“He moved in close, his face a scant millimeter from his target, his eyes widening and narrowing, his eyebrows rising and falling. From his pockets poured clippings, memos and statistics. Mimicry, humour and the genius analogy made ‘The Treatment’ an almost hypnotic experience and rendered the target stunned and helpless.”
The description is of Lyndon Johnson at work on recalcitrant Congressional representatives. Would that it were of Barack Obama.
The President returned to Washington from Camp David yesterday with the lustre fading from his leadership and his job approval ratings in a trough that even the Republican National Committee would not have dared hope for nine months ago. Three factors are dragging them down: a ragged, confusing set of healthcare reform proposals that a majority of Americans do not understand and do not think they want; a projected deficit of $9 trillion over ten years that makes any significant new entitlements for those currently without health insurance look unaffordable; and a pervasive worry about what Mr Obama brings to his office beyond elegant phrasemaking, of which the nation has heard a great deal in the past year. The war in Afghanistan has split his Cabinet and continues to exact a toll in blood and treasure that the country can ill afford, but the President’s most pressing challenge is domestic: to prove that, when the autocue is switched off, he can govern.
So far there is little evidence of an Obama “treatment” as irresistible as the techniques President Johnson used to drive his Great Society Bills onto the statute books. He needs to perfect one urgently. Healthcare reform is this President’s equivalent of the Civil Rights legislation of the 1960s in terms of its significance for the disadvantaged and the direction of American politics. Another speech — even the one he will make to the joint Houses of Congress on Wednesday — will not make it happen. The real test as he contemplates the most critical week of his presidency so far will be whether he can knock enough heads together on Capitol Hill to deliver reforms that are worthwhile and affordable.
He faces this test almost as an underdog. His ill-advised early summer deadline for a healthcare Bill made it look a failure when the deadline passed without results. A vicious conservative insurgency at “town hall” meetings since then has robbed him of the initiative on policy. His refusal to dictate the precise terms of the reforms he seeks, for fear of having them shot down as were those of Hillary Clinton 16 years ago, has left Congress to drift and two thirds of Americans unpersuaded that any major reform is necessary despite insurance premiums that have doubled in ten years and are projected to do so again in the next ten.
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These setbacks are reversible. A more serious obstacle for healthcare reform and Mr Obama’s effectiveness generally is the left wing of his own party. He signalled through his chief strategist yesterday that he was ready to face down liberal demands for a “public option” in the healthcare Bill, and was right to do so. The healthcare debate is a proxy for a much larger one on the size and role of the federal government. Mr Obama must recognise this week that the great American centre wants restraint from that government, not revolution.