what policies did president obama accomplish to empower minorities

Dueling Explanations for the Mid-term Ballot Results

During his showtime 2 years in role, President Barack Obama and his Democratic allies in Congress compiled a substantial record of policy accomplishment—the economic stimulus, bringing the financial system back from the brink of collapse, rescuing two automakers, universal health intendance, sweeping reform of financial regulation, and major changes in student loan programs, amid many others.  Nevertheless, the political standing of both the president and congressional Democrats slipped steadily through much of this menstruation, and the voters administered a substantial rebuke in the November 2010 midterm elections. While some contests remain unresolved, the Democrats have lost at to the lowest degree half dozen Senate seats, at to the lowest degree 10 governorships, and more than than sixty Firm seats, the nigh for a mid-term election since 1938.  By any mensurate, this is a substantial and consequential expression of public discontent.

What went wrong?  There are four broad schools of thought.  The first— popular among mainstream liberals, and the nearly supportive of the president—focuses on the unusual quantity and nature of problems that Obama inherited when he took the adjuration of office.  Because economical downturns induced past financial crises differ fundamentally from ordinary cyclical recessions, recovery is slower and takes longer, generating sustained high unemployment.  And because such crises destroy and so much wealth, regime must take plush steps to avert all-out disaster, expanding deficits and debt in ways that boilerplate citizens are spring to discover alarming and hard to understand.  Every bit Brookings'southward Thomas Mann puts it, summarizing this view,

The simple fact is that no leader or governing party thrives politically in difficult economic times. . .  Citizens today are understandably scared, sour, and deeply pessimistic most our economic future. . .  The well-documented successes of the financial stabilization and stimulus initiatives are invisible to a public reacting to the here and now, not to the counterfactual of how much worse it might have been.  The painfully deadening recovery from the global financial crisis and Great Recession accept led nigh Americans to believe these programs have failed and every bit a consequence they estimate the president and Congress harshly.[i]

In brusk, proponents of this view contend, Obama and the Democrats are generally the victims of forces beyond their control.  Although they did everything in their power to restart the engine of growth, the economic clock is running more slowly than is the political clock, generating widespread discontent and a huge voter backlash.

There is a political also as an economic dimension to this thesis.  A big part of Obama's appeal to independents and moderates was his promise to reduce the level of partisanship in Washington.  Unfortunately for him, he couldn't deliver bipartisanship on his ain, and (so runs the argument), the Republicans' decision to oppose his every initiative, starting on Solar day One, made it impossible for him to redeem his pledge.  The Republicans gambled that because Obama and the Democrats controlled the unabridged government, they would exist blamed for continuing partisan wrangling.  And the Republicans turned out to exist correct.  Although it was not Obama's fault, the public focused their discontent with continuing partisan rancor focused nonetheless on him and the Autonomous leadership, not on the real source of their disappointment.

There is much to this, of course.  There is little doubt that the Republicans decided early on (just when is a matter of dispute) to act as a disciplined and relentless opposition, or that this decision was a dagger aimed at the heart of Obama's public standing.

Barack Obama get-go came to national prominence at the 2004 Democratic convention.  Rejecting the sectionalisation between "Ruby America" and "Bluish America," his spectacularly successful keynote address appealed to the public's yearning for a politics of common purpose.  During his presidential entrada, he connected this theme, promising to reduce partisan polarization in Washington.  Just he underestimated the depth of the division between the parties, misunderstood its source, and assumed, wrongly, that his personal mandate and persuasive powers would suffice to overcome it.

In reality, the divide between the parties and between red and blueish America went well beyond incivility to embrace disagreements on core principles and conceptions of how the globe works.  Bridging this dissever, if possible at all, would take taken much more than than a change of tone in the White Firm.  Information technology would accept required, as well, a policy agenda that breached traditional partisan bounds.  But in that location was little in Obama's agenda that corresponded to Bill Clinton's heterodox positions on criminal offence, welfare, trade, and fiscal restraint.  Instead, Obama synthesized and advocated policies representing the consensus within the Democratic Party.  Republicans rejected that agenda as a footing for reaching mutual ground.

It is an open question whether in that location was whatsoever feasible grade Obama could have pursued in the early months that could have diminished the fierce partisan disharmonize of his starting time ii years in office.  Could he take made House Minority Leader John Boehner and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell an offer they couldn't refuse, at least not without them being punished in the courtroom of public opinion? Those arguing in the affirmative point to the process that produced the stimulus nib.  Any the truth, the perception spread that Obama had subcontracted that pecker to congressional Democrats, who proceeded to stuff it with a long-deferred wish-list of programs honey to their core constituents.  His strategy minimized the prospects for serious bipartisanship, even if some Republicans had initially been inclined to move in that management.  Those arguing in the negative invoke the failed three-calendar month effort in the Senate Finance Committee to produce a bipartisan health care beak.  I must get out the assignment of responsibleness to historians who volition be armed with information and documents not at present on the public record.

The second caption, associated with the left wing of the Democratic Party, argues that Obama failed politically, non because he was too partisan, but considering he wasn't partisan enough; not because he went too far, but because he didn't go far enough. The nib of particulars is roughly this: Obama misjudged the willingness of Republicans to meet him halfway and underestimated his ability to get his way without their help.  As a result, the stimulus bill was both too modest and poorly structured; months were spent negotiating health care with Senate Republicans who never had whatsoever intention of getting to yeah; the public option was thrown away without a fight; and the fourth dimension squandered on a needlessly prolonged struggle over the health intendance neb squeezed out other cardinal items such as climatic change and immigration reform.  Calculation executive insult to legislative injury, the president failed either to shut Guantanamo or to end "Don't ask, don't tell," and his Treasury allowed financial institutions and their leaders to survive and prosper without paying any price for their misdeeds.  The result was a demoralized base of operations and an emboldened opposition, with predictable electoral results.

There is something to this critique equally well.  Given the intensity of the polarization that predated his presidency, Obama did underestimate the difficulty of mitigating it.  Fifty-fifty the White House's strongest defenders concede that the health care contend went on much longer than it should have, with negative consequences for the rest of Obama'southward agenda.  And his administration's child-glove treatment of large banks and AIG was morally and politically tone-deafened.

For the most part, nonetheless, the critique from the left fails the examination of political realism.  The assistants couldn't have gotten a larger stimulus beak, even if it had pushed hard; nor could it have passed health reform with a public pick, let alone the liberal beau ideal, a unmarried-payer system.  The reason is the aforementioned in both cases: not merely were Republicans unanimously opposed, simply so were many Democrats. What the liberals overlook is that unlike the Republican Political party, Democrats are a various ideological coalition, split roughly forty/forty/twenty amongst liberals, moderates, and conservatives at the grassroots level.  In the state as a whole, moreover, liberals constitute just one fifth of the electorate and cannot hope to succeed outside a coalition with Americans to their right.  What sells in Marin County won't in Due south Carolina, or even in most parts of the Midwest.  Democrats representing more than moderate or even conservative districts know that if they go across the limits that their constituents can accept, they volition pay a high political cost.  And and then it proved in 2010, with Democratic losses concentrated in the South and Midwest.  Liberals in the Business firm of Representatives will at present painfully relearn the lesson that Rahm Emanuel patiently taught them in the past decade: past themselves, they do not establish a bulk and won't, for the foreseeable future.

There is also a third explanation, a critique from the right: while Obama campaigned as a moderate conciliator, he governed as a liberal activist, undermining the possibility of bipartisan cooperation and preventing himself from overcoming the dissever between Red and Blue America.  His efforts to bring Republicans into the conversation were largely cosmetic and were inconsistent with the office he allowed Firm Democratic leaders to play in the legislative procedure.  If he had been serious almost tort reform and market-based mechanisms such every bit purchasing insurance beyond state lines, a basis would have existed for a different kind of negotiation almost wellness reform.  In a like vein, the House version of cap-and-trade legislation made no concession to Republican objections and alternatives.  Under these circumstances, Republicans had no choice merely to oppose the president's initiatives and to persuade the American people to give them a share of governing power to create the basis for a more equal chat. The failure of the president'southward economic programs to reduce unemployment and stem the flood of housing foreclosures gave them the opportunity to make their example, and the public responded.

As nosotros'll see, there are some elements of truth in this critique besides.  There was indeed a tension at the heart of the Obama campaign betwixt the rhetoric of post-partisanship and the substance of the agenda.  Once in office, Obama could have tried harder to restrain Democratic partisanship in the House and to build Republican concerns into his wellness care proposals.

Yet, i overriding fact undermines the plausibility of the critique from the right.  After their defeat in 2008, Republicans quickly reached a consensus on the cause: voters had punished them, non considering they had been too conservative, but rather because they hadn't been conservative enough.  They had come to Washington to cut spending and limit government, merely under George W. Bush, they concluded, they had become the reverse—a party that used government programs to cement its bulk.  As a result, domestic spending rose more than rapidly in the Bush years than information technology had in the Clinton years, and the political party lost the confidence of its cadre supporters.  Past the time Obama took the adjuration of office, Republicans had decided to return to their ancestral faith–the straight and narrow path of express government.  Because the incoming administration's response to the economic crisis would certainly not focus on tax cuts and spending restraint, Republicans were bound to confront its plans across the board.  And and then they did.

In this paper, I will debate for a fourth explanation.  The gist of it is this:  Yes, American history is replete with examples of presidents and parties who feel political difficulties in hard economical times, only to regain public esteem as the economy regains its balance.  But there is more to the losses that President Obama and the Autonomous Party suffered in November 2010: the public punished them, not only for high unemployment and slow growth, but as well for what it regarded as sins of both committee and omission.  The White House and congressional leaders pursued an agenda that the people more often than not rejected while overlooking measures that might well accept improved the economy more, and almost certainly would take been more popular, than what they did instead.  In short, while Obama was dealt a bad hand, he proceeded to misplay it, making the political backlash fifty-fifty worse than it had to be.

The Seeds of Time to come Difficulties

Some of the seeds of hereafter problems were sown during the entrada. To begin, Obama raised the expectations of many Americans and then high that they were bound to be disappointed.  The excitement that his campaign aroused proved to be a 2-edged sword.  While information technology mobilized many people—especially minorities and the young—who otherwise might not have voted, it also led them to await change of a scope and speed that our political organization rarely permits.  When the normal checks and balances took concord in 2009, promise turned into doubt and and then into disillusion.

Too symptomatic of future problems, there was an odd void at the center of Obama's campaign.  Information technology featured soaring rhetoric about hope and change at one extreme and a long series of detailed policy proposals at the other.  Simply there was something missing in betwixt: a compelling, easily grasped narrative that offered a theory nearly our challenges and unified his recommendations for addressing them.  In this respect, Obama'south campaign did non measure up to its best-selling model, Ronald Reagan's successful race for the presidency, framed past his remarkable acceptance speech at the 1980 Republican convention. Promise is a sentiment, non a strategy, and quickly loses brownie without a road map.  Throughout his first 2 years in office, President Obama often struggled to connect individual initiatives to larger purposes.

Obama'due south campaign was not only expansive but also ambiguous, and Obama knew it.  After defeating Hilary Clinton, the presumptive nominee gave an interview to the New York Times.  "I am like a Rorshach test," he said.  "Even if people notice me disappointing ultimately, they might gain something."[ii]  The difficulty was that the hopes of his supporters were oft contradictory.  Some expected him to be a liberal stalwart, leading the charge for single-payer wellness insurance and the fight confronting large corporations; others assumed that his evident want to transcend the ruby-red-bluish divide pointed to a post-partisan presidential agenda implemented through bipartisan congressional cooperation.  It would accept been difficult to satisfy both wings of his coalition, and he didn't.   As he tacked back and along during the outset two years of his presidency, he concluded up disappointing both.

There was a farther difficulty.  While Obama's calendar required a significant expansion of the scope, power, and cost of the federal regime, public trust in that government stood almost a record low throughout his entrada, a reality his ballot did zippo to alter.  A majority of the people chose to place their confidence in Obama the man but non in the institutions through which he would take to enact and implement his agenda.  Although he was warned but days after his victory that the public's mistrust of authorities would limit its tolerance for bold initiatives, he refused to trim his sails, in outcome bold that his personal credibility would outweigh the public'southward doubts about the competence and integrity of the government he led.[iii]  As events proved, that was a significant misjudgment.

It was reinforced by a fateful decision that Obama made during the presidential transition.  Once elected, Obama in fact had not ane only two agendas—the agenda of choice on which he had run for president and the agenda of necessity that the economical and financial plummet had forced upon him.  The outcome he then faced was whether the latter would require him to trim or delay the former, a question he answered in the negative.  Denying whatsoever conflict between these agendas, he opted to pursue both simultaneously.  A major health care initiative was piled on acme of the financial rescue plan and the stimulus parcel, exacerbating the public's sticker stupor.  And initiatives such as climate change legislation and comprehensive immigration reform remained in play long after it should have been articulate that they stood no serious chance of enactment while pervasive economical distress dominated the political mural.

From Latent Difficulties to Actual Problems: The Economic Claiming

Every bit Obama took office, it was clear that the public'due south overriding concern was the state of the economy and the job market place.  Merely throughout the 111^thursday Congress, the White House and congressional Democrats failed to address that concern in a manner that the electorate regarded as satisfactory.  After some promising signs in the autumn of 2009 and spring of 2010, economic growth slowed to a clamber, the private sector generated jobs at an anemic step, and unemployment remained stuck near 10 pct.  The number of workers remaining jobless for six months or more soared to levels non seen since the Peachy Depression.  Many older workers doubted that they would e'er once again be employed.  Contributing to the sour mood, economic forecasters held out scant hopes of faster job generation through much of 2011.  The administration did non assist itself early on in 2009 when its Council of Economical Advisors suggested that with the passage of the stimulus beak, unemployment would superlative around 8.5 percent. (Instead, information technology reached ten.iii percent before subsiding slightly.)

Although many economists outside the administration argued that a financial crunch differed fundamentally from a cyclical downturn, assistants officials struggled to integrate this premise into their economic program.  They proceeded with a traditional need-side stimulus, even though difficult-pressed households were more concerned virtually reducing debt than expanding consumption.  (In any event, a flood of cheap imports weakened the link between consumer need and domestic job creation.)  And the administration chose not to use TARP money to have devalued debt off the banks' rest sheets, opting instead to allow them to rebuild capital through profits gained from record-depression interest rates.  In some respects, this replicated post-crash policies the Japanese government employed through the 1990s, with unsatisfactory results.

Home buying is at the center of virtually middle-class families' balance sheets and fashion of life.  The wave of foreclosures that began in 2007 devastated unabridged communities.  But here over again, the assistants's initiatives roughshod curt.  Rebuffing calls for bones structural change—such as permitting bankruptcy judges to modify the terms of mortgages—the administration opted for a more modest arroyo that relied on lenders' cooperation.  This gamble on the efficacy of incrementalism did not pay off.  Programs to renegotiate the terms of mortgages in or in danger of default reached only a minor pct of families in need of assist, and in many cases the relief they received was non enough to prevent them from sliding back into default.  By the fall of 2010, foreclosures reached a rate of more than than one hundred yard per month for the get-go fourth dimension always.

 To make matters worse, a massive scandal erupted: it turned out that banks and other mortgage lenders were sending borrowers into foreclosure by the thousands without meeting bones legal requirements.  (The term "robo-signer" quickly entered the dictionary of shame.)  Policymakers were forced to consider a nation-broad foreclosure moratorium.  Concerned about the impact on the fiscal system, the administration resisted, winning loftier marks for responsibility but probably reinforcing the impression that information technology cared more about large, wealthy institutions than near hard-pressed families.

The Politics of Agenda Management

The early phase of the Obama administration resembled nothing and so much as the early days of a presidency that Obama held in depression regard—namely, President Bill Clinton's.  Although the man from Hope had campaigned equally a different kind of Democrat, his party's congressional leaders persuaded him to downplay his signature bipartisan effect—welfare reform—in favor of a plan for comprehensive health insurance.  Combined with the effort to eliminate barriers confronting gays and lesbians serving openly in the military, this shift helped convince many of Clinton'due south moderate and independent supporters that they had been mislead, that he was an E Coast liberal masquerading as an Arkansas moderate.  In improver, Clinton became wrapped upwards in the daily legislative procedure and began measuring success by the number of bills enacted.  In the process, he lost control of the overall narrative.

Something similar happened to Obama, as the post-partisan candidate morphed into a more than traditionally partisan president.  He has acknowledged as much: the administration's early legislative agenda, he says, "reinforced the narrative that the Republicans wanted to promote anyway, which was [that] Obama is not a different kind of Democrat—he's the same one-time taxation-and-spend liberal."  And the master orator of the campaign all but abased the presidential bully pulpit during the drawn-out struggle to enact cardinal proposals.  Said one top counselor, "It's not what people felt they sent Barack Obama to Washington to do, to exist legislator in chief."  David Plouffe, the former head of the president's campaign and one of his closest political advisors, adds that "I practise think he's paid a political price . . . for having to be tied to Congress."

Could information technology take been unlike? Another senior aide has been quoted as saying that "Here's a guy who ran as an outsider to change Washington who of a sudden realized that just to bargain with these bug, nosotros were going to accept to work with Washington."  It'south difficult to believe that this came as much of a surprise to Obama; information technology certainly didn't to his primary of staff.  The question was non whether the White House would have to work with Congress to move the president's calendar; of course it would.  It was rather whether the president would be dragged into the daily process or would be seen equally remaining above it.  President Ronald Reagan, Obama's model of a transformational president, had to engage with members of Congress on both sides of the aisle to enact central legislation, starting with the 1981 taxation cuts.  Merely he managed to do this without becoming "legislator in primary" and without losing control of the narrative.  Reagan's compromises—and there were many—were seen as occurring inside a framework of principles and goals that never changed and that divers his political identity.[four]

Not so for Obama, who failed to grasp fully the nature of the function he had won.  Alone amongst the advanced democracies, the United States combines the functions of head of government and head of state in a single institution and man being.  The American president is expected to be more than a legislator, more than a prime minister.  He must also fill the role occupied by monarchs or ceremonial heads of state in other countries. He must exist an explainer and a comforter, equally circumstances crave.  And he must stand for, and represent, the country as a whole.

Rather than doing this, President Obama immune himself to go trapped in legislative minutia, even as the state remained mired in a kind of economic slump that most Americans had never experienced and could non understand.  Their reaction combined defoliation and fear, which the president did little to allay.  Ironically, a human who attained the presidency largely on the strength of his skills as a communicator did not communicate effectively during his offset two years.  He paid a steep political cost for his failure.

From the starting time, the administration operated on two fundamental political premises that turned out to exist mistaken.  The first was that the economic collapse had opened the door to the comprehensive change Obama had promised.  As incoming Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel famously put it, "you never want a serious crisis to become to waste."  In fact, as Emanuel himself came to realize, there was a tension between the steps needed to arrest the economical decline and the measures needed to concretize the president's vision of fundamental change.  The financial bailout and the stimulus bundle made information technology harder, non easier, to pass comprehensive health reform.

2d, the administration believed that success would breed success—that the momentum from one legislative victory would spill over into the next.  The opposite was closer to the truth: with each difficult vote, it became harder to persuade Democrats from swing districts and states to cast the next one.  In the issue, Firm members who feared that they would pay a heavy price if they supported cap-and-trade legislation turned out to have a improve grasp of political fundamentals than did administration strategists.

The legislative process that produced the wellness care bill was peculiarly damaging.  It lasted much too long and featured side-deals with interest groups and individual senators, made in full public view. Much of the public was dismayed by what it saw. Worse, the seemingly endless wellness care debate strengthened the view that the president'southward calendar was poorly aligned with the economic concerns of the American people.  Considering the administration never persuaded the public that health reform was vital to our economic future, the entire endeavour came to exist seen as diversionary, even anti-democratic.  The wellness reform bill was surely a moral success; information technology may turn out to be a policy success; but it is hard to avoid the conclusion that it was—and remains—a political liability.

Indeed, most of the Obama calendar turned out to be very unpopular.  Of five major policy initiatives undertaken during the start two years, only one—fiscal regulatory reform—enjoyed majority support.  In a September 2010 Gallup survey, 52 per centum of the people disapproved of the economic stimulus, 56 percent disapproved of both the auto rescue and the health care beak, and an fifty-fifty larger bulk—61 per centum—rejected the bailout of financial institutions.[v]  Democrats' hopes that the people would alter their minds most the party'south signature outcome—universal health insurance—afterward the bill passed were not fulfilled.  (It remains to be seen whether sentiment volition change in coming years as provisions of the neb are phased in—that is, if they survive what volition no uncertainty exist stiff challenges in both Congress and the states.)

It isn't hard to sympathise why the stimulus neb remained so unpopular: it neither fulfilled the administration'south promises nor met public expectations.  As for the health care beak, cuts in Medicare needed to finance individual insurance coverage for low and moderate income individuals alarmed many older voters, and the beak failed to address about people's core wellness intendance concern—rising costs—in a mode that allowable confidence. The aid to tottering financial institutions that began during the Bush administration affronted people's moral sense: wrongdoers seemed to go off scot-costless, and many people wondered why banks and insurance companies received hundreds of billions of dollars while average families struggled to make ends see.  And surprising many observers, it turned out that decades of shoddy products had undermined public support for once-iconic American auto makers.  In the optics of most people, what was good for General Motors was no longer good for the land—at to the lowest degree not when taxation dollars were on the line.

Administration officials could and did debate that what they did was necessary and in the national interest.  It is easy to sympathize with their view.  Failing to prop up pivotal financial institutions would take risked a rerun of the 1930s.  Allowing the domestic auto industry to go abdomen-up would have disrupted production and employment throughout the Midwest, already the most economically depressed region of the land.  Non passing the stimulus bill would have forced hard-pressed state and local governments to slash spending and cut their workforces in sectors such equally public safe and education, exacerbating unemployment.  Then forth.

Clearly, though, the administration failed to persuade most Americans, who viewed its program as costly, unnecessary, and unproductive if not outright dissentious.  The administration often seemed to believe that its policies spoke for themselves and that their merits were obvious.  We will never know whether a different strategy of public explanation could accept produced a meliorate result.

Nosotros do know this: the assistants quite consciously chose to condone the immediate political consequences of enacting its agenda.  In his now-famous interview with the New York Times, President Obama put it this fashion: "We probably spent much more fourth dimension trying to get the policy right than trying to go the politics right.  There was probably a perverse pride in my administration—and I take responsibility for this . . .—that we were going to exercise the right thing, fifty-fifty if curt-term it was unpopular."  If so, by the autumn of 2010 he had come to understand the shortcomings of this opinion: "anybody who'southward occupied this function has to remember that success is adamant by an intersection in policy and politics and that you can't exist fail[ful] of marketing and P.R. and public opinion."[vi]  Information technology remains to be seen whether the president has fully grasped the implications of this "intersection": in our democracy, pop sentiment necessarily influences, non simply strategies of persuasion, but also the option and sequence of bug for action and the shape of the policies devised to address them.  America's populist political civilization normally resists rule by elites who claim to know better than the people—even when the elites represent a meritocracy of the best and the brightest rather than an oligarchy of the richest and best-connected.

The Route Ahead

The event of the Nov 2010 election has fundamentally inverse the political dynamic for at least the side by side ii years.  Information technology volition no longer be possible for President Obama to advance his agenda with back up from merely his own party.  Instead, he will be forced either to negotiate with an emboldened Republican Business firm majority or endure two years of confrontation and gridlock.  (As Newt Gingrich discovered in 1995, the same logic applies in reverse: it is no easier to run divided government from Capitol Hill than from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.)

Choosing the path of negotiation over confrontation would require a change of substance also as tone. The president would have to give the federal budget deficit and national debt a far more than central place in his policy agenda. Here the obstacles to agreement across party lines are formidable, although the findings of his bipartisan fiscal committee, due out in Dec, may assistance him in making a shift to a more fiscally conservative position. It helps that the co-chairs of the commission, Democrat Erskine Bowles and Republican Alan Simpson, are determined to intermission the current gridlock, in which conservatives turn down to consider raising taxes while those on the left stoutly resist cuts in social programs.

The logic of the coming new political remainder will impose other requirements. If Obama hopes to achieve his goal of doubling U.S. exports, he will have to remainder a possible confrontation with China with a button for the ratification of pending merchandise treaties with Colombia and S Korea. The latter would dissever the Democratic Political party and forcefulness him to rely on Republican support. If he wants to fire up the idling U.s.a. job machine, he would also have to do more to repair his administration'due south damaged relationship with corporate America, and give more weight to the effects of his policies on the business community'southward animal spirits.

In social policy, only new programs with strong bipartisan support (if there are any) would stand up a hazard. While a package of incentives for energy evolution that includes new and alternative fuels may be possible, a cap and merchandise scheme will be on concord until after 2012, perhaps even longer.  Crafting a response to the housing crunch that offered more effective relief to struggling homeowners would require serious negotiations over the future of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. And progress on immigration reform – a vital outcome for America'southward burgeoning Latino population – would mean accepting the tough enforcement measures on which conservatives insist.

The outlook for defence force and foreign policy is much the same. If President Obama does not achieve ratification of the New Start treaty updating limits on the strategic nuclear stockpiles held by the U.South. and Russia earlier the new Congress is seated in January, he will have to compromise with anti-arms control conservatives on their favorite result, missile defense. And if he wishes to persevere in Afghanistan (a affair of theorize, admittedly), he volition take to rely on Republican support to fill the gap left past ascent opposition within his own political party.

In brusque, to avoid gridlock, Obama volition take to govern less like the liberal antonym to Ronald Reagan and more than like the heir to Pecker Clinton whose calendar he has regarded hitherto as excessively compromised and incremental. If he wants to succeed in the next two years of his presidency, and stand for re-election from a position of force, he will take to do what Clinton did after the debacle of 1994 – namely, defend what he cannot give up, while negotiating seriously with the opposition in other areas.

A survey conducted days before the November 2010 ballot suggests that this is indeed possible.  While the electorate conspicuously wanted a change of course, it rejected key elements of the Republican agenda, including a freeze on all authorities spending except national security and a permanent extension of the Bush-league revenue enhancement cuts for upper-income Americans.  Barack Obama enjoys a college approval rating than either Ronald Reagan or Pecker Clinton after their mid-term defeats, and the people are more than favorably inclined toward his bid for reelection than they were for either Reagan or Clinton at comparable points in their presidencies.[vii]  If the new Republican majority over-interprets its mandate and goes too far, equally Newt Gingrich's Republicans did in 1995, and if the president draws the correct line betwixt conciliation and confrontation, history could echo itself, and he could detect himself in a much stronger position at the end of 2011 than he was after the mid-term ballot.

No later than his 2011 State of the Union accost, nosotros volition observe out whether Obama possesses the i trait that every successful statesman needs: the ability to adjust to changing circumstances without selling his soul.

---

[i]

Thomas East. Mann, "American Politics on the Eve of the Midterm Elections," Chatham Firm, October 2010.

[ii]

"Obama, the self-described 'Rorshach examination,' liberal but inscrutable," New York Times, June 4 2008.

[3]

See William A. Galston and Elaine C. Kamarck, "Change You Tin Believe In Needs a Authorities You lot Can Trust," Washington DC, 3rd Fashion, November 2008.

[4]

All quotations in the preceding two paragraphs are from Peter Baker, "The Pedagogy of President Obama, New York Times Magazine, October 17 2010.

[v]

Gallup, "Among Recent Bills, Fiscal Reform a Lone Plus for Congress," September 13, 2010.

[six]

The quotations in this paragraph are from Baker, op. cit.

[7]

Pew Research Heart, "Midterm Snapshot: Enthusiasm for Obama Reelection Bid Greater Than for Reagan in 1982," October 25 2010.

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Source: https://www.brookings.edu/research/president-barack-obamas-first-two-years-policy-accomplishments-political-difficulties/

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