Newsweek’s Hirsch: Obama Lost Control Of Agenda

Suddenly, with less than three weeks in office, to listen and watch the new and old media, President Barack Obama is on many fronts on the defensive — reacting to some crises of his administration’s own making and no longer leading by setting the agenda but reacting to it.

True or not? Unless he turns it around, it’s true as we noted in this post today. And now Newsweek’s Michael Hirsch comes to some of the same conclusions that we have here:

Barack Obama began making his comeback Wednesday, apparently aware that he has all but lost control of the agenda in Washington at a time when he simply can’t afford to do so. Obama’s biggest problem isn’t Taxgate—which resulted in the Terrible Tuesday departure of his trusted friend, Tom Daschle, and the defanging of his Treasury secretary, Tim Geithner. Nor is the No. 1 problem that the president can’t seem to win a single Republican vote for his stimulus package. That’s a symptom, not a cause. The reason Obama is getting so few votes is that he is no longer setting the terms of the debate over how to save the economy. Instead the Republican Party—the one we thought lost the election—is doing that. And the confusion and delay this is causing could realize Obama’s worst fears, turning “crisis into a catastrophe,” as the president said Wednesday.

Obama’s desire to begin a “post-partisan” era may have backfired. In his eagerness to accommodate Republicans and listen to their ideas over the past week, he has allowed the GOP to turn the haggling over the stimulus package into a decidedly stale, Republican-style debate over pork, waste and overspending. This makes very little economic sense when you are in a major recession that only gets worse day by day. Yes, there are still some very legitimate issues with a bill that’s supposed to be “temporary” and “targeted”—among them, large increases in permanent entitlement spending, and a paucity of tax cuts that will prompt immediate spending. Even so, Obama has allowed Congress to grow embroiled in nitpicking over efficiency when the central debate should be about whether the package is big enough. When you are dealing with a stimulus of this size, there are going to be wasteful expenditures and boondoggles. There’s no way anyone can spend $800 to $900 billion quickly without waste and boondoggles. It comes with the Keynesian territory. This is an emergency; the normal rules do not apply.

Hirsch says that by the time Obama signs a bill — and he suggests that is even in question whether a bill will actually emerge now — a public that polling shows is increasingly souring on the Obama plan may conclude that the GOP is right and that the Democrats merely want to spend like a bunch of drunken CEOS (we think CEOs spend more and less responsibly than sailors who’ve lifted a few “cold ones”). And, he notes, Obama himself seems to now realize it, as he goes on a media blitz and seems to have concluded that it’s time to put empathy aside as a national goal.

The decisive issue here is leadership. The lack of it is what is plaguing the Obama administration. Every war needs a successful general, and this administration doesn’t have one yet. Geithner is still wounded by his soul-scourging confirmation vote (he was the first tax controversy of course, barely escaping on a 60-34 vote; had his vote come after the Daschle news, it’s likely that Geithner would be the one leaving town today). On Wednesday the taciturn new Treasury secretary delivered all-too-brief remarks at a meeting with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, saying he was working to “help lay the foundation for long-term recovery, [develop] a comprehensive plan to help get credit flowing again and address the housing crisis.” Sounds great, but Geithner is apparently going to wait until next week to announce a lot of this, and that seems a long way off. (Monday is President’s Day, which became Obama’s informal deadline for passage of the stimulus package after he backed off his original hopes of having something to sign inauguration week.)

In the interim, no one else has dominated the newscasts…

As we noted earlier, there seems to be a disconnect now between the Obama of the campaign who was such a smooth, politically dominating figure — one who some analysts said could turn out to be another FDR with as much or more political smarts than Bill Clinton.

Instead, Obama is now looking as if he is stunned by the system — and the danger is that, if he doesn’t revert to being perceived by the public or Congress as a dominating (if polite) political figure, he will be gobbled up alive by a political culture that would just LOVE to run on its own.

After 8 years of a Congress basically given its marching orders by a President and Vice President who believed the Executive Branch was The One, progressives in his own party and Republicans in Congress trying to reassert their imagery and clout to rebound in 2010 would be only too glad to let him leave them to fill what seems to be being perceived now — a hard-nosed leadership gap.