Can the President really pose as the ‘fair shake’ candidate?
Barack Obama knows that, after three unsuccessful years as president, he cannot again sell himself to the electorate as a messiah who brings hope and change. The hope that accompanied his election vanished as the American economy continued to sink. Little has changed. But the unpopularity of the Republicans — widely seen, even among conservatives, as America’s nasty party — has given Obama an opportunity to re-invent himself for re-election in 2012. He is now the president who wants to ‘give everyone a fair shot’: he stands for honest, hard-working people against big business; for blue-collar jobs against multinational asset-strippers; for working mothers against Washington lobbyists.
As his exemplar, Obama has called on the legend of a Republican, Teddy Roosevelt. According to popular history, TR stood up for plain folks against greedy plutocrats, and won. (He was also, curiously, the man upon whom John McCain tried to model himself when running against Obama in 2008.) ‘Roosevelt was called a radical …a socialist — even a communist,’ says Obama, who has been called a radical, a socialist and even a communist. ‘But today, we are a richer nation and a stronger democracy because of what he fought for.’ The message is clear: like Teddy, Barack can save the Republic from economic and moral bankruptcy and restore values of decency, hard work and common sense.
Which all sounds great — if only it were true. The Obama administration has repeatedly, at times scandalously, failed to practise what it preaches. Obama came to power saying that lobbyists ‘won’t find a job in my White House’, then he appointed dozens of them to his administration.
On 21 January 2009, he introduced by executive order a new ‘ethics pledge’ to bar what Washingtonians call ‘the revolving door’ — the system whereby highly paid bureaucrats rotate between senior government posts and private-sector jobs in companies with an interest in talking to the government. ‘The pledge,’ said Obama, ‘represents a clean break from business as usual’ and ‘will help restore faith in government’.
It didn’t. Senior White House staff have carried on swapping posts in his administration for fat salaries in the private sphere. In December last year, for instance, Peter Orszag, who served almost two years as Obama’s director of the Office of Management and Budget, became vice chairman of global banking at Citigroup, a role which, according to the Financial Times, would involve ‘dealing with clients and top government officials rather than running a business’. Another example is Cathy Zoi, who left her job as assistant secretary for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE) at the US Department of Energy to work for a George Soros fund that invests in green energy. Soros is a major Democratic donor, as it happens.
At the start of his presidency, Obama — channelling the other Roosevelt, Franklin Delano — excited liberals with talk of a ‘Green New Deal’. The idea was that America could save the planet and make loads of money by becoming the world’s leader in environmentally friendly technology. To this end, the government diverted $16.8 billion towards EERE to fuel eco-innovation. Questions soon emerged about the integrity of EERE and Ms Zoi, however. Her husband was an executive at Serious Materials, a small window manufacturer which was reportedly the first green company to receive a stimulus cheque. The Obama administration also backed a dysfunctional green business called Solyndra to the tune of $535 million. It later emerged that several of Solyndra’s shareholders and executives had made generous donations to Obama’s presidential campaign.
Liberals find it easy to forgive sins committed in the name of protecting mother earth. It’s harder for them to excuse the fact that what was meant to be Obama’s great legislative achievement — healthcare reform — was undermined by his administration’s collusion with lobbyists. Obama’s initial bill contained amendments to stop the government over-paying for drugs through the federal health scheme, Medicare. Yet the White House soon dropped those clauses after it struck a deal with the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), the leading lobby group for US drug companies. In exchange, PhRMA companies supported the bill, not least with lots of TV advertising.
Another much-trumpeted Obama reform was to introduce ‘net neutrality’ laws. Far from being neutral, the rules hugely benefited web giants such as Google and Amazon.
All of which should make the idea of Obama as the ‘fair shake’ President seem silly. Yet he is comfortable playing the folksy populist, and, remarkably, many Americans still buy into the act. His admirers — the vast majority of the US press corps among them — invested so much faith in Obama in 2008 that they cannot easily come to terms with his failings.
They blame others instead. Liberal investigative journalists have gone to great lengths to explain how venal (and white) politicos — Democrat and Republican — have derailed Obama’s crusade to clean up Washington. Their hope now is that, in his second term, he will break free from the shackles of the system and bring about a fairer, more progressive America by 2016.
Obama’s fans will not win him the 2012 election by themselves, however. He needs to win over the independents and undecideds, as he did in 2008. His problem is that these people are poorer than they were before they heard of Barack Obama, and they are not happy about it. His ‘job approval’ rating may have had a Christmas boost this week — it climbed above his ‘disapproval’ rating for the first time since July after he secured a tax cut for workers in 2012 — but general disgruntlement persists. Obama’s trillion-dollar stimuli have stimulated almost nothing. His schemes to create jobs have flopped: unemployment has increased from 5 to 9 per cent during his first term.
Obama failings, however, are softened by the flaws of his opponents, which grow more and more obvious as next week’s Iowa caucuses approach. It’s not as if the current Republican favourite, Newt Gingrich, whose career has been riddled with scandal, can accuse the president of being corrupt — though no doubt he’ll try. Newt’s rival, Mitt Romney, might be able to challenge Obama’s claim to the moral high ground. But he’s hardly beyond rebuke. As a CEO of a huge management consultancy, he was responsible for outsourcing thousands of American jobs to the developing world — a fact that Democratic speechwriters will not fail to emphasise.
The question, then, is whether Obama can get away with presenting himself as a man of the people for the people in spite of his dodgy record. And the answer is yes, he can. But that doesn’t mean he should.