It sounds as if President Barack Obama — fresh off a weekend when he angered Republicans by making 15 recess appointments and became a big story by making a surprise visit to Afghanistan — plans to use the “Big Mo” created by the passage of health care reform. If anyone thought Obama was going to take a breather, they are apparently mistaken.
An emboldened President Barack Obama will take a stronger hand with Congress in coming weeks, planning to push lawmakers to pass new regulations for Wall Street by September, the second anniversary of the meltdown, aides tell POLITICO.
The spring offensive, if successful, would allow Obama to claim concrete progress on all of his domestic priorities, despite a “lost year” between the passage of a stimulus package in February 2009 and the signing of health reform last week.
Some Democratic leaders hope to have financial-regulatory reform on the president’s desk even sooner — by Memorial Day, a timeline the White House considers doable.
During protracted negotiations over the health care bill, Obama was criticized for giving congressional leaders too much leeway and too little direction and for bending too easily to the timetables of Capitol Hill.
No more. Aides say that with the momentum from the most complex domestic bill to pass Congress in 45 years, Obama now will push Congress to close campaign-finance loopholes opened by the Citizens United case, adopt his overhaul of the No Child Left Behind education bill and perhaps even tackle a clean-energy bill.
“He goes into these into these negotiations, and into these legislative battles, with a stronger hand because people understand that he’s going to fight for what he believes in,” White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said in an interview. “Congress proved to itself that it’s well within their power to do the big things that’ll bring about the type of change that they were elected to bring.”
It truly sounds like Obama has concluded that no matter what he does he’ll be criticized so he’s going to go for it — for as much of his agenda items as he realistically can. It also sounds as if he and his aides have (rightfully) concluded that Presidential clout for Presidents who have not yet completed their first term has a short shelf-life. If he really wants policies and substantative change he has better chance of getting it now on the heels of health care reform than after the mid-term elections which will almost certainly result in Democratic losses (the degree of the loss will be how it is judged).
Polls show health care reform is not yet a plus for him and the Demorats — although it is argued by them that it will be. But the plus is him getting it through Congress and putting his personal capital on the line. If it had failed Obama would be called “another Jimmy Carter” but that isn’t correct as of this writing.
The most accurate way to describe him right now:
He is a work in progress — no longer the blank slate he was during the campaign where people could assume he would govern one way or another. He is evolving and in the end that could be positive or catastrophic for him and the Democratic party.
But right now he has the wind at his back — and he’s going with the wind’s flow.
Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0310/35116.html#ixzz0jWugFXmb
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.