Events | 2009.09.17
Another fine speech will not be enough | Timothy Garton Ash
Instead of more charm, Obama should use these pivotal days to win the necessary votes by fair means or foul
"Change – I\'d like mine back". The badge being handed out by Republicans at the Minnesota state fair captures a veering national mood. Last year, Americans voted for change; this year, they worry about their change. Shocked by the scale of US government spending to prevent recession turning into depression, gobsmacked by the prospect of more gazillions in deficits and national debt, they are now told that Obama\'s healthcare reform will cost another $1 trillion over the next decade.
A summer of sometimes hysterical town hall meetings has not left him winning the argument. According to the polls, most of that large majority of Americans who do have healthcare insurance are reasonably content with what they\'ve got. They fear that the proposed reform would leave them worse off – as well as costing the country more. (The first fear is largely unfounded, the second less so.) More than half the all-important independent voters are also unhappy with it. Obama\'s approval rating has sunk down close to 50%, worse than that of most of his predecessors at this stage in their presidencies.
Just seven months in, he has reached for the American parliamentary equivalent of a nuclear weapon. A special address to both houses of Congress – over and above the inaugural and State of the Union addresses – is an exceptional step, last taken by George Bush after the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks. According to the veteran political commentator Mark Shields, Lyndon Johnson delivered only two such addresses, one following the assassination of John F Kennedy, the other on civil rights. Franklin Roosevelt gave only one, to ask Congress to declare war after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
And Obama uses it for this ... Even if Wednesday night\'s speech works the desired magic – this column went to press before it had been delivered – it will only empower him to get through Congress a modest, compromised version of healthcare reform. The bill that seems likely to emerge from the congressional sausage factory will address the most pressing social problem, that of the nearly one in six Americans who have no healthcare insurance coverage. It will not address the fundamental economic problem, which is the grotesquely soaring costs of the system. These are out of any proportion to the benefits to patients but hugely lucrative for the insurers. According to Harper\'s magazine, since 2002 the profits of the top 10 health insurance companies have increased by 428%.
Afghanistan, the healthcare of Obama\'s foreign policy, is also not going well. Under the noses of American and British soldiers and election monitors, President Hamid Karzai\'s regime has been honing its skills at election fraud . The US administration is locked in a debate about whether to build up troop numbers still further, as Hillary Clinton and Richard Holbrooke urge, prompting grim comparisons with President Johnson\'s build-up in Vietnam. It is almost impossible to imagine a clearcut "victory" in Afghanistan. And where Obama charged Bush with "doing" Iraq at the expense of Afghanistan, Obama\'s critics now charge that he may be focusing on Afghanistan at the expense of what is (as Britain knows better than anyone) a truly decisive theatre in the long-term struggle against Islamist terrorism: Pakistan.
Two explanations are offered for Obama\'s travail. Democrats say that history (and, more particularly, George Bush) has dealt him a very difficult hand. Republicans say he is not playing it well. Both may be true. The economic situation he inherited could hardly have been worse. Unemployment is now teetering on the brink of 10%. American taxpayers will be paying the cost of the bailout and stimulus packages for decades to come. Healthcare reform is one of the biggest and most intractable domestic issues there is, and it has grown bigger and more intractable with every administration that failed to tackle it.
Moreover, the way the American political system has evolved makes it extraordinarily difficult for even the most clear-sighted president to do what he or she wants. This applies particularly to the fateful interplay of Congress, the media and money. CNN estimates that $375m has already been spent lobbying for and against this round of healthcare reform. It was none other than Obama\'s defeated rival for the presidency, John McCain, who earlier this summer – in the context of a massive congressional battle to kill a useless piece of defence spending – spoke of "the military-industrial-congressional complex". Or, as it might be today, "the health-industrial-congressional complex". Systemic burdens that the US could sustain in the plenitude of its wealth and power have grown heavier just as the country is less able to afford them.
Abroad, Obama has inherited the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Islamist breeding ground in Pakistan, the neglected challenge of climate change and the rise of China – to name just a few of his problems. Abraham Lincoln himself might quail at the prospect, at home and abroad.
Yet it\'s also true that Obama has not so far proved himself adept at using the tools at his disposal to – in one of his favourite phrases – get it done. His personal style remains a delight: cool, civilised, articulate, humorous and humane. He is a pleasure to watch every time, and always a fine wordsmith. His farewell tribute to Teddy Kennedy was beautifully turned. But he has still to prove that he is as good at the prose of government as he is at the poetry of campaigning. Inexperienced first-term Democrat presidents do not have a compelling track record of success. His own almost preternatural self-confidence and calm – his ability not to get "all wee-wee\'d up", in the somewhat puzzling phrase he used to characterise this summer\'s hysteria – make us forget how inexperienced he is in the business of government. So he has to learn on the job.
On healthcare, in particular, his administration seems to have underestimated how difficult this would be. His charm, articulacy and obvious decency in his own town hall meetings over the summer could not make up for the fact that – having tried to avoid what is seen as one of the Clintons\' mistakes in advancing healthcare reform, instead leaving it to Congress to come up with the bill – there was no single, clear "Obama plan" for him to explain and defend. Arguably, instead of giving yet another fine speech, he should be using these pivotal days to cajole moderate Republicans and browbeat conservative Democrats, with all the hard-nosed cunning of an FDR.
"His wax wings having melted, he is the man who fell to earth," gloats the neoconservative commentator Charles Krauthammer. But Obama is not Icarus yet. Many presidents have recovered from worse lows and gone on to stronger second terms. And Krauthammer may have forgotten that the other guy with wax wings flew low and made it across the sea. His name was Daedalus, and he was a consummate artificer. That\'s what America needs now: not a wordsmith to get it said but a politician to get it done. Step forward, Barack Daedalus. Your time has come.
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/[...]ech-congress-healthcare-reform
