The Big Tests for President Obama’s Next Chapter

(AOL) — There is the state of the union, and then there is what everyone really wants to talk about this week: The State of Obama.

With his address falling during what The New York Times delicately dubbed “a particularly rocky point in his presidency,” President Barack Obama is expected to use the occasion to pivot away from the frenetic change-seeking of his first year and toward safer political ground. But the fact is that many of the challenges he now contends with have roots that stretch back well before Scott Brown’s super-majority-busting victory in Massachusetts (and the pressure that his win brought from the left to stay the course). And for all the hype, the success of this next phase of his White House will depend much more on his ability to reverse a number of problematic patterns than on how well-crafted, and well-received, his speech is. So while the parties spin Obama’s performance and pundits declaim on its effectiveness, keep in mind that we won’t know whether the president has turned things around until answers to the following seven questions come into focus.

Can He Regain His Oratorical Mojo?

Let it be said: Obama’s most surprising rookie year shortcoming was his weakness as a presidential orator. In fact, that’s being said a lot, by commentators from the Washington Post’s Michael Gerson to Time’s Mark Halperin, who argue that despite Obama’s outsized reputation as a gifted speaker, he has so far failed to effectively inspire the nation from the Oval Office. Though the president has made speeches galore, at key moments, such as following the Christmas Day bombing attempt, he has not stepped up to offer a memorable address to match the likes of Ronald Reagan after the Challenger explosion or Bill Clinton following the Oklahoma City bombing. Most concretely, Obama’s speeches have not produced results, besides, of course, a Nobel Peace Prize for him. Even if he delivers a home run tonight, the problem will remain. Obama needs to find a way to connect with Americans again on a consistent basis.

Of the many explanations forwarded for Obama’s disappointing oratorical performance, two stand out. With few exceptions, Obama has made the transition to the White House by abandoning the soaring flourishes that sealed his speech-making prowess; President Obama has been more subdued and professorial, and speeches that read well on paper have not had the same effect in delivery. Second is the problem of over-exposure. Obama’s near-constant appearances on television and in interviews may have succeeded in getting his message out in a fragmented media environment, but the impact of a “major speech” is dulled when it’s the second in so many weeks. The element of surprise he could count on as a little-known senator has been replaced by familiarity and sky-high expectations, making it simply much more difficult to blow away his audience and move the increasingly entrenched dials of public opinion. As a candidate, Obama demonstrated that he could send hearts soaring. His task now is to show he can pull off the hard sell. — Russell Berman

Has He Completed His On-the-Job Training?

A regular refrain from Obama’s opponents throughout the 2008 presidential contest was that he lacked the necessary experience — the executive experience of not simply leading but effectively managing a large operation with many competing interests — to be an effective president. To which Obama would respond: “I may not have been in Washington as long as some folks. I may not have all the experience that they want, but I guarantee you this: I have the experience that America needs right now to restore this country to greatness.” It proved a persuasive campaign-season riposte, but after a year in the White House, the inexperience narrative refuses to die. Keeping it alive has been a series of broken promises betraying a mix of naivete, overabundant idealism, and a striking lack of situational awareness. These weren’t all standard fare flip-flops, either. In some cases they were promises that a more seasoned operator would have known better than to make in the first place.

Among others: Obama failed to close the detention facility at Guantanamo, despite a self-imposed deadline to do so by January 2010. And he reversed course on transparency, forbidding the release of photos of American soldiers abusing detainees, bailing on a pledge to televise the health care reform negotiations on C-SPAN, and falling short in efforts to track and communicate the effects of stimulus spending. While the president could not have foretold the numerous challenges he would face in his first year, it is clear that he catastrophically misjudged the sheer difficulty of the tasks at hand, the opposition he would face, and his young administration’s capacity to handle it all at once. The result is a lack of follow-through that gives obstruction-minded Republicans motivation to dig in further and his allies the suspicion that he’s too willing to back down from a fight and too easy on those who double-cross him. The modified agenda he’s now rolling out may give him more achievable targets, but he won’t reach them if he hasn’t developed a keener, more realistic sense of the most effective uses of presidential power. — Carl Franzen

Is He Nuts to Hold Out Hope for Bipartisan Victories?

One of the undisputed failures of year one for Obama was his inability to “change the tone” in Washington, which is perhaps more polarized than ever before. Heading into the State of the Union, the president has been offering hints of a renewed effort on that front, signaling an openness to a scaled-back health care bill that could win broader support and proposing a budgetary spending freeze aimed at the political center, if not anti-government conservatives.

Many progressives are dubious that Republicans will play along, but despite all the rancor, his early tenure does provide some precedent for that. Among Obama’s most significant — and overlooked — achievements are his efforts on education reform, where his appointments and initiatives have drawn praise from conservatives like former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who lauded the president’s willingness to take on the teachers unions. The centerpiece of this agenda is the $4.35 billion “Race to the Top” program, which has states competing for federal grant money on the basis of their willingness to increase the number of charter schools and raise standards for teachers and students — and has been credited with spurring many to institute considerable reforms. Praise for the program has not been universal. Still, at a time when every other policy debate seems to be devolving into a partisan food fight, Obama’s early record on education is a notable exception, and a possible model for year two.

An even more instructive example, however, might be his biggest diplomatic coup: the beer summit. Bringing Henry Louis Gates and Sgt. James Crowley to the White House did more than turn a gaffe into a PR victory — it was also perhaps the one moment that encapsulated all the promise of his conciliatory approach. The problem for the president, of course, is that this moment did not star leaders of hostile nations or warring political parties, but merely a Harvard professor and a police officer from Cambridge. And in that, it goes down as a testament as much to the limits of the Obama style as to its potential. — R.B.


Has the White House Finally Recognized the Limits of the Obama Magic? (And If So, Now What?)

For much of 2009, the White House seemed to believe that it could overcome legislative, diplomatic and electoral hurdles through the sheer force of the president’s popularity. And while the president remains generally well-liked on a personal level, time and again his personal touch was not enough to make the difference. Exhibit A: the Olympics gambit. Obama’s last-minute decision to travel to Copenhagen to play pitchman for Chicago’s bid to host the 2016 summer games resulted in a stinging failure, and though the move did not have make-or-break political ramifications, it prompted a discomfiting question that still lingers: How could the White House have so badly misjudged Obama’s prospects?

More than that, the misstep fed a theme: that an operation praised for its strategic brilliance throughout Obama’s winning campaign had since developed a habit of overreaching. This week came evidence that the outsized self-confidence extends to the president himself. Rep. Marion Berry, D-Ark., a Southern Blue Dog, told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette that Obama responded to concerns that 2010 would be a repeat of the 1994 electoral nightmare for Democrats with this gem: “The big difference here and in ’94 was you’ve got me.” (The presidential bravado fell flat; Berry decided to retire rather than face an angry electorate). With the possible demise of health care reform threatening to deliver Obama his most staggering rebuke yet, the Olympics debacle, rather than a footnote to the first chapter of his presidency, could start to look more like foreshadowing. He got to the White House largely thanks to his stirring personal narrative, but to build a legacy, Obama may need to make the next phase of his tenure about somebody else.

Cue the fat cats? — R.B.

How Will the Afghanistan Gamble Pan Out?

Obama’s decision to send more troops to Afghanistan is the riskiest and potentially most consequential of his presidency thus far. And while the war has faded from the front pages in recent weeks, the president’s advisers have said they will likely know whether the surge is successful by the end of 2010 — meaning the conflict could become a dominant story just in time for midterm election campaigns to heat up. A successful turn-around could re-define the Obama legacy, while a quagmire would bring still more echoes of Vietnam, as well as the ghost of Lyndon Johnson, another Democratic president whose domestic goals were subsumed by a far-away conflict. — R.B.

Can He Win Back His Most Jilted Supporters?

“A year and more has passed, yet we have not been delivered. Some believed that Barack Obama had come to restore the Republic, to return our nation to the righteous path. A new, glorious era in American politics was at hand. If only that were true. We all can taste the bitterness now. Obama promised to end the war in Iraq, end torture, close Guantanamo, restore the Constitution, heal our wounds, wash our feet. None of these things have come to pass.”

So wrote Roger D. Hodge, the now ex-editor of Harper’s, in his magazine’s February issue, eloquently capturing the disenchantment of Obama’s progressive supporters. The lack of liberal turnout — the so-called enthusiasm gap — was one big reason why Democrats lost races in Virginia, New Jersey and, most recently and consequentially, Massachusetts. And big losses could be in store for the party in November if it persists. But re-energizing the base without losing the rest of the country will take considerable finesse.

Obama’s predicament is perhaps best illustrated by his relationship with Hispanic voters, arguably the one constituency he could claim a net gain with at the end of 2009. To some observers, choosing Sonia Sotomayor for the Supreme Court was the savviest strategic move of his first year — a “political 10-strike” in the words of the University of Virgina’s Larry Sabato — winning over a group that clearly preferred Hillary Rodham Clinton in the Democratic primaries while giving some GOP senators an opportunity to show their attitudes toward Latinos seemed circa Ricky Ricardo. Still, Hispanic voters have their eyes on a bigger agenda item that Obama has promised to deliver on: immigration reform

It’s also the thorniest of political issues, and the administration’s pledge to tackle it during the 2010 election year is befuddling to many, considering its failure to win battles on health care and climate change with a full tank of political capital. The growing consensus is that the White House is keeping immigration reform on the putative agenda as a political tool; a bill might not pass, but it could galvanize Hispanics in the Democratic base to turn out for the 2010 midterms and further alienate conservatives from a growing voting bloc. If that is indeed the play, it might make strategic sense. But it will serve as a striking example of how much the field has shrunken for Obama, who will have gone from pursuing his “big bang” agenda of transformative change to pushing doomed legislation to score symbolic points. — R.B. and Andrea Stone

When Will the Unemployment Rate Come Down?

The hoopla over Scott Brown’s Massachusetts Senate win notwithstanding, the most painful number for the White House is not 41, but 10 percent, the unemployment rate for December. No matter how much the Obama administration (and many economists) blame the problem and the broader economic malaise on Bush-era policies, the president faces a jobless number significantly higher than the 7.4 percent of December 2008, and it will almost undoubtedly remain the most politically resonant statistic through the midterm elections in November. The Federal Reserve expects unemployment to stay high through 2010 even if economic recovery picks up, and unless Obama can push a new jobs-creating measure through Congress, it’s the Fed that will have more stimulus power by setting — or in the current case, keeping — interest rates and the cost of borrowed money low. What’s more, post-recession labor markets often defy economists’ predictions. About the only certainty is that come November, the bulk of the blame for wherever the unemployment rate sits will fall on Obama’s shoulders. — Joseph Schuman