That’s not exactly how Charles Krauthammer puts it, but that’s the problem he’s identified:
Obama then compounded it by vastly misreading his mandate. He assumed it was personal. This, after winning by a mere seven points in a year of true economic catastrophe, of an extraordinarily unpopular Republican incumbent, and of a politically weak and unsteady opponent. Nonetheless, Obama imagined that, as Fouad Ajami so brilliantly observed, he had won the kind of banana-republic plebiscite that grants caudillo-like authority to remake everything in one’s own image.
Accordingly, Obama unveiled his plans for a grand makeover of the American system, animating that vision by enacting measure after measure that greatly enlarged state power, government spending and national debt. Not surprisingly, these measures engendered powerful popular skepticism that burst into tea-party town-hall resistance.
Obama’s reaction to that resistance made things worse. Obama fancies himself tribune of the people, spokesman for the grass roots, harbinger of a new kind of politics from below that would upset the established lobbyist special-interest order of Washington. Yet faced with protests from a real grass-roots movement, his party and his supporters called it a mob—misinformed, misled, irrational, angry, unhinged, bordering on racist. All this while the administration was cutting backroom deals with every manner of special interest—from drug companies to auto unions to doctors—in which favors worth billions were quietly and opaquely exchanged.
“Get out of the way” and “don’t do a lot of talking,” the great bipartisan scolded opponents whom he blamed for creating the “mess” from which he is merely trying to save us. If only they could see. So with boundless confidence in his own persuasiveness, Obama undertook a summer campaign to enlighten the masses by addressing substantive objections to his reforms.
If you don’t believe Dr. Krauthammer, consider this from the Politico article on Barack Obama’s speech to Congress tonight:
2) He will not confront or scold the left. “This is a case for bold action, not a stick in the eye to our supporters,” said an official involved in speech preparation. “That’s not how President Obama thinks. The politics of triangulation don’t live in this White House.”
3) He will make an overture to Republicans. “He will lay out his vision for health reform—taking the best ideas from both parties, make the case for why as a nation we must act now, and dispel the myths and confusion that are affecting public opinion,” the aide said.
You cannot do both of these things at once. You just can’t. You cannot “make an overture to Republicans” without promising to actually consider Republican ideas and integrate them into your program—and to do that, you would have to confront the Left, to tell them that they’re going to have to give up some of the things they really want and to allow the Right to get some of the things they really want. You have to actually follow through on “taking the best ideas from both parties,” which would require actually forcing the Left to compromise, and scolding them for their dogmatic refusal to do so to this point. It’s not triangulation (and when did that become a dirty word, anyway?), it’s recognizing that you can’t eat your cake and still have it.
That the President doesn’t realize this is clear from the fifth point in Politico’s list:
5) Obama will try to reassure the left about his commitment to a public option, or government insurance plan. Aides said they are rethinking what he will say about this. He wants to thread the needle of voicing support for a public option, without promising to kill health reform to get it. But liberal congressional leaders were unyielding in their support for it on a conference call he held from Camp David yesterday, and he’s going to meet with them at the White House early next week.
Again, if he actually wants to make a serious overture to Republicans, the public option has to come off the table; that’s completely unacceptable to folks on the Right, and meaningless “concessions” that make no substantive difference won’t be enough to win any meaningful Republican support. But of course, to take that off the table, he’ll have to confront the Left, in a big way, and so far, he’s shown no stomach whatsoever for doing that (if in fact he’s ever actually wanted to). President Obama has a choice: reach across the aisle, or continue to appease the Left. He’ll have to pick.
As a result, the inestimable Jay Cost (who has to be one of the three or four best political analysts going right now) comes to this conclusion:
I think this will be little more than a change in tone—perhaps from cool/slightly mocking Obama to angry/forceful Obama. From the looks of it, the President is still planning to make all the same points he’s been hammering for months. He’ll ask for bipartisan cooperation while remaining cagey on the public option (a deal breaker for 99% of the Republican caucus). He will again insist the time for debate is over and the time for action is now. He’ll make a not-terribly-compelling case about how this somehow relates to the current economic morass, even though the benefits do not kick in for years. He’ll fearlessly stand up to Republican straw men, who never offer anything except disingenuous attacks.
Which, if that does indeed to turn out to be the best he can do—and if it isn’t, then why haven’t we seen something better well before now?—raises a critical question: what’s the point of this speech? Why is the President doing this? Cost suggests two related reasons:
First, it has begun to believe its own spin that the President is good at giving game changing speeches. But he isn’t really. Nobody is. If the game could change because of a speech, the game would constantly be changing because lots of people can give a decent speech, especially when they have a TelePrompTer. President Obama is a compelling speaker to a relatively narrow segment of the country—namely, African Americans and white social liberals. He inspired them to support his primary campaign against Hillary Clinton—but other voters (including many in his own party) were harder to win over. His Philadelphia speech on race was no Cooper Union; it merely distracted attention from the main question of why he spent so many years in that church. His numbers still fell, and he struggled through the rest of the primaries, even losing South Dakota on the day he declared victory. He then gave big speeches in Europe and Denver, but it was only thanks to the financial panic of last September that he had a breakthrough.
Still, his speechifying seems to give some people a thrill up the leg—and the idea that he’s not just a good speaker, but a game changing speaker, has become conventional wisdom. I think the White House believes that this is actually true.
Second, it does not know what else to do. It looks like Congress is at something less than square one. There is no passable compromise that has been proposed—nothing that can win enough votes in the center without losing the left flank. But now the “Gang of Six” has basically broken up, public approval has tanked, moderates are scared, and if there isn’t bad blood on the Democratic side of the aisle there is at least a lot of finger pointing. If Humpty Dumpty breaks and you don’t know how to put him back together—why not give a speech and boldly proclaim how important it is to put him back together?
Cost believes, and has been arguing, that the administration needs to scale its plan way back and go for incremental health-insurance reform rather than trying to revamp the whole system on the fly; I think Cost is right. If President Obama were to take that tack, he could keep the moderates in his own party and pick up the moderates from the other side of the aisle; with a little creativity, he might even come up with something that could attract support from some conservatives without losing liberals, which would be a huge accomplishment. While he would probably still emerge from this whole fight weakened, producing an actual bipartisan reform package would allow him to recover a lot of face and a lot of his prestige—as well as some of his “post-partisan” image—and thus to salvage a fair bit from an initiative that so far has been a complete fiasco for him. As Cost concludes,
If the President scaled back his ambitions, the final bill would not be as far to the left as the liberals like, but since it is not comprehensive they could at least plan to fight for the public option another day. Then, Obama could pick up enough moderates to pass it, and he could declare victory.
Incidentally, this is how most legislation gets passed in the Congress.
Which suggests, yet again, that Barack Obama would be a more effective president if he’d spent enough time actually doing his job as a legislator to actually understand things like that. As it is, all he can do is give (yet) another speech. If Allahpundit is right and the purpose of this address to Congress is really to push hardliners on the Left to compromise without admitting he’s doing so (which would alienate his base a fair bit more than he already has), then the President may actually accomplish something almost despite himself. We shall see.