Obama So Far
During Franklin Roosevelt’s first 100 days in office, Congress granted every request the new president made. Barack Obama, despite enjoying a decisive majority in both houses of Congress, hasn’t been so fortunate. His economic stimulus package failed to win a single Republican vote in the House, and conservative members of his own party are trying to block his ambitious plans to provide universal health care and curb global warming. What’s more, Obama himself has alarmed supporters by compromising on key issues, and he has yet to flex his political muscle by mobilizing the tech-savvy network of grass-roots activists he assembled during last year’s campaign. All of which raises the question: Is Obama raising false hopes? Or does he have what it takes to deliver real change?
To assess Obama’s performance during his first six months in office, we sat down in our New York offices with three of America’s leading political observers. David Gergen, a senior political analyst for CNN and director of the Center for Public Leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School, served in the White Houses of Nixon, Ford, Reagan and Clinton. Paul Krugman, a New York Times columnist and professor of economics and international affairs at Princeton University, won the 2008 Nobel Prize in economics. Michael Moore is the Academy Award-winning director of Bowling for Columbine and Sicko; his new film, Capitalism: A Love Story, will premiere on October 2nd.
Overall, how would you rate Obama’s first six months in office?
David Gergen: You have to ask, compared to what? Compared to the last president — indeed, compared to the last two Democratic presidents, Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter — he’s gotten off to a fast start, with a number of legislative accomplishments under his belt. The economy didn’t go off a cliff, he’s changed the mood of the country, and there are signs that he’s beginning to change the culture. Compared to his aspirations for the future, however, I think he’s fallen short of what he hoped for by this time, and certainly what the country hoped for by now. The best example is the famous argument between Paul Krugman and the administration over the size of the stimulus package — Paul looks like he won the argument.
Paul Krugman: The problems that Obama faces are kind of awkward. The two major ones — the economy and health care — are things where half a loaf is basically not much better than none. If you’re building a bridge across an abyss — I’m mixing metaphors here — it better be complete. If you have a stimulus plan that falls short, then the economy looks lousy, and everyone says it failed, even though it may have actually made things better than they otherwise would have been. This was a case where he really needed to go for broke, and it’s not clear that he did on a sufficient scale. Likewise, on health care, there is a pretty high threshold of what he has to do to call it a success, (jetting some marginal changes in the health care system will be viewed as failure. So his big push has to succeed on both fronts in a big way, and we don’t know yet whether he will on either one.
Michael Moore: I’m still pinching myself, and I have been since Election Day. In Obama’s first six months he’s played some very savvy, smart politics with the opposition that has tied them in a number of knots. I’m very happy with what I’ve seen. It doesn’t mean I don’t have disagreements with certain things, but we now have the virtual opposite of what we went through over the past eight years. We have an intelligent president who has a heart and cares about others, and who has staked out some very brave positions. You can go down the list: from his speech in Cairo, to his admitting to the Iranian people that the United States helped overthrow the democratically elected prime minister of Iran in the Fifties, to his signing the bill against tobacco companies, to what he’s attempted to do to shut down Guantánamo, even without the support of a majority of senators from his own party. Considering what he’s inherited — the absolute, utter mess that the country is in — it’s been a remarkable six months.
What have you been most impressed by so far? Has any one move he’s made stood out for you?
Moore: He fired the head of General Motors! [Laughs] Seriously, a president of the United States, for all intents and purposes, fired the head of a company that was number one on the Fortune 500 list for more years than any other company in the history of that list. He essentially took over the company in an attempt to save the industrial infrastructure and jobs that it represents — that really stood out. That and his Cairo speech to the people of the Muslim world. Here’s a guy who went through an election where one of the tactics they used to try to prevent his election was to continually plant the idea in people’s heads that he was a Muslim, and a few months after he takes office, he essentially tells the Muslim world that we want to be friends and that he has Muslims in his family, and he respects them. That’s who I want representing me to the rest of the world.
Obama So Far, Page 1 of 10