Projecting an Obama presidency

I noted yesterday that I expect Barack Obama to win in November. I’m not one of those who think the race is over, not by a long shot—I’m just skeptical about the McCain campaign’s ability and will to make its case, especially after blockheaded moves like writing off Michigan. The key, I think, is that they haven’t been able to convince enough people that Sen. Obama isn’t a centrist (and aren’t likely to do so), even though on all the evidence, he isn’t. He’s a gifted politician at letting people believe of him what they want to believe, and people would prefer to believe that he’s “a uniter, not a divider” (for all that, I’d prefer to believe it); John McCain hasn’t succeeded in convincing enough people otherwise to win.The thing is, unlike George W. Bush, who did have a record of working in bipartisan fashion in Texas, Sen. Obama has no such record; and if such talk from the bipartisan Gov. Bush didn’t translate to results in his presidency, how much less should we expect true bipartisanship from a President Obama?Perhaps the most interesting indicator on this came during the debate when Sen. McCain said of Sen. Obama, “It’s hard to reach across the aisle from that far to the left.” Sen. Obama’s response: “Mostly that is me just opposing George Bush’s wrongheaded policies.” He seems to have thought that was a good comeback—as did others, from the post-debate commentary—but it wasn’t; in point of fact, it was a concession, one which offered a real insight into Sen. Obama’s mind. What he said in effect was, “You can’t expect me to be bipartisan when confronted with policies with which I disagree.” Granted, one must be careful not to push one sentence too far, and certainly absolutizing it would be unjustified; but the attitude expressed in that line is the exact antithesis of true bipartisanship. It’s the attitude that defines “bipartisanship” as “I’ll work with them when they’re not wrongheaded”—which tends to boil down to “when they do most of the compromising.” And given that George W. Bush wasn’t really all that conservative, it’s not like Sen. Obama (and the rest of the congressional Democrats) were being asked to reach a long way across to the right. But then, as Stanley Kurtz notes, this is the pattern for Barack Obama:

Obama’s vaunted reputation for bipartisanship is less than meets the eye. The Illinois legislature has long been home to a number of moderate Republicans, less fiscally conservative than their colleagues, many from districts where the parties are closely balanced. It was easy enough to get a few of these Republicans to sign onto small, carefully tailored spending bills directed toward particularly sympathetic recipients. The trouble with Obama’s bipartisanship is that it was largely a one-way street. Overcoming initial opposition from Catholic groups, for instance, Obama cosponsored an incremental bill on abortion, requiring hospitals to inform rape victims of morning-after pills. Yet rejecting compromise with the other side, Obama voted against bills that would have curbed partial-birth abortions. In other words, Obama is bipartisan so long as that means asking Republicans to take incremental steps toward his own broader goals. When it comes to compromising with the other side, however, Obama says “take a hike.” Obama voted against a bill that would have allowed people in possession of a court order protecting them from some specific individual to carry a concealed weapon in self-defense. The bill failed on a 29-27 vote. Bipartisanship for thee, but not for me: That’s how Obama ended up with the most liberal voting record in the U.S. Senate.

This all suggests that all the post-partisan language we heard from Sen. Obama ca. 2004 is unlikely to be reflected in an Obama presidency—especially since whatever his talk, Nancy Pelosi and the rest of the House and Senate Democrats aren’t running on promises of bipartisanship. They’re going to want to press their agenda, and who gives a hang what the GOP wants. As a consequence, if President Obama wants to get bills passed—and he will, as every president does, because that’s how presidents have “accomplishments” and “legacies”—it will have to be the bills they want, on their terms; Speaker Pelosi, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, and the rest of the Democratic powers on the Hill will take up their pipes and fiddles, and President Obama will dance to their tune. Speaker Pelosi will be the dominant figure in national politics (since I expect Majority Leader Reid to turn out pretty clearly as second fiddle to her first), and it will be her agenda driving the bus.Now, this might be a pretty stiff conclusion to draw, but there are several good reasons to think that this is how it will go. First, as Dick Morris pointed out three months ago, this is what happened to Bill Clinton in 1993, even though the congressional Democratic caucus was considerably less liberal then than now (for example, the Speaker of the House was Tom Foley of conservative eastern Washington, not Nancy Pelosi of liberal San Francisco) and the new president was a former governor who was used to working with a legislature. Clinton couldn’t “triangulate” with his own party firmly in control on the Hill, and so

as he took office as president, Bill Clinton found no alternative but to move dramatically to the left, shelving for the moment his promises of a middle-class tax cut and welfare reform. He had no choice.The Democratic majorities in both Houses served him with notice: Either you stay within the caucus and not cross the aisle in search of support for centrist policies, or we will do unto you what we did to Jimmy Carter when Tip O’Neill turned on him and made his life miserable.

If Gov. Clinton couldn’t govern as a centrist with the Democratic Congress of 1993-94, it’s almost inconceivable that Sen. Obama will be able to do so with the even more liberal Democratic Congress we will likely have in 2009. For one thing, he doesn’t have the experience in how to get his own agenda through a legislature; for another, despite all his use of centrist language, Sen. Obama has no observable record of centrist political impulses, much less achievements. (Indeed, he has little record of achievements at all, but we’ll get to that in a minute.) That’s why Stanley Kurtz, in his extensive examination of Sen. Obama’s years as a state senator, says he’s “fundamentally . . . a big-government redistributionist”:

Obama’s overarching political program can be described as “incremental radicalism.” On health care, for example, his long-term strategy in Illinois was no secret. He repeatedly proposed a state constitutional amendment mandating universal health care. Prior to the 2002 budget crisis, Obama’s plan was to use the windfall tobacco settlement to finance the transition to the new system. That would have effectively hidden the huge cost of universal care from the taxpayer until it was too late. Yet Obama touted his many tiny expansions of government-funded health care as baby steps along the path to his goal. The same strategy will likely be practiced-if more subtly-on other issues. Obama takes baby-steps when he has to, but in a favorable legislative environment, Obama’s redistributionist impulses will have free rein, and a budget-busting war on poverty (not to mention entitlement spending) will surely rise again.

As such, where President Clinton does seem to have been at least someone uncomfortable with the line he had to toe at the beginning of his term (judging by the way he moved toward the center once the reality in Congress changed), Sen. Obama is likely to be quite comfortable with that agenda. (He has, after all, supported it 97% of the time in the Senate when he’s bothered to show up to vote.) The reality of bipartisanship can be expected to disappear on all important matters (except perhaps when congressional Democrats want to be able to blame Republicans for an unpopular necessity), leaving behind only the language—which will likely be used primarily to bash Republicans as obstructionist for not going along with the program.This is especially true given that Sen. Obama has no record of resisting his own party. Rather, he’s been a machine politician for his whole political career; it was the Chicago machine that helped create him, and its own rules by which he played to force Alice Palmer out of his way in his first election, and he’s never once stood up to it. He’s never challenged it, or questioned it, or even really sought to influence it in any way. He even endorsed Richard Daley for re-election as mayor, which was perhaps the one time he really disappointed his liberal supporters in Chicago (since Mayor Daley’s an old-school Democrat, not a modern liberal Democrat), because he’s the boss and you don’t mess with the boss. Then down in Springfield, when even Illinois politicians call their state “one of the most corrupt at this point in the United States,” he claimed to make a difference, but nothing really changed, except that he contributed to the growth in spending that has led to severe budget problems in Illinois. Indeed, even now that he’s out of that environment, his state’s junior U.S. Senator and his party’s presidential candidate, he still didn’t want to stand up to the political bosses, like his mentor Emil Jones, the president of the Illinois State Senate; when asked to use his influence to help resurrect an important ethics bill aimed at reducing the corruption in Springfield, he initially refused; it was only when coverage in the Chicago papers made that problematic that he changed his mind and asked his old mentor to reconsider the issue. The other concern that I see here is in the words and attitudes of Speaker Pelosi, Harry Reid, Charles Schumer, and other senior Dems. Every time they open their mouths, I’m a little more convinced that they don’t see Sen. Obama as the leader of their party, but as the instrument through whom they intend to accomplish their purposes. Whether it’s Sen. Schumer declaring that Sarah Palin’s “lack of experience makes the thought of her assuming the presidency troubling” while remaining serenely untroubled by Sen. Obama’s lack of experience (which makes me think that the subtext is “he’s just out front running the campaign; when it gets down to brass tacks, it will really be Uncle Joe running the show”), or Majority Leader Reid calling on Sen. McCain as essential to help solve the financial crisis while essentially ignoring Sen. Obama, I just don’t see any reason to believe that these folks take their own nominee, the presumptive head of their party, seriously. I’m increasingly of the mind that they see him as the PR-flack-in-chief, the appealing face they want to put on the front of their agenda, nothing more—and if he should try to break out of that role and stand up to them, they’ll punish him for it.As a result, I have four substantive concerns about an Obama presidency. Two might be described as “conservative concerns”—things I don’t want to see because I’m conservative in my thinking that those who are liberal will welcome. The other two I think can fairly be called general concerns, because they’re things that it seems fair to assume liberals wouldn’t want to see happen either.One, I expect to see a hard-Left turn on social issues, including a significant reshaping of the federal judiciary. This, I think, is Reward #1 President Obama will owe his base, and one which he’ll be happy to give them; based on past performance, I expect the Senate GOP to roll over for this process and present their collective belly in submission. Obviously, liberals will be glad to see an administration committed to abortion on demand, expansion of gay rights, the submission of our Constitution to international opinion, etc.; I won’t.Two, I expect to see a hard-Left turn on economic issues. Hugh Hewitt did an excellent job of laying out what this will look like in his post “President Barack Hoover”; I don’t see any need to reinvent the wheel (especially when I couldn’t do half as well at it), so I’ll just encourage you to read it, with this comment: the core of Hewitt’s post is the reality that Sen. Obama’s announced agenda, if he puts it into practice (and I believe Speaker Pelosi et al. will hold him to it), will be a recapitulation of the mistakes President Hoover made that played a major role in turning a stock-market crash into a depression. This is a very real possibility, and I believe is a major reason why the markets are continuing to perform poorly: they expect Sen. Obama to win, just as I do, and they expect him to put his plan into effect, just as I do. Thus his own plan helps drive the economic crisis that will help him win, which is another neat little irony. Still, again, I realize that the Left has a different view on this than I do; we’ll see who’s right. I’ve certainly never claimed to be infallible, but I think the record of the last eighty years bears me out: raising taxes in a crisis brought a depression; the Reagan tax cuts started a long period of growth (not uninterrupted, but an upward trend for a long time) that has benefited everyone. Yes, we still have a lot of people who are poor by comparison to society as a whole—but materially, those who are poor today are a lot richer than the poor of thirty years ago.Three, I believe the approach we’ve seen from the Obama campaign to dissent and criticism will be repeated in the policies and responses of an Obama-led Executive Branch; given the clear willingness of his campaign to suppress freedom of speech to prevent criticism of their candidate, I believe we’ll see the same willingness from his administration and his chief congressional allies. This will mean a surge in the kind of the strongarm political tactics that we’ve already seen entirely too often this year. The thin part of the wedge will be the reinstitution of the “Fairness Doctrine” as a political/legal weapon to silence conservative talk radio and the pundits of Fox News. (Given what you can do with the Internet these days, I don’t think it will actually work to any significant degree; if that drives the Dems in Congress to try to regulate Internet speech, we could really be in for a battle royale.) Now, given that many American liberals want to see the return of the “Fairness Doctrine,” it may be optimistic of me to call this a general concern; it could turn out that liberals as a class are perfectly happy with censorship and political thuggery as long as it’s only used against people with whom they disagree. Certainly that has proven to be the case in other countries. This isn’t Canada, however, and I don’t think it’s likely to be any time in the near future; until proven otherwise, I think it’s necessary to give American liberals credit that their commitment to freedom of speech is real, and thus believe that most of them will not be willing to tolerate and defend this sort of behavior over the long haul, even if carried out by politicians they otherwise support. I certainly hope they won’t, because the Obama campaign’s efforts to shout down Stanley Kurtz and David Freddoso (in an effort to intimidate Chicago radio station WGN into canceling their appearances on Milt Rosenberg’s show) ought to be disturbing to anyone who cares about free speech. Of even greater concern should be the Obama “truth squads” in Missouri, where the campaign enlisted allies in public office to threaten prosecution of any TV station that runs any ads about Sen. Obama that the campaign deems untrue. Not only is this approach outrageously biased (one side’s allowed to lie, but the other isn’t?), it gets into some very grey areas about interpretation and intent, and thus raises some real concerns as to the approach an Obama Department of Justice might take to the First Amendment. This kind of approach, like Joe Biden’s suggestion that an Obama/Biden administration might prosecute the Bush administration, is nothing more nor less than the use (or threat of use) of political power to punish one’s opponents, intimidate critics, and silence dissenters; it’s the sort of thing we’re used to seeing in Zimbabwe, not here—and as the case of Zimbabwe shows, there’s nothing, not even money, that can corrupt a democracy faster, or more severely. I’ve argued before that one of the great problems with our politics in this day and age is that we absolutize our own perspectives—we assume that our own perspectives and presuppositions are the only legitimate ones, and that those who disagree with us can’t possibly be doing so sincerely, but must be acting out of motives that are selfish or otherwise wrong. The criminalization of politics, which we’re starting to see urged by the Obama campaign, is a more extreme version of that problem, because it argues that those motives are not only wrong, but are in fact criminal in nature. The chilling effect of that sort of approach should be deeply worrisome not just to conservatives, but also to true liberals.Four, and clearly a matter of general concern: al’Qaeda is weakened badly but far from dead—they still have the ability to pull something, and there’s good reason to think they’ll try. They’ve tested each of the last two administrations with a major attack in the first year (even if the 1993 World Trade Center attack didn’t succeed), and they’re bound to repeat the pattern if they can. As Hugh Hewitt says, “International jihadism must sense this is a moment in which any strike they can muster would have enormous consequences for Western confidence,” which gives them a powerful motive. This will only be reinforced in the case of an Obama administration, because al’Qaeda will almost certainly be denouncing him as an apostate—they’ll have to follow up their propaganda with an attack. If I had to guess, I’d think they’ll target the DC area, some combination of the Pentagon, the Capitol Building and the White House; my fear would be that they’ll use suitcase nukes.If and when this happens, I predict that we’ll see the same sort of ineffective, dithering response from Obama/Pelosi/Reid and their foreign-policy advisors that we saw to al’Qaeda provocations during the Clinton administration. (Remember the cruise-missile attack on the pharmaceutical plant in the Sudan?) I say this for a couple reasons. First, the sort of thing we’ve seen from Sen. Obama on foreign policy has been stubbornly refusing to admit that the surge worked in Iraq; stubbornly refusing to admit that we’ve significantly weakened al’Qaeda through the fight in Iraq; failing to understand that Afghanistan is a nearly impossible place to fight a war; repeatedly publicly announcing his intention to violate Pakistani sovereignty should he be elected (and why is it OK to fight in Pakistan but not in Iraq?); proclaiming moral equivalence between invader and invaded when Russia launched its attack on Georgia, then changing his position a couple times; allowing his running mate to tell the Israelis that an Obama administration wouldn’t take any serious measures to prevent Iran from going nuclear; surrounding himself with people who don’t like Israel when Israel is our only firm, stable ally in the Near East; and proclaiming repeatedly that he will meet with enemy dictators face to face without preconditions. I don’t see any signs that he understands how to conduct foreign policy effectively, that he has the instincts to identify an effective response, or that he has the will to carry it out.A couple years into an Obama presidency, I expect to see someone write the same sort of article about him that James Fallows wrote about Jimmy Carter; like President Carter, Sen. Obama is bright, fluent, and well educated, but ineffectual. Indeed, he lacks even the modest record of achievement Gov. Carter could claim—he simply has no significant professional accomplishment at any level of life. He was chosen as president of the Harvard Law Review, but wrote virtually nothing for it, and while he was well-liked by everybody, this was in part because he avoided conflict and confrontation—leaving an impending crack-up to his successor. The results of his time as a community organizer were modest, at best. He ran the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, which conspicuously failed to improve Chicago schools. As a state senator, he authored no major legislation. In the U. S. Senate, the same is true. He claims his campaign as evidence of his executive ability, but the more we find out about his campaign, the less impressive that is; he’s spent a lot of money in places where he will get no significant return, his campaign staff run a disorganized, chaotic ship which makes it hard for the press accompanying them to do their job (though they dote on him despite the consistent disrespect they receive), and he can’t even keep his campaign plane from stinking. As Beldar says, this raises a real question: “If Obama can’t perceive that problem on his own campaign plane and see to it that even that problem is solved, why would you ever think he can handle the national economy or world affairs?”The funny thing is, behind all this is the reality that a McCain loss could be the best thing possible for the Republican Party. For one thing, a victory in this election won’t be the usual prize for the winner; far from it, in fact. As Gerard Baker argued in The Times just before the first debate,

It is highly probable that that moment, the very hour that he takes office, will be the high point of his presidency. Whoever wins on November 4 will be ascending to the job at one of the most difficult times for an American chief executive in at least half a century. . . . 2008 may be the best year there has been to lose an election.This sobering reality was startlingly underscored this week by none other than Tom Daschle, the former leader of the Senate Democrats, the national co-chairman of Mr Obama’s presidential campaign, and the likely White House chief of staff in an Obama administration. He told a Washington power breakfast that he thought the winner of the election would have a 50 per cent chance at best—at best—of winning a second term in 2012.

If my primary concern were the good of the GOP, I’d be rooting for a close but real loss for Sen. McCain—perhaps to see Sen. Obama just edge over the 50% mark. It might be fun to see the McCain campaign manage an Al Gore Special (a defeat in the Electoral College combined with a measurable lead in the popular vote) just to see all the lefty pundits who denounced the system eight years ago suddenly become its biggest fans, but that wouldn’t do. Eight years ago, that scenario left Democrats walking away thinking they didn’t need to change anything because they hadn’t really lost, and that attitude hurt them in 2002 and ’04. As Bill noted over on The Thinklings, the GOP really needs to take a long, hard look at itself, and then regroup, rethink, and reboot; and that’s not going to happen unless the party takes a defeat that its most influential folks have to admit is a defeat.Of course, one might think that a squeaker of a victory would spark the Democrats to similar humility, leading them to govern with caution and moderation; but I don’t see that happening. They’re too angry and eager, and the hard-Left wing of the party has the ascendancy—and they’re firmly committed to no-quarter politics. If they eke out a close win, I expect to see the pundits write it off as “well, that was just John McCain; against a real Republican, we would have blown ’em out,” and charge merrily off to do exactly what they want to do. If I’m right in the concerns expressed above, the result will be a backlash in 2010 at least as bad as the 1994 backlash that brought the congressional GOP to power at the midpoint of exactly the sort of disaster term that Gerard Baker was talking about, followed by another Republican in the White House in 2012. That’s the best-case scenario for the GOP, to be sure, but it’s clearly a far better case than anything a McCain victory in November could create; it’s also, however, a very bad case for the nation. (Worst case would be everything about this except the GOP taking inventory and cleaning up its act, thus giving us a return to power by a party that hadn’t learned anything from losing it.)That’s why—and you may not believe this, but it’s the absolute truth—when Sen. Obama wins in November, I’m going to be praying hard for him to make good, wise, godly decisions, to stand up to his own party—and win—to actually govern from the center and make room for the beliefs and opinions of those on the other side of the aisle; I’m going to be praying that he will respond adroitly and decisively to the crises he inherits, and promptly, forcefully, and wisely to the new ones that come along. I’m going to pray, in other words, for an Obama presidency to be a wise and clearly successful one (though I acknowledge that to some extent, I’ll be asking that he disappoint his own base in so doing), even though that’s not what would be best for the party I support. I have a lot of disagreements with Sen. McCain, but this is one thing on which I totally agree with him: when it comes to politics, it shouldn’t be party first, it should be country first.