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Ted Bromund: Time for action, not words, Mr President
WHAT, in the year since he was elected, has Barack Obama actually done?
Making speeches doesn't count. It's certainly part of the President's job to make them, and he's not disappointed. According to CBS News, in mid-July – and less than six months after his inauguration – he gave his 200th speech, and, if anything, the pace has only accelerated since then. But it's a cardinal error to mistake giving speeches for getting things done.
The results on the home front are scanty. The administration made big claims about its so-called stimulus act, but unemployment has continued to rise mercilessly towards 10 per cent.
Last week, Christina Romer, who chairs the President's Council of Economic Advisers, shocked even Obama's supporters when she admitted that "by mid-2010, fiscal stimulus will likely be contributing little to growth". So that's all we get for our $800bn.
Obama's other priority could be climate change legislation, on which – appropriately – he's run hot and cold. But health care is where he's fruitlessly spent most of his political capital.
It shouldn't have been this hard. The basic fact of political life in the US today is that the Democrats have a majority in the House and 60 votes in the Senate. Commentators who blame the Republicans for carrying out the first duty of the opposition – to oppose – are missing the point. If the Democrats want to pass a bill, and are agreed upon it, there is nothing the Republicans can do to stop them.
But they are not agreed. That's because, unlike the Left-wing Democrats who have driven Obama's domestic agenda, centrist Democrats don't like public health care. And they don't like it because a majority of the American people don't like it. The reasons are not hard to grasp.
Most Americans like their own health care. They worry about the other guy. But they're not worried enough to trash the coverage they have. And Obama's proposals will add billions of dollars to the deficit. With both Britain and the US already busy mortgaging their financial futures, that's a bill too far for the moderates.
Obama has made speech after speech to try to turn around the momentum. But the more he speaks, the more unpopular his plan becomes. Americans, by and large, like the President. They just don't like what he wants to do.
The US didn't elect Barack Obama because it wanted to enact all the nostrums of progressive liberalism. It elected Barack Obama because the country was looking for someone who was not George W Bush.
Obama is eloquent in delivery and he promised to slim down government. But Obama's abilities as a speaker have not helped him sell his legislative programme, because it is not what the moderates who elected him thought they were voting for.
Abroad, the story is much the same: many words, few results. But they all betray a basic misunderstanding. Most foreigners, and most foreign leaders, didn't like George W Bush. But that doesn't mean that they'll do his successors any favours. That's not how international relations work.
The Europeans haven't helped close Guantanamo, or recommitted to Afghanistan, just because Obama wants it. The Iranians won't do a deal over their nuclear programme, no matter how nicely he asks. And the North Koreans won't stop testing missiles just because he was elected.
Of course, in a perverse way, these rgimes appreciate Obama. After all, he gives them concessions and requires nothing in return. The Iranians have paid no price for crushing their dissidents. The Russians got missile defence scrapped for free. And Sudan was offered incentives for good behaviour and absolution for their past sins.
It's not even clear that the administration actually has a foreign policy, in the proper sense of the term. Foreign affairs appear to be only domestic policy writ large.
The President's approach isn't even working at home, but it will fail far more badly abroad. The audience and the rules of the game are completely different. But, yet, at home and abroad, the administration tries to get by on the fact that Obama is not Bush, on the President's personal charisma, and on his soaring promises of hope and change.
As a result, the impression the administration conveys is that it doesn't realise it's won. But it has. It's time for it to stop running for office on the wrongs – actual or perceived – of the past.
Since the election, the administration has made error after error, but really, it's made only one. It's not gotten over itself.
Ted Bromund is an American political commentator.
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