Frankly, Barack Obama doesn’t give a damn
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The theme is ubiquitous, from John Podhoretz to Rush Limbaugh to Drudge to Iowahawk and beyond, even in unconservative circles: it’s the invisible presidency. Look across the seas, and it seems like the world is building towards some kind of apocalypse, what with the churning Middle East and the expanding catastrophe in Japan. At home, the prices of fuel and food are on the increase, unemployment remains crushing, housing is continuing to sink beyond redemption, the debt is ballooning like an infected elephant, and on and on. Where’s Barack Obama? He’s going on TV to make college basketball picks. He’s going golfing. He gives speeches on bullying in schools. He’s taking Michelle and the kids down to Rio for a weekend jaunt, and will file another speech for the books that no one will remember a single line from (but they’ll all say what a fine speech-giver he is.) When he deigns to interrupt his make-believe presidency long enough to speak to the urgent issues of the day, it is only to mouth words that are backed up by exactly nothing. There’s not even any need to get into a full litany of what he’s ignoring and how weak he is making the presidency look — others are doing that quite well enough.
I’d just like to address what I believe is the reason President Obama is acting in this way. It is simply that he genuinely doesn’t care very much about anything that’s going on at the moment, in the country or in the world. He is marking time, and endeavoring to avoid misplacing a foot somewhere, or making any commitment that will turn out — closer to November of 2012 — to have been a mistake. The man who voted present almost 130 times as a state senator in Illinois feels he knows one thing really well, and that is the value of having taken no position.
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Barack Obama has said he wants his presidency to be a transformative one, like Ronald Reagan’s (but of-course achieving the very opposite of what Ronald Reagan’s presidency achieved in terms of ideology). I take him at his word on that much, at least, and I think at this point Obama knows well that, with the Republican control of the House of Representatives, his opportunity to achieve transformative things in his first term is now over. The biggest thing he achieved in his first two years — and the thing that certainly has the greatest potential to be transformative — is his upending of the U.S. health care sector; what is called ObamaCare. As Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) said publicly the other day, it is a “platform” for building a single-payer, universal health care system. As has been said again and again, health care is one sixth of the U.S. economy, but it is actually far more important than even that figure conveys; that’s because, self-evidently, it is embedded deeply in the lives of every person in America. You need to see a doctor sometimes, as do the people you love, and your ability to get effective treatment in those situations is an overwhelming necessity. When the battle once shifts towards which politician or party is going to promise you “more” health care, then the war has been won, and it will have been won by Obama’s side. When Americans look to the government to divvy out how much time and the quality of attention they should receive in their doctors’ offices and hospital rooms, then something deep and valuable about America will surely have died. And that is precisely the kind of transformation that is underway. It was achieved at the cost of a nationwide massacre of Democrats in the elections last fall, and is under attack both legislatively and in the courts today, but at this point it still stands, and the longer it endures, the more difficult it will be to turn it back.
Obama knows that it’s on this that his legacy and his agenda of transformation rests, and he’s serious about defending it. He’ll veto any attempt at repeal, naturally, and his administration is trying to drag out the legal challenges for as long as possible, to make the prospect of overturning it that much more intimidating to the justices of the Supreme Court who will ultimately review it.
The other thing that Obama needs to do to keep his transformation alive is to get reelected in 2012, and so prevent a Republican president from working with Congress on a repeal of ObamaCare. Getting reelected with his record ought to be nearly impossible, but of-course nothing is impossible in politics (as the success of his original run for the presidency should show). Winning an election is not necessarily about one’s own record, but rather about positioning oneself advantageously in relation to one’s opponent. (People may think your record is bad, but if they can be convinced that your opponent is worse … ) Obama doesn’t even have an opponent yet, so these are early days. But not too early for key adviser David Axelrod to have left the White House to start preparing for the campaign. And not too early to start trying to avoid getting oneself mixed up in anything too messy, from here on out.
And that’s why Obama doesn’t care. On the foreign policy front, he looks around and sees any number of ways he might be proven wrong, should he commit to one action or another. So instead he just mouths the words he thinks people expect him to say, and avoids the actions for which he might be held to account. (And never mind that he is flushing American credibility down the sewer, and likely provoking an enemy to test U.S. resolve in a way that could be exceptionally costly). On the domestic front, he’s happy to let the newly-elected Republicans forge ahead, staking out positions on matters of spending and spending cuts, and taking heat from various constituencies, while he gets away with blathering only meaningless nonsense on the economy — and then heading off for some more golf. He rubs his hands in glee at the idea of Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) courageously leading Republicans to tackle the pressing issue of entitlement reform. He will commit himself not one inch — until there’s a clear political wind he can stick his sail into.
All of it, in the end — earthquakes, revolutions, unemployment, poverty, misery, exploding debt — is nothing but an annoying distraction for Barack Obama now. He’s watching the clock and waiting for the right time to shift into full campaign mode. He doesn’t want the detritus of any of these issues of the day to stick to him. If he could just hang a sign on the White House that said, “Present,” and underneath that, “Do Not Disturb,” then that would suit him just fine.
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Of-course, there are consequences for a president acting this way (or rather, for virtually not acting at all). The void that the United States leaves internationally can be filled by actors who have neither shyness nor shame, and a bottomless appetite for blood. The consequences for his unwillingness to be serious about economic policy will be only continuing partisan political positioning (from the “post-partisan” president) rather than agreement on decisive measures that could inspire confidence and begin to encourage genuine recovery.
The unknown consequences of all this are the political ones. Will Obama’s period of inertia and invisibility come back to haunt him in 2012, or is he right in betting that it — like all of those things he’s happy to avoid dealing with now — will fail to stick to him?
The shame is that the only consequences Barack Obama likely cares about are the political ones.
