Why Obama needs a big play as reality takes over

President's early radiant optimism has vanished ahead of high-stakes address on healthcare reform

Michael Tomasky guardian.co.uk,
Tuesday 8 September 2009 22.06 BST

It's football season in America. Football is far and away our most popular sport, and countless metaphors from the game are deployed here in everyday conversation. So without getting into a tedious discussion of the rules, let us just say that "third-and-long" is exactly what it sounds like: a situation you don't want to be in, on the field of play and in life.

But third-and-long is exactly where Barack Obama finds himself as he prepares to deliver a high-stakes address on healthcare to a joint session of Congress tomorrow. He needs a big play. In fact, he will need two or three of them on healthcare alone in the coming weeks. And then there's climate change, Afghanistan, the Middle East, Iran - and most centrally of all, the economy.

Put the radiant optimism of the early Obama weeks and months out of your mind. It's gone. Reality has set in, and with force. Any thought that Obama could wave a wand and make the economy better, or give a speech that would force Iran's mullahs to see reason, has been defenestrated definitively.

Such thoughts were always unrealistic, but it has nevertheless been surprising how quickly confidence has dissipated. Obama's poll numbers are still all right - just above 50%. But all right is a long way from the stratosphere in which they danced until summer. Democrats are anxious, Republicans smell blood and the people in between, once on the president's side, have probably reverted to their usual posture of distrusting both sides. What on Earth happened?

Three things happened, but before we get to those I should note that I'm not saying here that the presidency has collapsed beyond the point of repair. It's still a better than even bet that a healthcare bill will pass before the end of the year. Such passage - which eluded titans named Roosevelt and Truman - would automatically make this presidency a historic one. Most experts predict that the economy will be moving into the black by next spring, and the former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, surely no Obama partisan, predicts even sooner. So no one's running the white flag up the pole just yet.

But yes - three factors haven't played out quite the way one might have thought they would back on inauguration day. First and foremost, the ferocity and mendacity of conservative opposition to Obama simply weren't foreseen by most people. What we have witnessed has been borderline certifiable. One poll in late July found that only a minority of Republicans (42%) even believes that Obama is a rightful US citizen. For some he's a socialist, others a communist, still others a fascist. He wants to use a government programme of youthful volunteers called Americorps as his shock troops, his Obama Youth if you will, to round up dissidents (this programme does exist but here on planet Earth is benign and in fact admirable). And of course there are those evil "death panels" - that toxic and utterly false allegation about healthcare reform has been refuted now, but long after the damage was done.

But it did seem, for a while, that the brand of attack politics that conservatives honed during the Clinton years might not take hold this time. That their blind hatred of Clinton was uniquely about Clinton. Well, it turns out it's not. And Republican office-holders have been largely silent. At best. Others, like the 11 Republican sponsors of a bill to ensure that future presidential candidates (starting in 2012 - in other words, starting with Obama himself) provide a copy of their birth certificate when they file their candidacies, are egging the lunacy on.

Second, Obama and his people are guilty of overconfidence. I wondered from the start whether trying to push healthcare reform through in the first year wasn't pushing things. There are policy reasons why moving now is justified: namely, that controlling healthcare costs could help drive down the long-term budget deficit. But one senses that political reasons - the "use our political capital while we have it" school of thought - played a role too.

Third, many liberals are suddenly disillusioned. These folks - by no means a majority - seem to have thought that Obama could wave a wand. Or at least to have forgotten that Congress exists, and that Congress by its very institutional nature likes to slow presidents down. Even George Bush, with a GOP congressional majority for whom the word "submissive" is an understatement, got about $300bn less in tax cuts than he wanted in 2001.

And this brings us to a psychological difference between the partisans of the two sides. When the Bush tax cuts passed, conservatives generally hailed them as a great victory and, to the extent that they felt the cuts didn't go far enough, blamed the evil Democrats. Whereas when and if Obama gets, say, two-thirds of a loaf on healthcare, these liberals will call it defeat and label Obama a weakling and a sellout.

So that's where we are. And it brings us back to tomorrow's speech. Obama has to recalibrate public opinion and motivate Democrats in Congress to get moving and pass something. But Democrats in Congress, the liberals and the moderates, are warring among themselves as usual. Some time in the coming days or weeks, Obama is going to have to let the liberals know that the so-called "public option" (a government-run insurance company that would compete with private firms) just doesn't have the votes in the Senate. There will be rhetorical mutiny, and lots of it, but the general expectation is that in the end, they'll swallow hard and pull the "yea" lever.

Because they know that healthcare affects everything else. Climate change probably won't come up again before the Senate until early next year. But when it does, healthcare - whether the Democrats proved they could pass something, or whether they fell apart and failed - will create the context in which it is considered.

The next weeks are also crucial on the Afghanistan front, as Obama ponders how many more troops to send. Here again he'll have a fight with his party's liberals, who don't seem to have given much thought to what would happen there if we reduce troop levels and the Taliban regain control of much of the country - or the country.

And as far as Iran and the Middle East are concerned, a healthcare victory would help Obama too. You can be sure that Binyamin Netanyahu and the mullahs and Hamas are monitoring Obama's poll numbers as closely as anyone. A strong and popular American president is a lot harder for all of them to ignore.

The summer has been a bummer for American liberals. But we've learned lessons. Chiefly, that American conservatism is as Leninist as ever in its tactics. Do anything, say anything, allege anything; crush the opponent at all costs, even when it means more Americans will die because of inadequate healthcare. In fact, if anything it's gotten more extreme. Fine. So now we know.

Also, the hard awareness has set in about the depth and number of crises handed over to this president from his ruinous predecessor. Fixing them will take time. Rearranging national priorities, around goals like the greening of the economy, will need longer still.

"Third" is what we call a down - a football team gets four of them to maintain possession of the ball. "Long" means yardage. Third-and-long is a desperate situation indeed in a game's closing moments. But this game has still really just started. Obama and his team have seen what they're up against. The tone of tomorrow's speech needs to reflect this post-summer reality. "Yes we can" needs to become "yes we are".

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree ... are-speech