The late addition of immigration reform to President Obama’s already-crowded agenda highlights a persistent decision-making deficit at the White House, where problems go to linger.
Pressing issues currently unresolved include: Closing the Guantanamo Bay prison, addressing the deficit, where to try accused terrorists, an emissions bill, how to treat gays in the military, creating jobs, reforming education, health care, and more.
Obama on Monday huddled with lawmakers at work on a bipartisan immigration bill — an issue the president promised to tackle last year, but never got around to.
“He does seem to be doing everything at once at the expense of getting anything done,” said Cindy Rugeley, a political scientist at Texas Tech University. “The problem is that when you take on that much, nobody understands what you’re doing.”
Since coming to office, Obama has shown a strong preference for working on multiple issues at once. He also takes time to reach decisions, and tackles new issues before resolving the old ones.
Much is deferred by summit and commission. Accused by Republicans of suffering from “summit-itis,” Obama recently led a health care summit at Blair House. In April, he is hosting an international summit on entrepreneurship.
Other summits have explored fiscal responsibility, jobs, and the now-famous Rose Garden beer summit that grew out of the arrest of Henry Louis Gates. A special commission is studying gays in the military, and Obama wants to create another to tackle the deficit.
In his role as problem-massager, Obama likes to declare points of agreement, as he did Monday in a health care speech in Philadelphia.
“I know a lot of people view this as a partisan issue, but both parties have found areas where we agree,” Obama said.
But areas of agreement cover a lot of ground, and rarely seem to serve as a starting point for resolving thorny issues. Despite his claims to its bipartisan complexion, health care reform is expected to draw no Republican support in Congress.
“We agree on the notion that you can’t just drop somebody if they’ve already purchased coverage. We agree on the idea of extending dependent coverage to a certain age,” Obama said last month. “Some people say up to 25, some people say up to 26, but we basically agree on that concept. … We agree on no annual or lifetime limits. We agree philosophically that we want to end the prohibition on pre-existing conditions.”
On other key issues, there is no shortage of agreement despite the lack of resolution.
“We all agree that education is the key to a 21st century economy,” Obama told a New Hampshire town hall last month. “We all agree that the best anti-poverty program around is a world-class education.”
Similarly, “I think everybody agrees that expanding our exports has to be a priority,” Obama told business leaders in December.
In October, “We all agree that more needs to be done” coordinating intelligence, he told an audience of intelligence organizations.
