per cent, the highest since the measure began, under Dwight Eisenhower, to 38 per cent.

“He has a lot to learn about how to reach out and work with a divided party situation, and it is going to be hard for him,” says Thurber. “His legacy will be the first two years and then a legacy of not doing well in terms of managing the basic functions of government.”

As George W Bush experienced with 9/11, a president’s record may be determined by foreign-policy challenges. The rise of Islamic State and the growing instability in the Middle East, Ebola and the emergence of a new cold war with Russia may shape the contours of the Obama presidency.

In time Obama’s tenure will also be measured alongside the presidencies that preceded and succeeded his, so the domestic political stability and foreign-policy standing that Obama bequeaths the next president will also determine his own legacy.

Unlike previous Democratic presidents with a flair for passing legislation, Obama lacks the horse-trading skills of Lyndon Johnson or the dealmaking verve of Bill Clinton. The latter set aside personal differences to work with a Republican Congress to ensure that his bills, including welfare reform and a balanced budget, became law.

“President Obama is working with a very different kind of Congress, but he is a very untalented politician when it comes to legislative affairs,” says John Hudak of the Brookings Institution, a think tank. “He is a very good speaker. He can rouse a crowd up. But in terms of negotiating legislation he is quite poor.”

Mike McCurry, press secretary in Clinton’s White House, says the former president “knew how to roll up his sleeves and get down to work with a Republican majority” – but only after the GOP moderated, following damaging battles that shut down the government in 1995.

The new Republican Congress could craft a legislative agenda by co-operating with Obama on some issues they could agree on,” McCurry suggested, leading to “some kind of rhythm of co-operative effort”. “There is an opportunity, but it will require fairly deft negotiations, accommodating some of the wishes of the Republican majority, and that will be a bitter pill for Democrats to swallow. But they are going to have accept some of the reality of what has happened.”

Legacy issue

The pressure to leave behind a better public impression may drive Obama to reach compromises with the next Congress.

“The president does not want to leave office having the very low ratings that he has. I believe that he will take this to heart,” says Bill Hoagland, an aide to the former Republican Senate majority leader Bill Frist. “His party lost pretty badly. That has to send a message.”

Obama’s final two years could, ironically, mirror the final two of his predecessor, George W Bush, whose policies he so strongly opposed on his sweep to victory in 2008. The emphasis would move to foreign policy, domestic executive orders, vetoes and, of course, the next presidential election.

To achieve anything more than this the president must become less aloof with Congress, less professorial and more willing to compromise.

“That will be the real test for Obama, because he is going to have to adjust his method of operation,” says McCurry. “He is going to have to be a lot more inclusive when it comes to reaching out to Congress.

“He has not had a great appetite for that. It is a little contrary to his nature, but it will weigh heavily on him. He has got two years left, and he has got to make something of it. That will force him to make some changes in the way he runs the Oval Office.”

Almost seven years since his famous win in Iowa, Obama will have to trim the “hope and change” agenda that once proved so compelling.

LOST GROUND: TUESDAY'S US MIDTERM ELECTIONS
Republicans regained the Senate, with 52 seats, a rise of at least seven. (Two more seats may still turn red, in Alaska and Louisiana.) The party took control of Congress for the first time in eight years and increased its House of Representatives seats by 13, to a majority margin last seen when Herbert Hoover was president, in 1928.

The GOP won four state governorships, including in some Democratic strongholds. Obama’s party couldn’t hold on to Illinois, the president’s electoral base, or the dark-blue states of Maryland (home of the Irish-American governor and Democratic presidential contender Martin O’Malley) and Massachusetts, in the normally liberal northeast.

States that Democrats thought were moving their way – Colorado, Iowa and North Carolina – fell to Republicans. Rick Scott, the Republican governor of Florida, whose seat was considered at risk, won re-election in a bellwether state in presidential races every four years.

Democrats were hurt by the large turnout of older, white and more conservative voters who tend to show up in midterms and vote Republican. Many young voters, women and minorities, who backed Obama so heavily in the presidential elections, sat out these midterms.