Washington Monthly - September/October 2012 - (Page 23)

ten miles square ton’s 1996 gambit to inch into Republican territory by vouching for public school uniforms. “That was all about sending a larger meta-message that this was a president who got up every day to fight for the American people.” Obama, by contrast, “is a lot more about telling than about showing,” the speechwriter said. “He gives nice speeches, but he’s not really practiced in the doing. Part of that is because he was never a doer before he became president.” Another former Clinton official, who wouldn’t let me identify him more specifically, argued that Obama showed his inexperience by letting Congress not only define his bills for him, but write them, too, in the cases of stimulus, health care, and climate legislation. “The result of that is it became extremely difficult to maintain a set of clear principles of what it is you are about,” he said. “Clinton had been a five-term governor. He really knew how to be an executive. And I think it took Obama a while to learn.” Rendell, no surprise, makes precisely the same point. “I think the president was hurt by being a legislator only,” he said in a June television appearance. “Too much of [stimulus and health care] was left up to the Congress. He sort of said, ‘Here’s my concept, you guys flesh it out.’ I think Hillary Clinton would have sent them a bill and said, ‘Here’s what I want.’ ” This is where the Clintonites, their vision clouded by personal fealty, become less convincing. Rendell, who stumped hard for Hillary in 2008, seems to have forgotten that this very strategy failed miserably in 1993, when the Clintons pushed their health reform bill. Precisely because Obama saddled Congress with the responsibility of crafting the Affordable Care Act, it too was on the hook if it failed. (As are Senators John Kerry, Joe Lieberman, and Lindsey Graham for bungling climate change legislation.) Equally, talk of a leadership deficit ignores several of Obama’s high-profile unilateral actions: reversing Bush’s torture policies; authorizing military involvement in Libya; ordering the killing of Osama bin Laden; rescuing GM and Chrysler; and providing certain illegal immigrants relief from deportation. But the weakness of the Clintonite gripe stems not just from papering over the Big Dog’s mistakes and minimizing Obama’s accomplishments. It also suffers from a blindness to Obama’s political obstacles and an overly credulous conviction in the president’s power to sway public opinion. First, the economy is faring far worse today than it was sixteen years ago. In the summer of 1996, the national unemployment rate hovered around 5.5 percent; today it stands at 8.2 percent. In the modern era, only Franklin Roosevelt, who was backed by a strong New Deal coalition, has won reelection with an unemployment rate over 7.2 percent. In this context, Obama’s slim lead over Republican opponent Mitt Romney is something of a victory. Second, Congress has blocked most of Obama’s agenda for the past two years, which has in turn exacerbated the country’s economic and fiscal crises. While Newt Gingrich’s famously intransigent 104th Congress allowed the government to shut down in 1995 and 1996, his 105th acquiesced to certain tax increases in a muchheralded 1997 budget deal that today’s House, beholden to a no-tax pledge, would deem dead on arrival. Meanwhile, Senate Republicans have kept busy playing nullifier, filibustering everything from jobs bills to low-level judicial appointments. Finally, the Clintonites place far too much faith in the bully pulpit. After all, when Obama does choose to use it, he’s not always rewarded. From Vanity Fair’s Todd Purdum, in 2010: ing his best to figure out “whose ass to kick”— he was denounced by some of those same critics as demeaning the dignity of the presidency. But even this anecdote obscures the larger point: what presidents say, especially in harsh economic circumstances, matters very little. As political scientists Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson argue in a recent Presidential Quarterly article, the bully pulpit helps presidents set their agenda, but does very little to determine “how citizens or legislators respond to these issues.” Which is all to say: if Obama had been dealt a better hand, he’d be cruising to reelection, and we probably wouldn’t be dissecting his communications strategy. Granted, the Clintonite critique I’ve identified is not completely unjustified. When a health care bill is broadly unpopular but the general public is in favor of most of its individual parts, clearly If Obama had been dealt a better hand, he’d be cruising to reelection, and we probably wouldn’t be dissecting his communications strategy. something’s been lost in translation. Indeed, Obama himself admitted in July that he spent too much of his first term governing, and not enough time telling a “story to the American people that gives them a sense of unity and purpose and optimism.” Still, I got the sense from the Clinton folks that they didn’t have a serious beef with Obama’s first-term performance. Rather, like Bubba himself, they’re backseat drivers who don’t want the newbie to wreck the car. “A lot of it is nostalgia,” says the official who worked in both White Houses. “Anyone you talk to that’s still in the immediate Clinton circle has no appreciation for the fact that not everybody is Bill Clinton.” Simon van Zuylen-Wood is a reporterresearcher at the New Republic. Washington Monthly 23 Obama’s … sangfroid and equanimity in the face of the worst crises became a subject of fevered agitation among the press and some critics in his own party, who accused him of failing to exploit the ultimate power of the presidency, its bully pulpit. But the moment that Obama responded to a suggestion from the Today program’s Matt Lauer that he needed to “kick some butt” regarding the oil spill—by allowing that he was, indeed, do-

Washington Monthly - September/October 2012

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