Well, it’s not your real birthday, and I’m not Marilyn Monroe, but it is the first anniversary of your election – and the first time the voters have spoken since then.
Welcome to the rest of your term.
This isn’t the happiest day you’ve had in the White House. Last night’s election returns weren’t what you’d hoped for – though there’s a sliver of light in upstate New York where Democrats managed to pick up a House seat.
The bigger picture is darkening, too. The health care timetable is slipping again. You had hoped to get it done in the summer; now it looks as if you won’t get a bill until 2010. If then. Blue Dog Democrats are going to be more nervous than ever about looking too liberal when they go to the voters next year. And the longer health care drags on, the harder it’s going to be to get Congress to deal with your other priorities. Cap and trade, immigration reform, financial reform: that’s a lot of heavy lifting. None of it is likely to help you with the independent voters who’ve been drifting back to the right. And until unemployment drops below 8% or so, your standing in the polls is likely to keep edging down. You’ve gotten yourself in a contest with Fox News that you can’t win.
Meanwhile, things are unraveling overseas. Everyone on the planet watched Netanyahu blow you off over the settlements. You huffed and you puffed – and you flopped. Karzai – somebody who would be living in exile without your guns and your money –left you looking pretty flat-footed over the election. Pakistan and Iran are playing games with you. People in places like Turkey, Russia and China are starting to think you can be rolled. You won’t have a consensus on carbon policy at home that you can take to Copenhagen; all those starry eyed European friends of yours won’t be happy.
You’ve been lucky so far; I don’t think the press and the chattering classes have quite realized yet just how much foreign policy trouble you’re in. But now that everyone’s attention is off the elections, they’ll figure it out any day. Commentators are going to start connecting the dots and you need to brace yourself for a rash of stories talking about a presidency in crisis. One thing to watch out for: you are supposed to accept the Nobel Prize just a few days before the Copenhagen climate meeting. The contrast between a shiny big prize in Oslo and an embarrassing flop in Copenhagen will be something that few pundits anywhere will be able to resist.
Mr. President, your critics aren’t wrong; your presidency is not going very well right now, and things will probably get worse before they get better. You have some tough weeks and months ahead.
Don’t feel too bad about this: crisis is what presidencies are made of. Look at Lincoln. He gets elected, and South Carolina secedes. All winter while waiting to take the oath of office, he tries to keep the Union together; the Deep South forms the Confederacy and Jeff Davis gets sworn into office before Lincoln does. Desperate to keep the Upper South on his side, Lincoln negotiates and delays. He flops. Virginia, North Carolina and Tennessee fall away. Kentucky declares itself neutral. His first major battle is a catastrophic fiasco; the army disintegrates at Bull Run and flees back to the Potomac. That December, he has a foreign policy disaster. A U.S. Navy ship intercepts two Confederate ‘diplomats’ headed for London on a British ship; the ‘diplomats’ are arrested. Britain blows up and threatens war; Lincoln, humiliated, climbs down.
Mr. President, as late as September 1864, Lincoln thought he would fail. McClelland would be elected on a peace platform, and Lincoln would be remembered as the man who sent hundreds of thousands of people to their deaths in a ruinous, losing war. Think about how that must have felt in the long, lonely nights, trapped in the White House with a psychotic wife and the ghosts of his two dead sons.
Mr. President, I hate to tell you this, but you are now just getting the first small hints about the nature of the job you have ‘won.’ You are feeling the first gentle breezes of the kind of hurricanes that envelop presidents in difficult times.
I don’t know how it will work out for you. Nobody does. You’re going to have good days as well as bad. In some ways, I think you’re likely to have an easier time than some of your critics predict. The economic cycle has turned; when you run for re-election (if you are crazy enough to want four more years in the White House), you will probably be running on economic growth and falling unemployment. Overseas, America is in better shape than many people think and you’ve got some talented people around you.
The chances are, though, that you are going to have to change directions here and there. Lincoln tried for almost three years to win the war by conciliating the South before concluding that crushing it was the only way to win the war. FDR ran for office denouncing Herbert Hoover’s budget deficits and was an isolationist well into his second term. When Truman started out he was hoping to bring the troops home and cut the defense budget after World War Two. The last thing Woodrow Wilson wanted was to spend his presidency concentrating on foreign policy. Thomas Jefferson came into office a strict constructionist but, though he seems to have believed the Louisiana Purchase was unconstitutional, it was just too good to pass up. By the time Ronald Reagan was finished he was trying to make peace with Gorbachev and abolish nuclear weapons.
Mr. President, nobody can really tell you what to do. Some of the ideas you brought with you to the Oval Office are the lodestars that should guide you through the storms and vicissitudes ahead; some are foolish misconceptions you will have to scrap. At this point, I doubt very much if you know which are which; with luck and the grace of God you will gradually figure it out.
As you digest the news from Virginia, New Jersey, Harry Reid and the Middle East, remember that there are a lot of us out here wishing you the best. Godspeed, Sir, and congratulations again on the anniversary of your historic election.
You must be logged in to post a comment.