BLAME W!:

New President, Old Mistake: Is Obama trying too hard not to be like his predecessors? (Jacob Weisberg, Aug. 1, 2009, Slate)

You can diagram Team Obama's game plan by reversing the Clinton playbook. Obama started by courting the major interest groups and so far has seen none of the major lobbies—insurers, drug companies, hospitals, or doctors—come out against what he's trying to do. He has repeatedly stated his bipartisan intentions, flexibility, and openness to compromise. Instead of proposing a plan or even endorsing any specific policies, he has laid out eight broad principles and left the rest to Congress. His allies are outspending his opponents in advertising by a ratio of 2-to-1.

Obama's major difficulties predictably derive from reacting too strongly against the Clinton model. Where Clinton went wrong by being too controlling, Obama has given up to much control. Leaving the specifics to Congress has led to a classic sausage-making festival. Neutralizing powerful interest groups has meant dropping sound policy ideas and neglecting essential cost controls. Putting the Democratic legislative barons in the driver's seat has undercut bipartisanship. Not having a specific plan has left Obama in the awkward position of lobbying for something that doesn't exist.

You can see a similar pendulum effect in foreign policy, where the object lesson is not Bill Clinton but George W. Bush. Obama, who did not have much global expertise before coming to office, molded his approach around his predecessor's errors. Bush's naive idealism and unilateralism encouraged Obama's realism and multilateralism. Bush's boycott of North Korea, Cuba, and Iran fed Obama's eagerness to engage pragmatically with those tyrannies. Bush's neglect of the Mideast peace process fed Obama's urge to plunge into it. The new president has reversed the old one's prioritization of Iraq over Afghanistan and, in what has become the political cliché of 2009, tried "hitting the reset button" on relations with Russia.

In so doing, Obama now faces an inverted set of hazards: getting overcommitted in Afghanistan, putting too much faith in the United Nations, accommodating dictators instead of standing up to them. Most alarmingly, given all that his predecessor did to discredit them, Obama has failed to stand up for the broader ideas of democracy promotion and humanitarian intervention. Surely if not for Bush, Obama's instinct after the Iranian election would have been to identify with those risking their lives to free their country, not to get back to his attempt at dialogue with Ahmadinejad.

The UR never crafted a single piece of legislation in his pre-presidential career, and yet Mr. Weisberg thinks his failure to participate in crafting any now that he is president is reactionary rather than characteristic? And, though he had no foreign policy experience whatsoever, he ran as a Realist/Pragmatist, but now we're supposed to blame W for the UR cuddling up to anti-democratic dictators in precisely the way that Realism counsels? Even for someone as obsessed with W as Mr. Weisberg this is a lunatic bit of drivel.

Posted by Orrin Judd at August 1, 2009 8:26 AM