Obama Cracks Up
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WHAT THE WORST WEEK OF HIS YOUNG ADMINISTRATION SAYS ABOUT THE PRESIDENT
The AIG bonuses, alienating our allies, that Special Olympics crack on “The Tonight Show” there’s certainly plenty of competition, but this was probably the worst week of President Obama’s nascent administration.
The problem wasn’t just bad decisions followed by rash reactions and changing stories. The mistakes, oversights, cover-ups, and bad press of this past week all hit Obama in the most sensitive spots, undercutting the pillars on which he had built his rare transpartisan appeal.
Obama fiddles while Rome burns
During the transition, Obama won some Republican hearts with his promise of competence and intelligence. When he stacked his administration with Ivy League PhDs, David Brooks gushed that Obama was “picking the best of the Washington insiders,” and giggled, “If a foreign enemy attacks the United States during the Harvard-Yale game any time over the next four years, we’re screwed.”
Then there were the “new politics” Obama promised. He was going to make us “trust in our government again.” He would provide transparency and make our government “govern for all the people not just the interests of the wealthy and well-connected.”
And the underlying promise of Obama at bottom, why his candidacy inspired such deep enthusiasm and such broad support was that he just made us feel good about ourselves and about our country. He sent tingles up journalists’ legs and induced swooning among his female supporters. One usually wonky liberal blogger declared, “He is not the Word made flesh, but the triumph of word over flesh, over color, over despair. Obama is, at his best, able to call us back to our highest selves, to the place where America exists as a glittering ideal, and where we, its honored inhabitants, seem capable of achieving it, and thus of sharing in its meaning and transcendence.”
The Obamian pillars of hope surrounding himself with competence and intelligence, providing transparency, restoring government for the people not just the well-connected, and bringing out the best in this country and its people have all been undercut this past week by the AIG mess and the subsequent thrashing about.
Allowing a taxpayer-owned collapsing company to pay $165 million in bonuses including retention bonuses to employees who have left hardly reflects competence. The shifting account of who knew what and when hardly looks like honest politics. Adapting a posture of outrage only after the public outcry was heard and after the bonuses were approved hardly looks like new politics.
And as far as making us all feel the love evoking America’s “glittering ideal,” and calling “us back to our highest selves” Americans today are left furious at our government, resentful of AIG bonus babies, distrustful of Congress and the White House.
The mystique has crumbled. And with it, the fabled Obama coalition is disintegrating.
Same old story
Obama’s bad week was paved for him last Friday, when word leaked that AIG paid out hundreds of millions in bonuses. Obama and Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner knew about these bonuses ahead of time, but the President decided to dedicate his weekly Saturday radio address to discussing food safety.
On Sunday, his top economic advisor, former Goldman Sachs executive Lawrence Summers, went on Sunday morning television, expressed outrage over the bonuses but threw up his hands, declaring the White House had already “done everything that it can . . . to limit these bonuses.” By Monday morning, though, public furor over the bonuses had reached fever pitch. The President took to the airwaves to declare his own outrage and promise to do something about it.
It certainly doesn’t look like new politics or transparency to know about the bonuses, but stay quiet about them until after they are paid, after the media reports on them, and after the public outcry reaches a boiling point. Instead, it looks like Bushian secrecy and Clintonian opportunism.
What followed was a week of muddy and shifting stories, both on the old Nixon-Watergate question what did the administration know, and when did they know it? and on the question of who stuck the bonus-protection provision into the stimulus.
First, we learned that Geithner knew about the bonuses since the previous Monday. Then we learned that Obama knew about them before they were paid. The timeline has crept backwards since then, with a Fed report that Treasury had been told on Feb. 28. Some journalists reported that congressmen had been complaining about AIG bonuses late last year.The lack of clear answers on a timeline raises transparency questions, but also competence questions. Why didn’t Geithner or Obama know earlier, and why didn’t they do anything about them?
When the U.S. House rushed through a bill on Thursday, grabbing back most of this money through a 90% tax on 2009 bonuses paid by bailed-out banks, Obama applauded the measure as “a strong signal.” But most observers winced at the spectacle. “There are third-world juntas that would think twice before doing this,” liberal writer Noam Scheiber wrote in The New Republic.
There were other lowlights, too. On Tuesday, a White House official was reported telling Senate staffers that the President’s proposals to cap greenhouse gas emissions and auction off emission permits could cost energy users three times the $646 billion estimated in the President’s budget. That same day, it came out that Obama planned to make veterans cover some of their combat-related injuries in VA hospitals.
On Friday, the Congressional Budget Office issued its assessment of the President’s budget, concluding that the President had underpriced his plans by $2.3 trillion.
Pillars of foam
Back in the campaign, Obama was well loved by the liberal base for obvious reasons. Nearly unique among recent politicians, though, Obama managed to appeal strongly to moderate voters and Republican voters without moving his policies an inch towards the center. The reason: his apparent integrity.
Perhaps it was the contrast with Hillary Clinton, but many of us believed his promises of transparency and honest government. To nearly everyone, he seemed much smarter than the average politician, and many set aside concerns about his inexperience believing he would appoint capable, smart deputies. And then there was the emotional pull: it really seemed he could make us all feel better about our country.
But this trust and this good will weren’t just electoral assets, they were political necessities. His plans are ambitious reforming health care, capping greenhouse gas emissions, ramping up federal spending after already breaking spending records, and generally governing a divided and distrustful nation and so he needs extraordinary political capital. He may not be on the verge of losing his base, but the support he had in the middle and the right is imperiled.
This past week with its fumbles, missteps, and evasions sparking new resentments and distrust show the pillars of Obama’s politics can’t withstand the weight of the real world.
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