President Obama faces adversity for the first time, and he doesn’t much care for it:
Frustrated by Republican unity against his economic-stimulus plan, President Barack Obama toughened his rhetoric Thursday and moved to wield his personal popularity to overcome opposition in Congress.
Mr. Obama’s recent courtship of Republicans gave way to blunt derision of their ideas for the stimulus, as he tried to raise the political pressure to pass a measure with a price tag of over $900 billion in the Senate.
Republican proposals are “rooted in the idea that tax cuts alone can solve all our problems, that government doesn’t have a role to play, that half measures and tinkering are somehow enough, that we can afford to ignore our most fundamental economic challenges,” the president said in an address at the Department of Energy Thursday. “Those ideas have been tested, and they have failed.”
Set aside the straw men (name one person who says any of those things!) and consider the strangeness of this. Democrats have the votes to do whatever they want, so what does it matter what Republicans think? Republicans matter because the stimulus package is deeply unpopular, and the Democrats want political cover. The stimulus package is deeply unpopular because he is losing the debate, and he is losing the debate because it is a very, very bad bill.
If the President really believed this bill was a winner, he would push it through without any Republican votes and happily claim credit. He knows it’s not, so he’s trying to change the subject from the crapulence of the bill to anything else (Rush Limbaugh, evil Republicans, or a host of economic straw men).
I think the President is making a political mistake. We know by now that few in Congress (Democrat or Republican) have any real principles. The Republicans are standing strong because they are winning the debate. If public opinion turns against them, they’ll wilt overnight, but as long as they hold public opinion, they won’t be bullied. If President Obama wants to win Republican votes he needs to win the debate, and if he wins the debate, he won’t need those Republican votes any more. Either way, he ought to be making the case for the bill, not trying to personalize it.
POSTSCRIPT: President Obama might be suffering from a bad habit learned during the campaign. During the campaign, personalizing everything worked, because he could tie everything (fairly or not) to an unpopular president. Now he is the president, and he doesn’t have an unpopular opposing counterpart to blame. (I don’t think Limbaugh will cut it for him.) He has to lead now, and he hasn’t learned to do it yet.
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