Obama, Searching for a Vision
By PETER BAKER
Published: April 9, 2011
WASHINGTON — When President Obama emerged from spending talks last Thursday night, he went before cameras to insist that an agreement was needed to avoid a government shutdown that he warned would damage the country. What he did not do was make a public case for what should be in the agreement itself.
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During a week of budget brinkmanship, the president who signed the largest stimulus spending program in American history largely left it to his Senate allies to respond to the sharp clarity of the Republican austerity message rather than outline a clear vision of what the role of government should be in the era of the Tea Party and rocketing national debt.
His reserved approach came at a time when he is being pressed as never before to define what American liberalism means for the 21st century. In the same week he kicked off his re-election campaign, he suggested that the incumbent of 2012 will not be the same as the candidate of 2008, as he pivoted on counterterrorism policy, embraced another free trade pact and managed his own military intervention in the Middle East. And yet he seemed reluctant to be drawn out too much as he confronted challenges that were never part of his original agenda.
“How does he define himself against this wave of conservative rhetoric and ideology?” asked Robert Dallek, the presidential historian. “It’s hard for him to say I’m an old-fashioned New Deal, Great Society liberal. He can’t say that and expect to win reelection. So you fudge. It’s like what they said about Roosevelt being a chameleon on plaid, changing coloration and shifting forms. But it’s much more difficult now because of the 24/7 news cycle.”
In the days leading up to a last-minute deal Friday night averting a government shutdown, the president’s immediate tactical goal seemed to be holding himself out as the one reasonable man in an unreasonable town. While the rest of Washington squabbled, he presented himself as the grown-up above a messy fray that would alienate voters scratching their heads over how the government almost could not get its act together to pay the bills and keep the lights on.
The effect, though, was to obscure his own philosophy and to raise the question of what he wants a second term for. “He needs to be very careful to avoid leaving voters with the impression that his sphinx-like aloofness is all that liberalism has to offer,” said Yuval Levin, a scholar at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington and a former domestic policy aide to President George W. Bush.
The challenge may in some ways resemble that facing President Bill Clinton during the last government shutdown in 1995-96, but one important difference is that Mr. Clinton had long identified himself as a centrist while there is less consensus in pinning down Mr. Obama ideologically. He has enacted some of the most expansive social and spending programs of any president since Lyndon B. Johnson, touching off the Tea Party rebellion against big government, even as his base on the left complains about his buildup in Afghanistan and his deal with Republicans to extend tax cuts for the wealthy.
Mr. Obama has always cast himself as a pragmatist and he seems to be feeling his way in the post-midterm election environment. In some areas, he has retreated. The decision announced last week to try the accused Sept. 11 plotters in a military commission at the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, represented a 180-degree reversal under pressure from congressional Republicans and some Democrats. His embrace of a free-trade pact with Colombia continued a new emphasis on trade for a Democrat who once vowed to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement, or Nafta.
The war in Libya represents one of the most complicated issues for Mr. Obama as he sets out his own form of modern liberalism. The hero of the anti-war movement in 2008 effectively is adopting Mr. Clinton’s humanitarian interventions in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s as a model, while trying to distinguish his actions from Mr. Bush’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
“He’s frustrating,” said Tim Carpenter, national director of Progressive Democrats of America. "He’s somebody who came out of our movement. He’s certainly well read about progressive ideas. But he talks a good game. He compromises way too early. He surrenders in the third quarter of many of these fights.”
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Republicans, of course, face their own crosscurrents as party leaders try to navigate the Tea Party wave. Their definition of conservatism, though, has coalesced around the straightforward message of cut spending, cut government, even if they splinter sometimes over the degree. Mr. Obama seems to present liberalism at least in part as opposition to what the other guys are, hoping voters see them as too extreme.
Conservatives argue that Mr. Obama risks getting left behind in the war of ideas if he cedes the reform mantle to Representative Paul Ryan, the Wisconsin Republican who last week produced a far-reaching plan to slash federal spending and taxes over the next decade. Although liberals and some moderates have called Mr. Ryan’s plan too radical, he has also won praise for boldly taking on big problems.
“The White House seems sure that this path is suicidal for Republicans,” said Mr. Levin, “but they are mistaken — and they will need to wake up very soon to the need to offer the country their own liberal alternative to our failing liberal welfare state.”
Obama advisers say he has made his vision clear in the State of the Union address and subsequent moments over the last few months, a vision that while no longer advocating the kind of stimulus he put in place in 2009 still favors “investments” in select areas like education, energy and scientific research to make the United States competitive with emerging powers like China and India. He repeated those points late Friday night after the spending deal came together.
That generates less ideological fervor than, say, a war on poverty or a drive for universal health care. “What he’s trying to do is create a modern economic vision for the role of government and contrast it with a kind of meat-cleaver characterization of the G.O.P. approach,” said Paul Bledsoe, a senior adviser at the Bipartisan Policy Center, a Washington advocacy group. “I don’t know that he’s been able to do that yet because I’m not sure he’s been able to capture the narrative of the U.S. role in the world.”
William Galston, a Brookings Institution scholar who worked in Mr. Clinton’s White House, said Mr. Obama’s approach “is not quite” like the so-called “triangulation” approach of the 1990s when the embattled Democratic president tried to set himself apart from both Democrats and Republicans.
Instead of Mr. Clinton, Mr. Obama seems to be channeling his inner Ronald Reagan, Mr. Galston said, by presenting a “winning the future” approach rather than dwelling on the problems of the moment. The president, he added, wants to recapture some of the magic of 2008 by convincing voters he is still the inspiring figure they became infatuated with.
“He doesn’t want to be the guy wringing his hands,” Mr. Galston said. “He wants to be the forward-looking optimist. That’s his vision of an attractive liberalism for the 21st century. It can’t be a preservationist liberalism; it has to be a reconstructionist liberalism.”
