President Obama‘s second term is proving that the so-called Pottery Barn rule needs revision: If it’s broken, you own it.
On issues ranging from Iraq to healthcare, immigration and the economy, the president is increasingly taking the blame for a raft of problems that were there before he came to the Oval Office and will likely be there when he leaves.
For much of the public, it seems failing to solve a problem can be just as bad as causing it in the first place.
It’s a lesson that Obama took too long to learn, presidential scholars argue, as he pursues a more aggressive strategy in the Middle East — only after watching perceptions of his foreign policy nose-dive in the face of inaction.
“Obama spent a lot of time looking at individual presidents and looking at the presidency as a collection of individuals,” said presidential historian Martha Joynt Kumar, a political science professor at Towson University. “He spent less time on thinking through the institution of the presidency. That’s where you come upon the ways presidents are restrained and the degree to which the president is constrained by the responsibilities they share.”
“Presidents are surprised by the degree to which they get blamed for things,” she added.
Obama may have been misled by the degree to which the public continued to blame his predecessor for problems with Iraq and the economy in his first few years. Those seemed to validate the Pottery Barn rule, which was coined before the Iraq War when then-Secretary of State Colin Powell warned President George W. Bush, “If you break it, you buy it.”
Domestic advisers might have given Obama similar advice before he took on healthcare reform. While many liberals thought the old health insurance system was broken, few Americans blamed the president for its problems. Now, Republicans routinely blame any rise in premiums on Obamacare.
On immigration, meantime, it’s inaction that is causing the president headaches. Unable to get a Senate reform bill through the House, Obama has also been unwilling to take action on his own — at least until after the November elections. That’s left Hispanic voters increasingly unsatisfied even as a border crisis has stoked renewed concern about border security.
Apart from his actions, Obama may also be to blame for his rhetoric.
On Iraq and his broader vision for the Middle East, the president has presented muddled and sometimes conflicting messages. On Obamacare, he has often failed to wade into the details of the largest overhaul of the healthcare system since Medicare, allowing opponents to paint it with a broad brush.
But six years into his presidency, those close to the president say he is still coming to terms with the outsized expectations surrounding his office — some of his own making — and the degree to which the public believes problems begin and end at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.
“People would always accuse us of blaming Bush for everything,” a senior administration official told the Washington Examiner. “But what they don’t get is how much of a president’s job is predetermined even before he walks in the door. Regardless of who the next president is, they’ll talk about the problems they inherited from the current administration. And they won’t necessarily be wrong. It’s the nature of the job.”
Obama, whose path to the White House was paved by anti-Bush sentiment, has seen his second term follow the same downward trajectory as his predecessor. And Bush, enjoying a post-presidential bounce, is now more popular than Obama, polls show.
Such findings prove that when things are bad, it’s not good to be the public face of government.
“It’s easy to say the president screwed something up rather than try to understand the complexities that any public policy entails,” said Julian Zelizer, a presidential historian at Princeton University.
And Obama has been forced to acknowledge that his presidential aspirations often take a backseat to the realities of being commander in chief.
“I do think it’s taken him time to come to grips with the fact that he is going to be a president using military force in a region — after he won the presidency by complaining the U.S. was too involved there,” Zelizer added.
In other words, as president, you “own” pretty much everything until you turn the lights out at the White House.
“You control your time when you’re a candidate, you think you can control your time when you’re president,” Kumar, the presidential scholar, said of Obama. “That’s not true at all — and it’s a real awakening for a president.”
