Obaminologists

Five months into the Obama presidency, analysts are still trying to psych out the President and figure out how his mode of leadership translates into policy implementation. Marc Ambinder has a post responding to a post by Nate Silver that criticized the President from the left for being too cautious in pushing for the policy objectives that he believes in. Ambinder sees something more at work in how the President approaches policy implementation.

Obama HAS avoided anything that would ruffle the delicate Congressional feathers. Why? Because the White House believes, from experience, that the president's agenda will advance more quickly through Congress if the White House provides little reason for the legislative branch to fight with the executive branch. From experience, they conclude that it is much easier to broker a deal between Democratic factions and the two cameras of Congress than it would be if Obama were pushing for more specifics. (Yes, there is an element here of a lesson learned from the Clinton administration, but Obama isn't Clinton.) It's not that they're afraid of losing -- it's that they want to win. Within the broader complaint about relative inaction on health care, some liberals worry that Obama isn't pushing for the type of change that fundamentally reforms and reshapes our health care institutions to fit a model that conforms to the way liberals believe the world works.

These criticisms of Obama miss at least one fundamental aspect of his personality, one that was evident in his presidential campaign: Obama has an abiding faith in the institutions of government. As a constitutional law nerd, he really does believe that Congress has a significant role to play in making legislation (and he has a corresponding belief that the prerogatives of the executive branch's actions on national security are sacrosanct." Parallel to the faith in institutions is an almost magical belief in the power of consensus. He's using his presidential powers, implied and actual, to build a consensus about health care reform, one that will last beyond his presidency. It isn't simply that Obama feels constrained by political realities in Congress, although that's part of it. It's that he believes that the best way to accomplish the most change is to let Congress legislate and let the President build public support for the end product, which still conforms to the goals that Obama laid out during his campaign. Don['t confuse bipartisanship with consensus; bipartisanship refers to outcomes, and the outcome here won't be liked by Republicans. Consensus refers to the process and to the way in which the public perceives the issue.

Michael Barone has a column explaining three things that we have learned about Obama's approach to government. First, Barone posits, Obama is fine at developing long-range plans but then falters when inconvenient facts or events interfere with his vision. We're seeing this now with both North Korea and Iran not following the script where Obama's outreach to the Muslim world and willingness to negotiate leads to concessions. Secondly, Barone doesn't see the deference and wily strategy that Ambinder perceives in Obama's approach to Congress.

Second, he does not seem to care much about the details of policy. He subcontracted the stimulus package to congressional appropriators, the cap-and-trade legislation to Henry Waxman and Edward Markey, and his health care program to Max Baucus. The result is incoherent public policy: indefensible pork barrel projects, a carbon emissions bill that doesn’t limit carbon emissions from politically connected industries, and a health care program priced by the Congressional Budget Office at a fiscally unfeasible $1,600,000,000,000.

He quickly announced the closing of the prison at Guantanamo Bay and now finds his administration begging the likes of Palau and Bermuda to take a few detainees off its hands. His acceptance of Arabist insistence that all problems in the Middle East can be solved by getting an Israeli-Palestinian settlement has put us in the absurd position of pressuring Israel not to expand settlements by a single square meter but pledging not to “meddle” in Iran.

Thirdly, he governs the country using the precepts he absorbed as someone who originally aspired to be mayor of Chicago from the way he deals with opponents to his confidence that government can continue to "plunder" the private sector to fund programs that aid political allies. Barone concludes,

Obama entered the presidency with what seemed like supreme self-confidence. He had, after all, advanced from the Illinois state Senate to the presidency of the United States in just four years — a steeper and more rapid ascent than any president since Woodrow Wilson. The success of his long-range campaign strategy seems to have made him confident that his long-range policy strategies would work as well.

But transferring large segments of the American economy from the private to the public sector has proved to be tougher than winning Democratic primaries and caucuses. And Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Kim Jong Il have proved to be harder to charm than American mainstream media. It’s generally good for American presidents to have long-term strategies. But in setting public policy it’s important to get the details right. And in guiding the nation in a dangerous world it’s vital to adjust to face hard realities and adjust to unexpected events.

Whichever of these analyses that you ascribe to depends probably on how much you liked Obama to begin with. I think that Ambinder goes too far in ascribing Obama's passivity to a fundamental respect for the powers of Congress and respect for a congressional role in defining policy. That might have been his approach while he was a member of the legislature in either Illinois or Washington, but now that he is the executive himself, he is fully prepared to expand the powers of the presidency. For example, think of the many "czars" that Obama has appointed. What are these but an evasion of traditional checks and balances by establishing officers of the executive branch who are not confirmed by the Senate and are not answerable to congressional oversight? Governance through czars is not the chosen path of someone feeling especially deferential to Congress.

We've yet to see whether congressional Democrats can be as successful in crafting health and energy policies that will pull in enough of a consensus among Democrats and perhaps moderate Republicans to pass. It's a lot easier to craft a stimulus package that spends federal funds on all sorts of wish-list projects especially if it's being sold as answer to dire economic conditions. Recrafting major parts of our economy in ways that will substantially change how people use health care or purchase energy and will cost much more than they would like to pretend is not quite as easy to go behind congressional leadership doors and come out with a bill that can be muscled through.

If Obama succeeds in getting passed the sort of health care plan or cap and trade plan that is being constructed now in Congress, historians will lean more towards the Obaminology that Ambinder proposes. If these plans fall through and Obama's presidency comes to be viewed more as Carter's failed opportunities, then Barone's analysis may become to be the conventional wisdom on Obaminology. Just like Kremlinologists during the Cold War would look for clues to decipher what was going on in Moscow, we have our own version to day to try to decode our president.