George Packer has written a really interesting piece called “Obama’s Lost Year: The President’s failure to connect with ordinary Americans.” It’s in this week’s edition of The New Yorker, which means that if you don’t subscribe, you can’t read it online yet. There’s a summary here, and Packer has a few excerpts and some comments here.
The focus of the piece is how the Obama administration made unnecessary and counterproductive compromises on the stimulus bill and then failed to sell the bill they got to the American people, with the inevitable results that (a) no one realizes that it actually worked pretty well, and (b) Obama can’t get anything else of any size through Congress because he has no public mandate to do so.
I was struck by a couple of things. First, the fact that Obama has blown an astonishing amount of political capital. He walked into an office with a bigger electoral win than any president in many years, plus a country in the midst of a financial catastrophe brought on by the incompetence and malfeasance of the previous administration. I think he could have gotten a better stimulus bill, as well as real financial reform, if he had been willing to play hardball from the get-go. But his own obsession with bipartisanship (remember the thing about 80 votes in the Senate? hahaha) did him in. Packer quotes Barney Frank:
Obama was trying to be favorably viewed by seventy per cent, and Reagan was willing to settle for fifty-seven per cent. He understood an intense fifty-seven was better than a sort of feel-good seventy.
That quest for the feel-good 70% was an epic fail, as we now know. Packer quotes Dean Price, who owns a biodiesel truck stop in rural Virginia, describing the result with what strikes me as impressive insight:
The American people were thinking radical change-not the status quo. Just the way Obama blamed Bush after 9/11, saying, “You told America to go shopping,” people are going to point the finger at him and say, “You had an opportunity and you wasted it.”
Very sad. And very hard to argue with.
The other thing that struck me was yet more eerie parallels between Obama and Deval Patrick. Compare, for example, this (no link – it’s from the magazine):
The White House and its allies … didn’t effectively use the Obama grass-roots movement and progressive organizations to embarrass Republican senators in vulnerable states like Maine and Ohio. The Administration, busily negotiating with the opposition, considered such tactics counterproductive.
with this:
[Patrick] said that, early in his administration, he called for a demonstration in Nurses Hall at the State House in support of his Municipal Partnership Bill; afterward, legislative leadership told him that the gathering had made it less likely the bill would pass. After that, Patrick said, he backed away from directly engaging the public – perhaps in error, he conceded.
So here’s one conclusion I draw from this article: David Axelrod should get out of the White House immediately. Axelrod is great at getting people elected. But he is evidently terrible at helping them govern. Between the article in the NYT a week or so ago and Packer’s New Yorker piece, one has the distinct impression of Axelrod as someone who is incredibly skilled at tapping into the electorate’s natural wish to be optimistic — which is great for campaigns — but who has no idea how campaign optimism relates to the realities of governing. He also maintains a worryingly unquestioning faith in his boss. The result is that Axelrod seems befuddled by what’s happened, and . Witness his simultaneously sad and infuriating comments to Packer about how he was just sure that the Republicans would help out Obama once he won.
Shortly before the 2008 Presidential election, Axelrod told me that the country’s problems were too grave for Republicans not to cooperate in solving them. When I reminded him of this recently, he said, “Republicans made a very cynical judgment.”
Now, any twelve year old could have told you that the Republicans were going to do exactly what they did: obstruct everything the Dems tried and do their best to strangle the Obama presidency in its cradle. And, unfortunately, the Axelrodian view that Obama at least initially adopted handed the GOP lots of rope.
And it gets worse.
For Axelrod, these lapses in communication [regarding the stimulus bill] were almost a point of honor. He suggested that the political failures in Obama’s first year were a result of the President’s conscientiousness in addressing difficult problems like financial instability and soaring health-care costs, regardless of the political fallout…. “I honestly don’t think people elected him because they thought he would be a great political tactician.” Obama, Axelrod argued, does what he believes to be right in spite of “short-term political calculations.”
Of course, in the long term, we’re all dead.
Look, that’s just hero worship run amok. Obama’s political failures happened because, well, he failed to do what needed to be done, in part IMHO because he was more interested in “bipartisanship” than in passing legislation that will actually solve the problem. This whole notion that Obama is some sort of political Jedi master is starting to wear a bit thin. And by the way, David, I did actually hope that Obama would be a great political tactician. Tacticians tend to get results, and at the moment, anyway, Obama’s a little short in the results department.
Anyway, I think Axelrod should quit. He seems miserable, from the NYT’s description, and at this point I think he’s not helping the president very much.
