WASHINGTON — The week after his re-election, US President Barack Obama was full of promises: his job-approval rating stood at 54 percent and the 2010 Tea Party wave appeared to have receded.
“With respect to the issue of mandate, I’ve got one… to help middle-class families and families that have been working hard to try to get into the middle class,” he said in November 2012. He acknowledged the dangers of “presidential overreach” in second terms, but he put forward a legacy-building agenda: a major fiscal deal, immigration reform and action on climate change. Two years later, only one of those initiatives has been achieved.
Obama is now under fire from his own party and the Republicans are poised to make gains in today’s elections.
A routine campaign stop on Sunday on behalf of Governor Dan Malloy, Democrat, in Bridgeport, Connecticut, exemplified this reversal of fortune. As the president spoke, protesters interrupted him at least four times as he worked to rally his party’s base. “I am sympathetic to those who are concerned about immigration,” the president said amid shouts from the audience. “It’s the other party that’s blocked it.”
Obama’s journey from triumphant, validated Democratic hero to a political millstone weighing on his party’s chances is a tale of a second-term president quickly and repeatedly sidetracked by a series of crises and the widely held perception that the White House has not managed them well. The fallout has led to questions about the president’s effectiveness both at home and abroad.
Obama’s list of second-term leadership crises is a formidable one: the botched rollout of HealthCare.gov, long waits at Veterans Affairs hospitals, Edward Snowden’s disclosures of the National Security Agency’s secrets, a pile-up of foreign children along the southwestern border, the threat of Islamist terrorists marauding across Syria and Iraq beheading foreigners and the arrival of the Ebola virus.
“These are legitimate crises in their own right that have to be dealt with by the president. That’s his job,” said AFL-CIO political director Michael Podhorzer, a White House ally who blames the GOP for blocking the president’s economic agenda. “But that has dampened his ability to speak out on other issues.”
At a fundraising event in New York in September, Obama talked about what he described as “disquiet” in the country despite the improving economy. The reason for that, he said, is that most people “just think government doesn’t seem to be capable of working anymore.”
He blamed Republicans, but it is the president and his party who may pay the heaviest price for that public perception.
Priorities dramatically altered
A month after Obama was re-elected, his agenda priorities were dramatically altered when 20 children and six adults were killed in a mass shooting at a Connecticut elementary school. The massacre upended Washington’s political debate and focused it squarely on a fight over gun control. Thinking it had a strong hand to play, the White House launched an all-out push to ban assault rifles and require stricter background checks.
“Every president finds that after setting an agenda on the campaign, the agenda is set for them by the world,” said Matt Bennett, Vice-President of Third Way, a centrist thinktank that supports stricter gun laws. “This time, the external events dictated the timing of something no one thought they would be taking up.”
But even an enthusiastic embrace of the issue by the White House was unable to deliver results. The Senate rejected all of the president’s gun-control proposals in April 2013.
Inside the West Wing, the loss, while frustrating, was not viewed as an event that would set the tone of failure for the second term. The president and his advisers remained convinced that they could still pursue the big bipartisan deals to cement an Obama legacy.
The president set about trying to woo enough Republican senators to pass key bills with margins big enough to pressure the GOP-controlled House to follow. Most of the White House overtures quickly fell apart. Republicans said Obama’s lack of follow-through was to blame.
By autumn, Democrats believed that they had seized the upper hand on fiscal matters, as the GOP forced a 16-day government shutdown in October, causing furloughs for 850,000 federal workers and costing US$2 billion in lost productivity. The shutdown was the most vivid evidence of the depth of antipathy toward Obama in the GOP, particularly in the House.
The shutdown was a political disaster for the GOP, but hope among Democrats that they had finally broken the opposition was short-lived, as the White House quickly became consumed by the troubled rollout of the online federal health insurance exchange, which launched October 1, the same day the shutdown began.
As Obama and his aides scrambled to fix the website in the early days, according to people familiar with the situation, senior Health and Human Services officials were still not providing them with accurate information about the depth of the system’s problems. Even though they mostly repaired the site within two months, a White House ally cited the botched rollout as a defining moment because Republicans, who were reeling after the 2012 election loss, stopped “feeling defeated” and were emboldened once again.
The wreckage of 2013
The wreckage of 2013 had a similar effect on the combatants: the president’s approval ratings took a nose dive, and Congress’ were even worse. Gallup reported that 42 percent of the public approved of Obama’s performance as the new year dawned.
Inside the West Wing, Obama’s top advisers developed a new strategy based on a memo that concluded that the president had acted too much like a prime minister, relying on lawmakers to get things done. In 2014, Obama would hold out one hand to Capitol Hill, but he would more aggressively move the levers of executive power with the other. John D. Podesta, a Democratic strategist with deep Washington experience, was brought aboard as a senior counsellor — a signal that Obama’s insular inner circle meant business.
Podesta’s influence was felt early on when the White House introduced an ambitious new regulation to cut greenhouse gas emissions from existing utilities — the most far-reaching climate rule ever undertaken by the federal government, which does not need congressional approval.
But whatever momentum the White House hoped to gain from that initiative was cut short as the news cycle was consumed by a crisis along the southwestern border, where tens of thousands of foreign children were crossing illegally. The situation was even more disruptive to Obama’s agenda than the healthcare embarrassment — it helped drive the final stake through the heart of his 18-month push for an overhaul of the immigration system.
After Obama was re-elected, conventional wisdom in Washington held that the first broad immigration reform bill in three decades was within reach as Republicans sought to repair their image with the fast-growing “Hispanic” voting bloc. Even after House Republicans had blocked a bipartisan Senate immigration bill in the fall of 2013, the White House held out hope that House leaders would relent after the 2014 primary season, when they were safe from challenges from the right.
But the combination of the border crisis and the defeat of House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, Republican-Virginia, in the primary in June to a Tea Party challenger running on a staunch anti-immigration platform doomed the White House’s chances for a bill.
By the end of June, Obama stood in the Rose Garden and announced that he would not wait for Congress and would act on his own to reform immigration laws. That threat sparked anxiety among vulnerable Democrats who persuaded the president in September to back off and wait until after the midterm elections to act.
Immigration advocates, already angry at Republicans, have turned their ire on the White House.
“With regard to immigration, I just think the conviction isn’t there,” said Kevin Appleby, director of migration policy for the US Conference of Catholic Bishops. “Every decision that has been made has been based on political calculation. You live by the political sword, you die by it.”
Source: Buenos Aires Herald