President Obama: Not So Super After All?
I’ll bet it was lots of fun at first. The Obamas look so sweet in that photo of them walking down Pennsylvania Avenue, and it had to feel pretty neat to take a girl from Chicago’s south side in your own helicopter around Maryland. But whatever warm glow enveloped Barack Obama seems to have been now blown away by Washington’s cold winds.
His stated intention to do things differently got torn to shreds by the appointment of some cabinet members with ethical lapses that looked kind of District-textbook. His bipartisanship ran into the Republicans (oh yeah, those guys are still here). And his much-awaited rescue plan for the financial system, announced by his treasury secretary on Tuesday, sent the markets into free fall. We thought Obama was so cool, he could do anything; but Tim Geithner looked like something off stuffwhitepeoplelike.com.
Critics have been queuing up. On the editorial pages, even some of the president’s friends have grown lukewarm. So has Barack Obama’s day in the sun turned into the shortest political honeymoon in memory?
Things might not be so bad. My guess is that the person least perturbed by the quick resumption of panic and anger is Mr. Obama himself; not because he will have retreated into a “don’t-worry-be-happy” shell of denial, but because, from election night, he has always signalled that the start of his ride was going to be a bumpy one.
Second, if support for his stimulus package is tepid, his own approval ratings remain sky-high. His principal mistake in that respect appeared to be to let House Democrats set too much of the stimulus agenda. Message to Democrats: find that abandoned mineshaft in which you’ve hidden Bill Clinton, and have him invite Nancy Pelosi for a barbecue.
On the bailout, my guess is that Wall Street optimists had been hoping for some kind of magic wand to whisk away their woes, restore their profits, and take toxic assets off their balance sheets. Yeah, right. There’s about as much chance of that happening in the near future as of the Italians playing exciting football.
The problems confronted by the Obama administration are enormously complex. As the Economist put it, Tim Geithner wasn’t ready for prime time. But as the details are fleshed out, it may take shape as the most reasonable solution. And while the stimulus package is not perfect, anything which gets money into the hands of US consumers will be better than something which does not.
However, the ride will continue to be bumpy. Having a rough start is not a problem. The literature on the political business cycle in the US suggests that the president does well to do unpopular things early in his presidency, in the hopes they begin to pay dividends at the next elections.
Things may really start to get rough for Mr. Obama after the 2010 mid-term elections, though. There’s a good chance that a real turnaround will not have yet begun, while national debt will soar. If his party suffer setbacks next year, the period which follows may prove particularly difficult.
In the meantime, though, when one compares Mr. Obama’s start with that of his immediate predecessors, it hasn’t been all that bad – at least, not yet. At this stage in his presidency Dubya was still wondering how they managed to make his office that shape; Bill Clinton was chairing night-long committee meetings deciding what committees he should chair.
Nonetheless, this is a nail-biting time. We’re only just now learning how very close the world financial system came to outright collapse last autumn. If the world economy is being besieged by the barbarians of bad credit and mistrust, Washington may be the last bastion from which a rearguard will be mounted. If the US stumbles its way into a Depression – and it still can – the rest of us will go down. If Washington manages to restore confidence, the world economy still faces a difficult couple of years. But it will not collapse, and can then start groping towards recovery.
So these are tense days and weeks, and all eyes are on the White House, and on the US Treasury. Nobody cheered encore at Tim Geithner’s debut; they were all trying to figure out why the curtain had closed. But everyone’s faith in Barack Obama may buy him a bit more time. Now more than ever, we’re hoping Michelle is pestering him not to screw up, buddy.
Posted by John Rapley in Other | February 12, 2009 5:45PM |