There’s been much speculation as of late that Obama isn’t having much fun, that the midterms took all the wind out of his sails, and that he didn’t have the stomach to abandon his liberal supporters and embrace triangulation the way Bill Clinton did after Democrats got slaughtered in the 1994 midterm. Hence, all signs were pointing to the fact that Obama had resigned himself to being a one-term President and wasn’t going to run for re-election.
Today I think we have pretty firm evidence that theory was wrong.
The fact that Obama caved in on extending all the Bush tax cuts isn’t so surprising in and of itself. Just about every economist to the right of Paul Krugman agrees that raising taxes during a normal recession is a bad idea, much less the extended Great Recession/Job Loss Recovery we’re currently stuck in, and sentiment had been trending in favor of extending the Bush tax cuts even before the midterms sent scores of Democratic officeholders scurrying for moving boxes. The question wasn’t so much whether they would be extended, but how much Obama would get in return for them.
The answer seems to be surprisingly little. Most expected Republicans to agree to extending unemployment benefits, and most of the rest of the agreement (like payroll tax cuts) are more than acceptable to Republicans. Further underscoring how well Republicans did are the negative reactions on either side of the aisle. Republican critics were saying things like “I’m not initially thrilled about it” while liberals reactions were things like “outrage” and (for socialist Bernie Sanders) threatening to filibuster.
More interesting still is the Obama White House’s explanation for the switch: Instead of blaming Republicans, they blamed congressional Democrats for being hopeless wimps. “We wanted a fight, the House didn’t throw a punch.”
I wonder if today Nancy Pelosi is walking around in a state of shock, thinking “This is the thanks I get for dragging ObamaCare over the finish line? A knife in my back with Obama’s name on it?”
Obama seemed slow to perceive the growing mood against him (certainly much slower than Clinton, who declared “The era of big government is over” the day after the 1994 midterms (I was wrong; see below); say what you want about Clinton, but he had a an exceptionally keen nose for ferreting out parades to stand in front of), but he seems to have finally woken up. The way the Obama went about this, cutting a deal with Republicans and then blaming House Democrats, looks exactly like the triangulation strategy Dick Morris mapped out for Clinton.
As for Morris himself, he wasn’t shy about saying Obama got taken to the cleaners:
To characterize this as a deal is like that famous deal that Emperor Hirohito struck with MacArthur on the Battleship Missouri. This is a surrender. This is absolutely Obama caving in. And the Republicans had to extend unemployment benefits anyway because you’re not going to give the tax cut and at the same time cut off unemployment benefits.
But this shows that Obama will blink. And it’s the first of the trifecta of confrontations. This one — the next will be state bankruptcies when we’re called on to bail out and then the enchilada which will be defunding Obamacare, a balanced budget plan and blocking the EPA from cap and trade.
I remain unconvinced that Obama will abandon his signature federal takeover of health care, but the rest seem entirely possible. Especially if he thinks its necessary to get reelected. He seems to fear a challenge from his party’s right flank (cough cough Hillary) more than his left. He probably believes (correctly) that no challenger to his left will be able to pry away enough black voters to prevent him from being renominated. Which means that he’s already positioning himself as a re-invented moderate for the 2012 general election.
Can Obama run convincingly as a moderate after two years (or, to be technical about it, just shy of 23 months) of governing as a liberal? Maybe. Remember, he did it successfully in 2008. Also, he can make a fairly credible case that he has governed as a moderate when it comes to foreign policy (Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay are classic examples of how Obama’s campaign promises became null and void when he actually had deal with real world problems in the White House rather than on the campaign trail), the occasional warm handshake with Commie dictators notwithstanding.
Can he take liberal votes for granted in the 2012 general election? Hell yes. Where else are they going to go? In fact, if Sarah Palin is the Republican nominee, Obama could probably personally execute a Gitmo detainee on the White House lawn every day at high noon and liberals would still vote for him.
Finally, can he win reelection as a moderate? I wouldn’t count him out. Politics is a “what have you done for me lately” business, and it’s quite likely that the economy will doing well enough in two years for him to (justified or not) take credit for it. He may be crummy at governing, but Obama is an excellent campaigner. Even as a challenger he showed a taste for pomp and circumstance; can you imagine how much it will be cranked up when he runs as the sitting President?
Remember, lots of pundits wrote Clinton off after the 1994 election. It’s taken him a while, but Obama finally seems to be using the same playbook. Whether he can still make it work for him (absent a Ross Perot) remains to be seen.
Addendum: I misremembered when Clinton said that. It wasn’t the day after the midterms, it was his State of the Union Address the following January. He did move to the center some shortly after the election (see this transcript from his November 9, 1994 press conference for details), but I screwed up the date, which partially invalidates the point I was making in that paragraph. Mea Culpa.
