Weak, Waffling Obama Loses Credibility with Voters

“The Daily Show” fans might remember Jon Stewart saying on multiple occasions during the Health Care Reform debate, “I don’t know whether Obama is playing 12–dimensional chess, or whether he is getting his ass kicked on this.”  It was a good question, because blind Obama loyalists will insist that, despite the debacle of this past 12 months, Obama has been wielding his political-fu and is winning this game of 12–dimensional chess, like the master that he is.

Barack Obama himself would insist that he has neither been playing 12–D chess, nor has he been getting his ass kicked.  He has gotten what he wanted out of this past 12 months.

Unfortunately, the millions of people who contributed $5.00 or $50.00, and put Obama in office, were expecting some Progressive ideas to make their way into law during the first 12 months of his administration.

When you look at what was expected of him, it is clear that Obama, to use Jon Stewart’s words, has been “getting his ass kicked” on pretty much everything.

There have been massive Wall Street bail-outs without any pledge by Wall Street or laws from Congress that will make them change their ways.  The same people who brought you the sub-prime mortgage fiasco are now making millions handling mortgage loan modifications for distressed home-owners.  Wall Street received record bonuses this December, and nothing has been done to reign in executive (over-)compensation.

Corrupt Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have been given a blank check to continue operations despite their contribution to the financial crisis economists have politely called a “recession”.  Despite overseeing trillions of dollars in mortgages, the Inspector General for Fannie and Freddie was fired because he was looking into Rahm Emanuel’s malfeasance while serving on the board of directors there.  The Inspector General has not been replaced, and much like how Bush operated, you can count on him not ever being replaced.  So much for transparency in government.

Gitmo has not been closed.  “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” is still robbing our military of highly-trained soldiers who are needed in our war on terrorism.  Many of those dismissed have been fluent Arabic translators.  Indefinite detention of terror suspects without habeas corpus is still being applied by the Obama administration, and there are still overseas prisons operating without oversight.

Health Care Reform is Obama’s signature issue, and it has failed.  Jim DeMint said that stopping health care reform would be Obama’s “Waterloo”.  Instead, passing the Senate version of health care reform will be Obama’s “Waterloo”.  Republicans are already calling out Obama and claiming that he has only been serving special interests and lobbyists donating millions of dollars to Democrats.  Never mind that the GOP tried to kill health care reform entirely, they are going to run against Obama and the Democrats for being *corrupt*.

There will be severe political costs to this abdication of responsibility by the Obama administration.  If Obama survives 2012, and I think he won’t, he will be working with a Republican Congress.  People have seen what they think is liberalism and found that it has served corporations with record stock market prices, while the average man on the street is still looking for a job.  Not only that, but they will soon be mandated by law to buy insurance they can’t afford, and whose price and quality are not regulated.

Drew Westen, Ph.D., from Emory University, describes the situation that Obama and the Democrats find themselves in by not governing from strength, but weakness (emphasis mine): 

It’s the job of the president to be in the fray. It’s his job to lead us out of it, not to run from it. It’s his job to make the tough decisions and draw lines in the sand. But Obama really doesn’t seem to want to get involved in the contentious decisions. They’re so, you know, contentious. He wants us all to get along. Better to leave the fights to the Democrats in Congress since they’re so good at them. He’s like an amateur boxer who got a coupon for a half day of training with Angelo Dundee after being inspired by the tapes of Mohammed Ali. He got “float like a butterfly” in the morning but never made it to “sting like a bee.”

Do you think Americans ought to have one choice of health insurance plans the insurance companies don’t control, or don’t you? I don’t want to hear that it would sort of, kind of, maybe be your preference, all other things being equal. Do you think we ought to use health care as a Trojan Horse for right-wing abortion policies? Say something, for God’s sake.

He doesn’t need a chief of staff. He needs someone to shake him until he feels something strongly enough not just to talk about it but to act. He’s increasingly appearing to the public, and particularly to swing voters, like Dukakis without the administrative skill. And although he is likely to squeak by with a personal victory in 2012 if the economy improves by then, he may well do so with a Republican Congress. But then I suppose he’ll get the bipartisanship he always wanted.

No Vision, No Message

The second problem relates to the first. The president just doesn’t want to enunciate a progressive vision of where this country should be heading in the 21st century, particularly a progressive vision of government and its relation to business. He doesn’t want to ruffle what he believes to be the feathers of the American people, to offer them a coherent, emotionally resonant, values-driven message — starting with an alternative to Ronald Reagan’s message that government is the problem and not the solution — and to see if they might actually follow him.

He doesn’t want to talk about social issues, even though they predictably have gotten in the way of health care reform and will do the same on one issue after another…

Immigration? Joe Wilson yells, “You lie.” So instead of acting like a man and going after Wilson on the spot (the man just attacked him in front of the entire nation in a joint session of Congress), he accepts his apology the next day, and a day later rewards Wilson for his incivility and bigotry by tightening the rules so that illegal immigrants can’t even buy insurance themselves on the health care exchange the Democrats are creating sometime between 2013 and 2025 (depending on how many seats they lose in the meantime, and hence how long, if ever, it takes for the exchange to get set up)…

If you just talk sensibly with Americans, they are sensible people. But ask them one-dimensional polling questions like, “Do you think illegal immigrants should get health care?” and you’ll entirely miss the art of the possible.

Jobs? Watch for a $25 billion plan that makes good political theatre and that every economist I know says will move the unemployment rate from 10.0 percent to 9.95 percent. Not enough to save 30 seats in November. And not enough to save a generation of families from financial ruin and lower education, higher unemployment, and poorer health for the rest of their — and their children’s — lives.

The problem with the president’s strategic team is that they don’t understand the difference between compromising on policy and compromising on core values. When it comes to policies, listen all you want to the Stones: “You can’t always get what you want” (although it would be nice if the administration tried sometime).

But on issues of principle… get some stones. Make your case to the American people, make it evocatively, and draw the line in the sand. That’s how you earn people’s respect. That’s the only thing that will bring Independents back.

And that’s where the problem of message comes in. This White House has no coherent message on anything. The message on health care reform changed even more frequently than the interest rates on credit cards last Spring, and turned a 70-30 winning issue into its current 30-50 status with the public. Last week on the Sunday news shows, I remember watching in disbelief as Larry Summers smugly told the 15 million Americans out of work that the recession was definitively over and that all economists agree. Then Christina Romer, another of the President’s chief economic advisors, announced on the next show that the recession is definitely not over.

It’s the same problem we’ve seen with messaging the deficit. Are deficits good — we’re supposed to deficit spend our way out of a severe recession, right? — or bad — they’re a drag on the economy and stealing from the next generation. So which are they? How about telling the American people, at the very least, when they’re good and when they’re bad, not flipping back and forth in the same sentence between deficit spending and deficit reduction.

To be honest, I don’t know what the president believes on anything, and I’m not alone among American voters. He introduced his recent job summit by saying that even in these times, the role of government should be limited. Really? That was a nicely nuanced reinforcement of the ideology of limited, ineffective government promulgated by Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. Unfortunately, it runs against all the available data and everything Democrats have stood for since FDR.

Obama, like so many Democrats in Congress, has fallen prey to the conventional Democratic strategic wisdom: that the way to win the center is to tack to the center.

But it doesn’t work that way.

You want to win the center? Emanate strength. Emanate conviction. Lead like you know where you’re going (and hopefully know what you’re talking about).

People in the center will follow if you speak to their values, address their ambivalence (because by definition, on a wide range of issues, they’re torn between the right and left), and act on what you believe. FDR did it. LBJ did it. Reagan did it. Even George W. Bush did it, although I wish he hadn’t.

But you have to believe something.

I don’t honestly know what this president believes. But I believe if he doesn’t figure it out soon, start enunciating it, and start fighting for it, he’s not only going to give American families hungry for security a series of half-loaves where they could have had full ones, but he’s going to set back the Democratic Party and the progressive movement by decades, because the average American is coming to believe that what they’re seeing right now is “liberalism,” and they don’t like what they see. I don’t, either.

What they’re seeing is weakness, waffling, and wandering through the wilderness without an ideological compass. That’s a recipe for going nowhere fast — but getting there by November.

Leadership Obama Style and the Looming Losses in 2010