Obama, the Mortal -- By: Charles Krauthammer
By webmaster@nationalreview.com (Charles Krauthammer)
What happened to President Obama? His wax wings having melted, he is the man who fell to earth. What happened to bring his popularity down farther than that of any new president in polling history save Gerald Ford (post-Nixon pardon)?
The conventional wisdom is that Obama made a tactical mistake by farming out his agenda to Congress and allowing himself to be pulled left by the doctrinaire liberals of the Democratic congressional leadership. But the idea of Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi pulling Obama left is quite ridiculous. Where do you think he came from, this friend of Chavista ex-terrorist William Ayers, of PLO apologist Rashid Khalidi, of racialist inciter Jeremiah Wright?
But forget the character witnesses. Just look at Obama's behavior as president, beginning with his first address to Congress. Unbidden, unforced, and unpushed by the congressional leadership, Obama gave his most deeply felt vision of America, delivering the boldest social-democratic manifesto ever issued by a U.S. president. In American politics, you can't get more left than that speech and still be on the playing field.
In a center-Right country, that was problem enough. Obama then compounded it by vastly misreading his mandate. He assumed it was personal. This, after winning by a mere seven points in a year of true economic catastrophe, of an extraordinarily unpopular Republican incumbent, and of a politically weak and unsteady opponent. Nonetheless, Obama imagined that, as Fouad Ajami so brilliantly observed, he had won the kind of banana-republic plebiscite that grants caudillo-like authority to remake everything in one's own image.
Accordingly, Obama unveiled his plans for a grand makeover of the American system, animating that vision by enacting measure after measure that greatly enlarged state power, government spending, and national debt. Not surprisingly, these measures engendered powerful popular skepticism that burst into tea-party town-hall resistance.
Obama's reaction to that resistance made things worse. Obama fancies himself tribune of the people, spokesman for the grass roots, harbinger of a new kind of politics from below that would upset the established lobbyist special-interest order of Washington. Yet faced with protests from a real grassroots movement, his party and his supporters called it a mob -- misinformed, misled, irrational, angry, unhinged, bordering on racist. All this while the administration was cutting backroom deals with every manner of special interest -- from drug companies to auto unions to doctors -- in which favors worth billions were quietly and opaquely exchanged.
"Get out of the way" and "don't do a lot of talking," the great bipartisan scolded opponents whom he blamed for creating the "mess" from which he is merely trying to save us. If only they could see. So with boundless confidence in his own persuasiveness, Obama undertook a summer campaign to enlighten the masses by addressing substantive objections to his reforms.
Things got worse still. With answers so slippery and implausible and, well, fishy, he began jeopardizing the most fundamental asset of any new president -- trust. You can't say that the system is totally broken and in need of radical reconstruction, but nothing will change for you; that Medicare is bankrupting the country, but $500 billion in cuts will have no effect on care; that you will expand coverage while reducing deficits -- and not inspire incredulity and mistrust. When ordinary citizens understand they are being played for fools, they bristle.
After a disastrous summer -- mistaking his mandate, believing his press, centralizing power, governing left, disdaining citizens for (of all things) organizing -- Obama is in trouble.
Let's be clear: This is a fall, not a collapse. He's not been repudiated or even defeated. He will likely regroup and pass some version of health-insurance reform that will restore some of his clout and popularity.
But what has occurred -- irreversibly -- is this: He's become ordinary. The spell is broken. The charismatic conjurer of 2008 has shed his magic. He's regressed to the mean, tellingly expressed in poll numbers hovering at 50 percent.
For a man who only recently bred a cult, ordinariness is a great burden, and for his acolytes, a crushing disappointment. Obama has become a politician like others. And like other flailing presidents, he will try to salvage a cherished reform -- and his own standing -- with yet another prime-time speech.
But for the first time since election night in Grant Park, he will appear in the most unfamiliar of guises -- mere mortal, a treacherous transformation to which a man of Obama's supreme self-regard may never adapt.
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Obamacare Goes Primetime -- By: NRO Staff
By webmaster@nationalreview.com (NRO Staff)
For Republicans, August was a dream -- Obamacare sinking by the day, angry protestors confronting befuddled or insulting Democratic politicians, Obama's poll numbers sagging. But the calendar inevitably turns, and it's on to September.
This week, the president's team signaled that it might finally be ready to shift away from Obamacare's current malignant incarnation. Maybe. They have mentioned no details, but David Axelrod and others are whispering to the media that on September 9, when President Obama makes his next major health-care policy speech to a joint session of Congress, things will start to move toward the center. We've heard this tune before.
Just what do Republicans make of this latest twist in Obama's message? Their strategists are heartened by the course of the debate so far but doubt Obama will go far enough in jettisoning his current approach. Still they still see potential peril.
"Axelrod's not stupid," a former GOP official who wished not to be identified tells NRO. "They're recalibrating to salvage a political win. The White House misjudged their audience. They campaigned to the public for the last six months when their audience is Congress. It's a classic mistake of a new White House. Reagan didn't make that mistake on tax cuts, his signature issue early in his first term. As a popular new president he spent his points charming Tip O'Neill and personally working the moderate Democrats and built a majority to pass his top priority. Reagan's people got it. Obama's people are in campaign mode. They need to learn it's not about the TelePrompTer, it is about the one-on-one with the members of Congress."
Obama really has "no choice but to shift strategies," says Mary Matalin, a longtime Republican strategist. The hints from Obama advisers in recent days that the administration will drop the public option was "a political event more revelatory than definitional."
"What it revealed will harden into the definition of him, unless he makes a real, comprehensive, and sustained strategic and tactical overhaul," says Matalin. "The health-care debate revealed: He is not only not infallible, he is -- they all are -- personally hubristic and politically feckless. The notion that his personal popularity would convert the country to statism and irrational redistribution schemes was patently incompetent, shockingly shallow from the outset. It revealed what conservatives have known and expressed since 2006: The repudiation of Republicans was neither a repudiation of conservatism nor an embrace of liberalism."
David Winston, a Republican pollster, agrees. He says that Obama "has to do a kind of reset on health care and figure out if he can regain the initiative on the policy debate, since he clearly lost the month of August." Winston cautions, however, that Obama has bigger problems than his message. "One of the difficult stress points of a majority coalition is how you keep your base and the people beyond the base together to sustain that coalition. Health care is the first clear example where the two have divergent views."
If Republicans are heartened by Obama's summer stumble, that doesn't mean they should relax. Republicans, says Winston, should work to create a "positive policy choice," such as insurance portability, since Obama has given them an opening to put something of substance forward. Winston adds that the GOP should remember, when thinking about their policy, that "seniors and married women with children are the key drivers in attitudes towards health care."
Another Republican strategist who knows something about framing public policy is Frank Luntz. He predicts Republicans will have ample opportunity this fall to shape the health-care debate -- if they're smart.
"First, Republicans should use their doctors'caucus to respond to Obama's speech next week," says Luntz. The doctors in the Republican caucus, he says, such as Rep. Tom Price of Georgia "should be the people to respond, because Americans trust doctors more than politicians when it comes to health care. Let them wear the hat of a doctor rather than an elected official, since they know more about health care than anyone else."
"Second," says Luntz, "it is time in their town-hall meetings for Republicans to be conveners rather than participants. I think it is essential that GOP town halls be less advocates of a particular policy and more informational about the consequences of Obamacare. We all know what the Democrats in Congress are promising. What we don't know, what the public doesn't know, are the consequences of those promises." Luntz adds that the GOP has got to "stop with the cute, playful advertising and get down to specifics. Some organizations are, frankly, making a mockery of this debate. Health care is serious and so should the GOP's advertising."
Ed Gillespie, former counselor to Pres. George W. Bush and chairman of the Republican National Committee, tells NRO that Republicans "ought to narrow their focus to health-care reform for those who are involuntarily uninsured." A strong policy rebuttal, says Gillespie, could be the GOP's best autumn asset.
Still, says Gillespie, "the pressure is not on Republicans." Obama, he says, will have to face a barrage of criticism on a host of issues beyond health care. "It's the stimulus that was rushed through, the sloppy spending, and the Cash for Clunkers program that people saw as ineffective spending. Health care reinforced that notion. The problem for the president is that the facts got out. There is no risk for Republicans in opposing the Democrats' health-care plans as they are. If Obama moves, there is risk, however, for Republicans to look too much like they oppose reform. Americans have real concerns about rising costs." Obama "has a major decision to make here," he adds. "If he jams his plan through with only Democrat votes in the House and Senate -- bowing to his left by keeping the public option in -- that's a path fraught with peril for him and it's possible that it ends in spectacular failure. It might cost him seats in next year's midterms and he will destroy the patina of post-partisanship that is so critical to his personal approval ratings."
Tony Fratto, a former deputy press secretary to Pres. George W. Bush, agrees: "The public option has become a lightning rod." Obama's moving away from it, "from a strategic standpoint, is smart -- the map on this has been complicated for them for a long time."
Obama, in short, gets a prime-time address -- but he still may not have a winning hand.
— Robert Costa is the William F. Buckley Jr. Fellow at National Review.
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What Would Bush Do? -- By: Rich Lowry
By webmaster@nationalreview.com (Rich Lowry)
EDITOR'S NOTE:This column is available exclusively through King Features Syndicate. For permission to reprint or excerpt this copyrighted material, please contact: kfsreprint@hearstsc.com, or phone 800-708-7311, ext. 246.
If he wants to prevail in Afghanistan, Barack Obama needs a George W. Bush moment. He'll have to ignore the polls, brush aside doubters in his own party, and reinforce a failing war effort.
Bush did all that, and more, when he ordered the surge in Iraq in January 2007. He also had to buck his own military brass and almost the entirety of a foreign-policy establishment that considered the feckless recommendations of the Baker-Hamilton commission holy writ. He operated from a position of political weakness so debilitating, Lyndon Johnson might have identified with it in his final days.
Compared with those headwinds, Obama is experiencing a late-summer breeze on Afghanistan. He's a new president in whom the American public hasn't yet lost faith, even if he's faded from his post-election heights. In a CBS poll, four in ten say they want troop levels decreased, and only 48 percent approve of Obama's handling of Afghanistan. That's nothing like the collective "enough" the public had exclaimed about the Iraq War prior to the surge.
But Obama will need three especially Bushian qualities if he is to spare his country a humiliating retreat or an underresourced, inconclusive slog in Afghanistan: sincerity, perseverance, and courage.
Bush risked his presidency on Iraq because of his heartfelt belief in its strategic importance. Obama sounds just as categorical about Afghanistan. If he believes it, he'll make the tough calls. If not, he'll be prone to Rumsfeldian half-measures that will ensure all our sacrifices are made on behalf of failure.
We'd be in even worse shape if Obama hadn't already sent 21,000 additional troops earlier this year. The buzz among coalition commanders on the ground was that August would be a trying month -- casualties would spike, and Americans back home would sour. So it has come to pass. If Obama approves another request for additional forces from Gen. Stanley McChrystal, it will mean even more casualties as -- for some period of time -- the Taliban look as strong as ever.
Bush had to endure a similarly treacherous lag between our troops' fighting their way to outposts among the population in Iraq and the results in enhanced security. Obama, too, will have to persevere, and have the fortitude to disregard the voices of his own politicos who want nothing to do with an Afghan escalation, to ignore his most fervent supporters who fear he'll wreck his presidency in the Hindu Kush, and to stomach poll numbers that will get worse.
If the war can't be fought on the cheap, it can't be sold on the cheap, either. Obama gives the impression of wanting to maintain at least 68,000 troops in a far-off conflict in Central Asia in which dozens of Americans die every month, without ever mentioning it except when scheduled for the occasional speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars.
He'll have to convince the public that the war is necessary and winnable when the charm of simply characterizing it as the "good war" in contrast to Iraq has worn off.
If we withdrew, the Taliban would take over swaths of the country and would likely host al-Qaeda again. Pakistan would feel pressure to return to embracing the Taliban fully as its proxy in a war that would become a free-for-all for Afghanistan's neighbors. This would strengthen the hand of extremists within Pakistan at the same time our credibility would have sustained a devastating blow.
The war is far from lost. Kabul is relatively safe, certainly compared with the hellish extremity of Baghdad in 2006. The areas that are in the worst shape, in the south, are those in which we have had the fewest forces. The population doesn't want a reprise of Taliban rule. If we could recover in an Iraq that had descended to Dante's seventh circle, Afghanistan is salvageable with enough resources and time.
As he contemplates his next move, Obama should ask an unexpected question: "What would Bush do?" |
