Obama: Not Bush

Yeah, it's shooting fish in a barrel, but I can't help it: Mark Halperin's "Obama=W." piece is about as bad as it gets, and what's the point of blogging if you can't have a little fun on a Monday morning.  Ready?  I'll go through Halperin's four points, and then make general comments.  The bottom line, however, is that Halperin is far more focused on the ephemeral portions of the presidency, the battle over each news cycle, than he is on things that are far more important to the success or failure of a president.

1.  "No chief economic spokesman"

Halperin seems to believe that George W. Bush's economic policies were unpopular, and Bill Clinton's were popular, because Robert Rubin was good on TV and John Snow wasn't.  This is, as anyone could figure out with a moment's thought, nonsense.  Bush's economic policies were unpopular because there were two recessions, one of them the deepest since the great depression, during Bush's eight years.  Clinton's policies were not very popular*, Rubin's telegenic charm notwithstanding, until unemployment started falling to unusually low levels.  Anyone who considers the public relations side of economic policy even marginally important, let alone a key error shared by Bush and Obama, is making a serious mistake.

2.  "Failure to integrate policy, politics, and communication"

I'm afraid I have no idea what Halperin is saying here.  He says that Bush put politics above policy...okay, perhaps.  And then Obama, per Halperin, "has failed to put in place the necessary procedures and personnel to move strong, serious ideas along the conveyor belt from the minds of wonky experts cloistered in the Old Executive Office Building chambers to the President's lips as he introduces new initiatives at dramatic public events."  Really, I don't know what that means.  It's certainly not the same thing as the accusation that Bush put politics above policy...I think he's accusing Obama of lousy spin control, in which case see point #1.

3.  "Tying the Adminstration's fate too closely to his own party's congressional leadership"

Here, Halperin makes the astonishing claim that everything unpopular or unsuccessful in the Bush years was Tom DeLay's fault (Medicare expansion was a Congressional idea?  Really?).  But for either Bush or Obama, there's simply no way that a president can avoid working with his party's leadership in Congress, especially when that party holds the majority.  Halperin faults Obama for "allowing the agenda and vision of Speaker Pelosi, Leader Reid, and a covey of mostly liberal committee chairs to define the public image of the Democratic Party and determine what his administration can accomplish."  On the substantive side, Obama has little choice here -- of course Congress (helps) determine what the administration can accomplish.  The administration wants to pass bills, and it can't exactly do that without getting the cooperation of Congress.  Meanwhile, Halperin implies that Congress has pushed Obama to the left, but that's surely not true.  On virtually every issue -- stimulus, health care, climate/energy, education -- Obama's agenda has been delayed or halted not by a liberal House or liberal Senate leaders, but by the fact that the Senate is operationally only as liberal as the 60th Senator.  I can't think of a single issue in which Congress pushed a liberal priority in which Obama had no interest, and Halperin doesn't suggest one.  But I suspect Halperin isn't interested in the substance; he's talking again of public image, in which case see item #1.  Again.

4.  "Failing to empower Cabinet members on domestic policy"

This item is a legitimate topic, but I'm not sure whether or not Halperin is correct.  I'm pretty sure that Halperin is not including economic policy here, and he specifically exempts Education, so it's not a wide range of areas in which Halperin is charging that the administration leans to heavily on the White House, not the executive branch departments and agencies.  I don't think I'd call this a major Bush problem -- like most Republican presidents, Bush didn't really care very much about policy in most of these areas, so it didn't really matter where policies originated.  And there's some false nostalgia in calls for cabinet government; for better or worse, all presidencies now feature powerful White House operations, and as far as I can tell Obama's White House is reasonably well run and efficient.  Still, I do think there's some truth that Obama has not fully exploited the possibilities of presidential influence on the executive branch.

Overall, Halperin's list is heavily weighted towards public opinion, not policy.  But this is backwards.  While of course presidents should be competent in presenting themselves to the public, the effects of successful spin control are highly overrated by the Washington press corps.  On the other hand, presidents have a lot of influence -- or, to put it more precisely, effective presidents can have a lot of influence -- on policy.  Successful policy, in turn, can help a president's popularity.  Perhaps even more important is avoiding policy disasters such as the Bush's war in Iraq, or Reagan's Iran-Contra affair, or Clinton's health care fiasco, all of which hurt the president's popularity. 

While I'm ready to criticize Obama when he deserves it, I think most of the recent chatter (the Rahm stuff, the NYT Axelrod piece) derive from one straight line that goes from the economy to Obama's approval ratings to a search for a scapegoat, without any pause to consider whether the administration is responsible for those approval ratings.  Indeed, I think a far better argument could be made that Obama's approval ratings are higher than the economic situation would predict; in other words, I think he's doing a pretty good job with the spin portions of the presidency.  What will really matter, however, is whether the policies he's put in place will prove effective or not, and whether he continues to avoid policy disasters.  As far as I can see, the White House is well-organized, good at dealing with the Hill, and good at establishing a process for making decisions, as in my view can be seen on the stimulus and Afghanistan choices.  Halperin is correct that what he calls "executive process" is important, but by focusing on spin and public presentation, he's missing the big picture, which is (as far as can be seen from reporting to date) pretty good.

For more on these themes, by the way, see Brendan Nyhan and Matthew Dickinson.

*UPDATE: Really ugly typo fixed -- it originally (and mistakenly) said that Clinton's policy's were popular in his early presidency, when of course I meant that they were not popular.  Fixed above, and thanks to commenter anon for the good eyes.