Ask not how Obama changed Washington
By Muhammad Cohen

HONG KONG - Barack Obama has the lowest approval ratings of any United States president at the end of his first year. Obama has been dealt a rough hand, but many say he's played it badly.

Historians will wonder how within months of taking office with the biggest winning margin in a generation, a young, charismatic, gifted president allowed a right-wing demagogue like Glenn Beck to become the most influential political figure of 2009. Don't say I didn't warn you that Obama might disappoint (see Let the disappointment begin, Asia Times Online, Nov 8, 2008 and that 

 
promised change would fall short of slogans (see Yes, he did, Asia Times Online, Jan 17, 2009). The team that ran such a brilliant campaign, adeptly measuring the public tenor, has proven tone deaf in the White House.

Although there's no mistaking Obama or his policies for George W Bush, he's failed to deliver the kind of change he promised. It's still business as usual in Washington, and that's fueled the public's anger. That anger helped elect Obama, but his White House has failed to seize the political advantage, given that Republicans were responsible for the failed policies behind so much of it. Instead, Obama has let Republican failures become his problems and let Republicans and their far-right fellow travelers shift blame onto him. His administration has let the entire political conversation get away from it, mainly through multiple miscalculations, and now fellow Democrats defy the administration without apparent consequences.

It's laudable that Obama has, true to his word, tried to avoid partisanship. But that hasn't created a post-partisan Washington any more than his election created a post-racial America. Obama and his White House would need to use the presidency far more effectively to neutralize political problems. It speaks volumes that by far the best speeches of Obama's first year were to audiences outside the country - in Cairo addressing the Muslim world and in Oslo to accept the Nobel Peace Prize that many said he didn't deserve.

On the economy, the top issue for most Americans, the administration has committed now-characteristic policy and political mistakes. Its first move, selecting Timothy Geithner as Treasury secretary, was a bad idea that's gotten worse. Geithner's work as New York Federal Reserve chief made him one of Wall Street's top enablers as these masters of the universe crashed the economy. His failure to pay his taxes - twice - signaled that the Obama administration wouldn't demand the higher ethical standards it had promised.

These political and public relations gaffes had serious policy implications. You could argue that it would take an insider like Geithner to give Wall Street the tough love it needed. But it hasn't played out that way. (We'll see how far the latest proposal to tax banks to cover the bailout gets.) Geithner didn't attach strings to the US$350 billion in bailout money the Obama administration controlled under terms of the 2008 bill crafted by former Treasury secretary, Henry Paulson, a former Goldman Sachs chief executive officer. Given the players' pedigrees, it's no surprise that the bankers got their bailouts and bonuses without conditions, such as loosening credit, or any meaningful reform. Meanwhile, a year into the emergency fiscal stimulus package, Main Street is still struggling with unemployment. To voters, the Bush mega-recession has become the continuing Obama mega-recession.

Moreover, Obama seems to have failed to show any real concern for the people who have lost their jobs. The stimulus package, despite its mind-boggling $787 billion price tag, has yielded disappointing results. Photo ops at factories and road projects do not convince anyone that the White House really cares. There haven't been appropriately grand policy steps to create jobs, though admittedly this is not an easy task. But Singapore, for example, is picking up a percentage of small business wage bills. China has targeted loans to hard-hit exporters. There are things the Obama administration could try, instead of acting as if passing the stimulus package and bailing out the banks had solved the problem.

The stimulus package vote should have also given the Obama administration an important new page in its political script. When no House Republicans voted for the stimulus package, the administration should have realized that bipartisanship wasn't about to happen. At that point, the administration needed to adopt a new mantra on bipartisanship: Republicans helped make this mess, and they need to help clean it up. That line would have helped the White House keep control of the political high ground and the conversation, backed by overwhelming majorities on Capitol Hill.

Instead, the White House let Republicans have a pass on the vote. This gave the opposition an opportunity to complain about the Republican-triggered recession and the burgeoning deficit, which is mainly the result of Bush's tax cuts, two wars and the unfunded Medicare pharmaceutical benefit. Under the White House's nose, the Republicans pretended history began with Obama's inauguration and channeled the electorate's anger at the new administration.

Healthcare shows the worthlessness of the campaign as preparation for governing. Obama's campaign had detailed plans for healthcare reform, honed by competing throughout the race with a similarly specific plan from then-presidential candidate, now Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Yet when Obama proposed healthcare reform as president, he left congress to write a bill. On an issue where there was great public support for reform, he gave the spotlight to the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, and the senate's majority leader, Harry Reid.

By hanging back, Obama avoided some political heat - the lesson learned from the Bill and Hillary Clinton healthcare reform failure - but it came at the price of letting others define the issue and define him and his positions. He didn't need to micromanage the process, but he needed to set out a clear set of simple-to-understand goals that the American people could support.

A smart White House would have begun by calling for health insurance reform, not healthcare reform: guaranteeing everyone the opportunity to purchase affordable insurance; preventing insurance company bureaucrats from interfering with decisions about other people's health; and cutting health insurance costs, which would mean cutting medical costs. People love doctors and nurses, since we trust them with our lives, but no one loves insurance companies.

In an era where no one loves politicians, Obama got elected to change Washington. Instead it appears as if Washington has changed him and his administration. Worse, Obama seems to have lost his gift to connect with the electorate. He's got nine months before mid-term elections to get his mojo back and save his congressional majority.

Former broadcast news producer Muhammad Cohen told America’s story to the world as a US diplomat and is author of Hong Kong On Air, a novel set during the 1997 handover about television news, love, betrayal, financial crisis, and cheap lingerie. Follow Muhammad Cohen’s blog for more on the media and Asia, his adopted home.

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