Obama must show competence to move agenda
By: Chris Stirewalt
Political Editor
March 16, 2009
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| President Obama on Monday plans to unveil a broad package of measures geared toward providing relief to small businesses. (Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP) |
The fear among conservatives was that President Barack Obama and his team would be so smoothly effective in pursuing their aims that European-style socialism would come to America without anyone really noticing.
Now, Republican worries of political irrelevance are starting to give way to more fundamental concerns.
The men and women of the right are wondering whether the new president can keep it together well enough to avoid running the country into a ditch.
As one former Republican National Committee hand and Bush lieutenant said: “You at least want the other guys to be competent enough to avoid disaster. Not too good, but at least competent.”
The current Republican fear is likely as overstated as the previous one. But the shifting thinking in the GOP shows how, in the span of eight weeks, the public image of Obama has gone from that of the cool technocrat who dispatched John McCain in November to something closer to the underprepared overachiever Hillary Clinton derided during the 2008 Democratic primaries.
The pivotal moment came Thursday, when Obama was addressing the Business Roundtable, a group of chief executive officers from the biggest companies. There, the president changed his message on the economy as abruptly as a frog jumping off a hot griddle.
“I don’t think things are ever as good as we say or ever as bad as we say,” Obama told the corporate chieftains in a chipper speech highlighting his “highly optimistic” view of the economy.
This was the man who two weeks prior had called for swift action on his $3.6 trillion budget — including nationalized health care, 20 years of free public education for every child and a global warming tax — in order to face America’s “day of reckoning.”
It was also the same man who warned of resistance to his $787 billion stimulus package. “A failure to act, and act now, will turn crisis into a catastrophe.”
Obama’s about-face came after conventional political wisdom had coalesced around the idea that the president was doing too much at once, but still not enough to salve the wounds of the battered financial system. From David Broder to Warren Buffett came worried sounds about Obama’s priorities and ambitions.
The president’s first response to critics of his agenda was to ask why, if Lincoln could build the transcontinental railroad during the Civil War, Obama couldn’t remake American capitalism during a recession.
But at the Business Roundtable and since then, the president has been ebullient about the state of the economy. In seven days, the economy went from “fundamentally weak” to being “fundamentally strong,” according to top White House advisers.
It may not be coincidental that Obama’s flip came on a Thursday.
On Wednesdays, Obama’s chief political strategist, David Axelrod, convenes a group of top Democratic consultants and pollsters for skull sessions. What they had to think on last Wednesday was mounting resistance to Obama’s agenda, dire public concerns about the stability of the economy and presidential job approval numbers slipping below those for George W. Bush at the same point in 2001.
A leader can only make the most of a crisis — as Obama Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel suggests Obama should — if voters have confidence in his abilities.
Timmy Geithner sweating through another hot-light session on Capitol Hill doesn’t inspire the requisite confidence. Neither, frankly, does Emanuel’s political gamesmanship with Rush Limbaugh.
With a bank plan still to come and China’s premier making worrisome noises about the amount of American debt his country has taken on, the Obama team ought to seem grown-up and serious for a grown-up and serious time.
Obama’s approach to his presidential agenda had been to define the nature of the economic crisis, sharpen public concerns about the crisis, propose a solution and then prepare to take credit for eventual success.
But concerns about competence may prevent him from implementing his solution, and all that defining and sharpening could make even basic governance difficult.
As Geithner rolls out some more of his bank plan this week and Emanuel prepares to open a new front in his war against the Republican Party, concerns about competency and priorities will again be at the fore.
To get his presidency back on track, Obama must recapture the cool technocratic confidence he had as a candidate.
And the situation must be getting dire if even Republicans hope he gets it together.
