January 1, 2011 opens President Obama’s campaign for re-election. Everything he does will be calculated to further the objective of re-election. Accordingly, his goal will be to minimize exposure to negative review and to maximize opportunity to capitalize on any positive developments. The most important of those developments will be economic recovery. At this stage, he expects a modest recovery to occur from the ordinary process of the economic cycle, so long as nothing is done to undermine it. Therefore, he will avoid any significant new policy initiatives, because of the potential for unintended consequences, while he will champion as major undertakings everything that he cannot help but carry out. His goal will be to champion the “little guy,” while claiming to have stood valiantly against those disposed to oppress the “little guy.”
The budget process will be a big deal; he will resist any cuts beyond the elevated spending levels that he has committed the government to in his first two years. He will defend the health care law, in terms of the specific welfare provisions that he expects people to be sympathetic to, while he will abandon one or two symbolic elements of the health care law, as a gesture of bipartisan cooperation. He will use the power of “Executive Orders” to demonstrate his willingness to “stand up to” Republicans, although he will not launch any major new initiatives that would be controversial. He would not mention immigration reform, if no one else mentions it. However, since it is almost certain that the issue will be forced on the table, he will advocate, but not push too hard, for “comprehensive immigration reform.” Nor will he be able to avoid growing pressure for “border security.” He will speak most of all about the economy, although, ironically, there is not much more effort that he can devote to that purpose. Nevertheless, that will be the image that he will sell. The foreign wars will remain visible, but they will be managed to suggest a certain winding down and withdrawal.
His Administration will raise a few red flags through the normal process of developing regulations, but the President will do what he can to slow down such developments in order to defer the most critical of such initiatives. For example, through regulation the Administration is already moving to impose “end of life counseling” as a mandatory feature of health care delivery. Because that will appear to be seeking through regulation what could not be accomplished in legislation last year, the President will force his staff to back down on it. His goal is simple: to spend two years now consolidating the accomplishments of the first two years, the price for four more years in which to innovate still more profoundly. Most of all, he wants to secure a highly likely prospect of getting one more Supreme Court appointment, which is not likely before a second term. To reach that point he needs to assure no new “policy” issues for the next year and a half.
He has already made the decision to start campaigning now. He believes that he will have to do this time exactly what he did last time, namely spend a long time building a solid organization to guarantee, first, that he has no challenge in the Democrat primary and, second, that he appears a “sure thing” by the time of the general election.
The President faces a dilemma: he cannot run away from his base and build a new political home in the country, while his commitment to his base is the primary source of his alienation from the true working class that actually supports the country. He must, therefore, attempt to re-ignite the political base from 2008, with a simultaneously vigorous effort to claim back the substantial defection from Independents he experienced in 2010. The main target of the campaign appeal will have to be “white working class voters,” but he dare not confuse them with the careless rhetoric about the “poor” that has dominated his approach thus far. We can safely predict that the President in the next two years will learn how to use the first person, plural pronoun far more frequently than the first person, singular pronoun, reversing the performance of his first two years.
The president can do nothing to alter the dynamic surrounding the military compound at Guantanamo. Although his Attorney General threatens to use “executive power” to do what Congress has denied the funding to do, one can be reasonably sure that the president will not do that. He will hold indefinitely several enemy combatants at Guantanamo, all the time making a very great show of putting in place careful safeguards to protect their human rights (which will in fact be the same procedures that George W. Bush put in place).
Judged by cosmetics, the first two years have given evidence of an energetic and forceful president, pushing the limits of legislative accomplishment. Judged by the actual results, it will be seen that he has failed to establish a tone of governing that cements the country as a whole. He has mainly paid off debts to a highly vocal but numerically limited portion of his base, at the expense of the party’s continuing influence in the country. In retrospect that will be seen to have been a major mistake. In foreign affairs he has become extremely dependent on the testimony of foreign leaders to build credibility at home, instead of influencing foreign leaders by the evidence of his solid credibility at home. He will remain under pressure to prove himself as someone capable of acting firmly and in a manner that will compel the participation if not the assent of other world leaders. In domestic affairs, his greatest task was to build national consensus, but he has instead presided over a national disintegration. This does not promise a bright future, but it does describe the future challenge he faces.
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