Reality sinks in

There was plenty of blame to go around once Congress took charge of the bill, says Norman Ornstein, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank in Washington. “Pelosi did not bring Republicans in when they were putting the package together, and she could have,” he says. “But at the same time, the process they used—going through committees and allowing votes on amendments—was more open than most of the things we saw when Republicans were in charge of Congress. It’s a mixed bag.” Nonetheless, the Republican rejection of Obama’s efforts was risky, he says. “It looked like Obama makes warm gestures and Republicans give him the finger.”

Some, though, faulted the President’s approach as well. Democrats—who balked at taking any advice from Republicans whose policies they blamed for the economic crisis—worried that not only had the efforts at bipartisanship unnecessarily delayed the crucial legislation, but that Obama had foolishly legitimized Republican ideas at a moment when they could have been discredited for a generation. Paul Krugman, the liberal economist and Nobel laureate, penned a scathing critique in the New York Times lamenting that the bargaining for the three Senate votes had done nothing but dilute the stimulus package. “President Obama’s belief that he can transcend the partisan divide,” wrote Krugman, “warped his economic strategy.”

But others urged the President to stay the course in the long-term interests of the country and the Democratic party. “I’m not of the camp who think the Democrats are in power now and we should just do whatever we want and ignore the Republicans the way they ignored us,” Al From, the founder and CEO of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council, told Maclean’s. “I think we should do what is best for the country and get as broad support as we can.” The compromise in the Senate over the stimulus served to build a foundation for future bipartisan co-operation, he said. “Cultural change will take time and a building up of trust on both sides. Developing a post-partisan politics is a big part of the promise that Obama brought to the country.” From urged patience with the process. “It doesn’t surprise me that, for the first time in opposition, Republicans would vote in unison, and that the Democrats would try to exact some payback for how they had been treated by Bush for eight years,” he said.

The disappointing stimulus partisan food fight was not the only clash between campaign promises and the reality of governing during Obama’s early weeks on the job. He took office promising high-minded ethics reforms—a pledge that appeared to be undermined when a procession of his nominees to high-ranking positions turned out to have not paid their taxes. Timothy Geithner, his choice for treasury secretary (who oversees the IRS), had made what Obama called an honest mistake and was eventually confirmed despite a delay in paying $30,000 in taxes. But Obama’s pick for the newly created post of “chief performance officer,” Nancy Killefer, withdrew when it emerged she had not paid full taxes on household help.

The biggest blow came when Obama’s nominee for secretary of health and human services, Tom Daschle, pulled out when it emerged that he had not paid US$128,000 in taxes on a chauffeured limousine provided to him by a connected Democratic money man. The former Senate majority leader, an expert in health care policy, had left politics in 2004 and made millions as an adviser to an investment firm and a Washington law firm whose clients had business with the government. But he was seen as uniquely qualified to push through Obama’s planned health care reforms. The prospect of a Senate confirmation hearing, though, probing Daschle’s post-politics enrichment with the help of health industry lobbyists, was a political nightmare in the making.

That question of lobbyists haunted Obama on other fronts as well. He had vowed during the campaign that lobbyists “won’t find a job in my White House,” and issued an executive order on ethics that included a ban on anyone in his administration working on issues related to private sector work with former clients for two years. But he found himself making exceptions: for William J. Lynn III, a former lobbyist for defence contractor Raytheon whom Obama nominated as deputy defence secretary before the order was issued, and William Corr, a recent anti-tobacco lobbyist whom he nominated as deputy secretary at Health and Human Services. (Corr said he would recuse himself from tobacco issues.) It all made his appointments process look less than squeaky clean. “You’ve come to our town and asked us to trust you, but those that you appointed to your cabinet are not trustworthy, can’t handle their own budget and taxes,” a skeptical woman told Obama on Monday at a town hall in Elkhart, Ind., where the President had travelled to promote the stimulus bill. Obama conceded he’d made a mistake. “We have not been perfect but we are changing the culture in Washington. It is taking us some time.”

Time indeed. If Obama faced a reality check on partisanship and lobbyist entanglements, some of his more liberal supporters faced a reality check of their own: Obama is, after all, a politician. A case in point is the matter of the Office of Faith-Based Initiatives, created by George W. Bush to allow religious organizations to receive government grants for administering social programs such as drug and alcohol counselling, soup kitchens and after-school programs. The policy had come under fire because Bush had allowed the groups to use taxpayer funds to pay the salaries of employees hired under discriminatory practices, for example by a Christian group that would not consider hiring a Jew, Muslim, atheist or homosexual. Obama not only kept the controversial office intact, but expanded its role and renamed it the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships. He did not issue a blanket change to the hiring policy, but created an advisory council to oversee hiring issues on a case-by-case basis.

Obama also punted several other hard decisions down the road. With great fanfare, two days after his inauguration, he declared he would close the prison at Guantánamo Bay, and froze the military trials there. But he put off for six months the complicated question about what to do with the detainees. Likewise, he banned torture and said U.S. interrogations would comply with anti-torture laws and treaties, but left the details to a review of specific permissible interrogation techniques. As well, his key election promise of withdrawing troops from Iraq within 16 months is under review, with the Pentagon also studying timetables of 19 and 23 months.