American Review | Global Perspectives on US Affairs

It was supposed to be so easy

By Jonathan Bradley in Seattle, WA
10 March 2010

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Well it was, wasn't it? Passing health care, I mean.

I'll admit, I was fooled too. She'll correct me if I'm putting words into her mouth, but one of the things Erin Riley and I were most excited about seeing during our time in D.C. was Congress as it passed its historic health care legislation. And we're now a week into March, Erin is back in Sydney, and the eagle-eyed among you will have noticed my location listed as Seattle, WA. And health care? Well, on strict technicalities, the reform is stalled exactly where it was on Christmas Day: one House bill, one Senate bill, and nothing on the President's desk.

But forgive my irrational exuberance. A coterie of commentators have exhibited far higher expectations than I ever did, if their dire reports of the state of the Obama administration are any indication.

We've had the Washington Post arguing, on its front page no less, that the White House is in dire straits because it doesn't listen to Rahm Emanuel enough. This was in response to suggestions the White House could pull itself out of dire straits if it listened to Rahm Emanuel less. Then there was Sunday's New York Times, which concluded the White House was in dire straits because it listens to David Axelrod too much. 

You don't even need to disdain Mark Knopfler as much as I do to tire of all this talk about dire straits and the White House, particularly when under examination, things don't look too bad for the Obama administration. True, this is not a great time for Democrats: Americans have too little patience with incumbents at the moment, probably because too many Americans are out of work. The economy is still a little too sluggish in its recovery, the deficit is a little too large for anyone's liking, and Charles Rangel's dealings appear to be a little too shady. The party can expect a tough run in the mid term elections.

But if you look a little farther afield than the Times' condemnation of Axelrod, you'll see within its pages a perfectly cogent summation of Obama's political fortunes:

Polls suggest that the public is already on the president’s side. In a New York Times/CBS News survey early last month, respondents were twice as likely to say that President Obama was trying to work with Republicans as they were to say that Republicans were trying to work with President Obama (62 percent versus 29 percent). And by overwhelming margins, they said they wanted both sides to compromise some positions “in order to get things done.”

[...]

In the New York Times/CBS poll last month, 51 percent said they view the Democrats unfavorably, the highest since November 1994, when the Republicans swept into office. But 57 percent said they view the Republicans the same way, near the all-time high of 60 percent.

The paper quotes a Democratic pollster, Stanley Greenberg:

Greenberg ... noted that the energy behind Democrats in 2006 had been building for a year, beginning with anger over President George W. Bush’s handling of Hurricane Katrina and the Iraq war. “The other side got demoralized as they watched our energy,” Mr. Greenberg said. This time, “our side is demoralized by the lack of progress. It’s almost independent of the energy on the other side.”

The Democrats have to do two things, he said. They have to show that they can govern successfully — passing some version of health care reform would be his preference — and then they have to frame the election as a choice for Democrats

Greenberg may be partisan, but his reading is accurate. This is not yet a Presidency on the ropes. For a start, as Matt Yglesias points out, Obama can lay claim to quite a few accomplishments from his first year in office. The President's approval rating, hovering around 51 per cent, is not nearly as high as it was during the heady months after he first took office, but it remains respectably positive. And most importantly, though commentators seem all too eager to elide this detail, health care, Obama's signature reform, is not dead yet. Rather than proving themselves unable to govern, Democrats are nearing the end of a long process of reform that nobody should have expected would be easy.

As my colleague Erin pointed out in an essay written for the USSC last year [PDF],  the Obama administration's approach "was not married to any particular version of health reform policy. Rather, it crafted an approach to the manner in which the policy would be shaped and political forces managed." In so doing, Erin argues, Obama has advanced this current attempt at reform closer to realisation than ever before.

Now that the Democrats have gotten over their Scott Brown-inspired shakes and realised that 41 Senate seats does not make a majority, this bill has every chance of making it as far as the President's desk. And while I would have preferred to see Obama campaigning six months ago for this legislation as hard as he is now, and while plenty of people around Washington pinpoint the length of time Max Baucus was permitted to seek the support of Senate Republicans (apparently Obama's fault), Obama has so far been reasonably successful in promoting a difficult and historic piece of legislative reform. Examining his administration's supposed failure is like complaining that, a hundred metres short of the finish line, a marathon runner has taken too long to complete the race. 

Tags: Health Care, Midterms 2010

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