Jonathan Alter: Caught In the Act Of Thinking

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http://www.newsweek.com/id/191407

Caught In the Act Of Thinking

Obama is following Roosevelt's approach of making early down payments on big ideas.
By Jonathan Alter | NEWSWEEK
Published Mar 28, 2009
From the magazine issue dated Apr 6, 2009



Mid-tweet in last week's press conference, reporters were already complaining that President Obama wasn't making news. And by the old standards, they were right. Obama didn't drop any bombshells, or rein in his agenda, as so many have been urging, or tee up a YouTube-ready sound bite. The same gasbags who had blasted him for demeaning the presidency by cracking jokes on "The Tonight Show" and drinking a beer at a basketball game (hadn't some favored George W. Bush over Al Gore in 2000 precisely because he was better "to have a beer with"?) now claim Obama's boring. On Sunday he had to defend himself on "60 Minutes" from the charge that he was "punch drunk" with mirth; by Wednesday, he was derided as too serious and professorial.

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Washington isn't bored by Obama; it's dazed and confused by him. I was on Capitol Hill in early March on the day the president's proposed budget came out. It was as though an IED had hit the place. Congressional aides asked each other in amazement, Did you read the thing? (They didn't mean actually read it. Nobody has time to read a big bill beyond the cheat sheets.) Can you believe it? The guy is trying to do what he said he would! This counts as heresy in a capital conditioned to believe that campaign promises are, in Ron Ziegler's immortal argot, "inoperative" on the day after the election. Last week a Democratic senator told me with a mixture of awe and worry that "every time I think he's gonna step on the brake, he hits the gas."

The critique comes in many metaphors. He's overloading the circuits. Putting too much freight on the truck. Biting off more than he can chew. That might be right. It's much easier to stop an idea in Congress than to get it through. Already, Democratic Sen. Kent Conrad, chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, is trying to strip the budget of the $630 billion that Obama set aside for health care. The president's cap-and-trade plan, designed to begin the transition to a green economy, is on life support.

"They're accustomed to incrementalism in this town," says David Axelrod. "Their answer is to muddle through—take the path of least resistance. Their lesson is, 'We're in a tough spot, so let's do less.' But that's wrong in the middle of a recession. History has been clear on that."

The subtext of Axelrod's comments can be found in what his old friend Rahm Emanuel said in January, that "a crisis is a terrible thing to waste." Of course, the White House won't admit that Obama's chance to bring foundational change depends in part on the crisis continuing. Had Franklin Roosevelt ended the Depression in 1933, it's unlikely he would have been able to regulate Wall Street, expand labor rights and establish Social Security later in his first term.

In the meantime, Obama is following FDR's approach of making early down payments on big ideas. So instead of abandoning cap and trade, for instance, he might push its implementation date forward a few years. We could see him fall short of universal coverage but still fulfill the dream of giving every American the same health-insurance options that a congressman gets.

The perfect, in a bit of White House spin that's reaching the status of cliché, should not be the enemy of the good. And the good, the public good in a serious time, should always be considered news, whether the man delivering it is laughing or lecturing or just trying to change the country.