Obama's Errors

It's been a rough July for President Obama. His original schedule called for both Cap and Trade and Health Reform to pass Congress before the August recess with Obama signing both bills by September 15. As recently as a month ago this looked possible. Now Cap and Trade is stalled and the new goal for health care is to get it out of committee before the recess. Even that looks doubtful.

What happened?

I've said before that the Progressives think that they are the smartest people who ever lived. Look at the audaciousness of Obama's schedule. He planned on reshaping a huge portion of the economy while saving the banks and the car makers and stimulating us out of a recession. And he was going to do it all in six months.

The problem with thinking that you are one of the smartest people who ever lived is that you think that you are infallible. No one can convince you that you are about to make a mistake and you don't recognize your mistakes after you made them. This has happened to Obama and it is starting to catch up with him.

His first and possibly biggest mistake was the stimulus. In fact, it was a whole bundle of mistakes.

The first mistake was letting Congress write the bill with little to no guidance from the White House. This allowed it to become the mother of all pork with very little actual stimulus involved. In order to be effective it needed to get as much money out the door as quickly as possible. Instead, most of the spending will be after 2009. People are noticing how little stimulus has actually been spent.

The second mistake was making the bill too big. Obama and Congress were cheered on by people like Paul Krugman who insisted that even $800 billion was too small. The bill should have been limited to money that could actually be spent in 2009. By bulking up the bill they made people afraid of additional debt. $800 billion rounds up to a trillion dollars too easily, especially when you include interest on the debt. Between that and the TARP, the country is still in shock over how fast such large sums could be spent.

The third mistake was abandoning bipartisanship. Obama made a pitch at the house Republicans. They told him why they could not support the stimulus. His response was to remind them that he won the election so he could do whatever he wanted and that they should stop listening to Rush Limbaugh. So much for bipartisanship.

You could see this one coming. During the campaign Obama promised to end partisanship but he has also made it clear that he does not like the compromises that bipartisanship usually involves. He seemed to expect the Republicans to see the error of their ways and convert to Progressivism. The stimulus ended any attempts at bipartisanship. Washington is more divided than ever. Without being willing to compromise, it is unlikely that Obama will pick up any Republican votes for Health Care or Cap and Trade.

The fourth mistake was underestimating the problems in the economy. The White House expected the economy to recover on its own by now which would allow them to claim that the stimulus was effective. That would have left the Republicans scrambling to explain that the two events were not connected. Instead the White House is stuck trying to explain why unemployment continues to rise. Obama promised that the stimulus would keep unemployment down to 8% and that people laid off from construction-related companies such as Caterpillar would be called back immediately. Instead unemployment is heading for 10% and Caterpillar has laid off even more people. It is hard to defend the stimulus and argue for even further-reaching legislation at the same time.

Even if the economy was improbing noticably, employment always trails the general economy. Unemployment continues to be high for months into a recovery. The most optimistic projections from January showed high unemployment throughout 2009. Obama will have to wait to take credit for creating jobs. In the meantime he takes the heat for not solving our problems. This happened to every other president in the last 20 years so the Obama administration should have been prepared.

The fifth mistake was the speed that the Obama administration pushes everything through. The stimulus was voted on before anyone could read it. The Cap and Trade legislation was passed in the House before the final copy had even been assembled. This is the sort of thing that Michael Moore makes fun of legislators over. The idea is to move so quickly that a bill's opponents don't have a chance to mount a defense. In practice it is indefensible. The actual process of writing the law has been subcontracted out to the unelected staffs of committee members. Personally I think that legislators should abstain on any vote where there has not been sufficient time to read the legislation. As new things pop up from the stimulus it taints future legislation that is being rushed through the same way.

That's five major mistakes on a piece of legislation that passed in Obama's first 28 days. He continues to make many of the same mistakes.

Probably his biggest mistake was losing his focus on the economy. This is part of his rush to implement everything in six months. The impression is that he has lost interest in the one issue that is most pressing to most people. Health Care has moved down on the list and global warming is barely on the list. Obama has tried to redirect his focus by insisting that the new economy will be built on green energy and health care but that doesn't get much traction. It is too easy for his critics to point out that both require massive government subsidies on top of an unsustainable national debt.

If Obama hadn't been in such a hurry he could have made centered everything he did on the economy and postponed items that didn't fit that model. Then, when the economy finally did recover, he would have new political capitol to spend on his remaining priorities. As it is, he may not have enough political capitol to carry him over.

Paul Light, an expert on the presidency and a professor at New York University, said the president's problems with Capitol Hill reflect "a miscalculation by the Obama administration on how political capital gets spent in Washington."

Light said that capital, even for a president who enjoys immense personal popular support like Obama, is spent a bit at a time on each initiative or piece of legislation.

"I think the Obama administration has been spending political capital at roughly the same rate the federal government spends money," Light said. "Eventually, it runs out."