Washington Post White House reporter Scott Wilson has a very long piece on Obama in todays Outlook section. Its an interesting essay but it has many of the problems that are known to plague this kind of piece. Because Wilson covers the White House it reads like a damning indictment written by someone who doesnt want to hurt the feelings of the very people hes indicting.
Theres much to comment on but I want to focus on one of the two core claims of the piece.
According to Wilson Obama is isolated in large part because he doesnt love the nitty-gritty human side of politics which I believe and that Obama prefers instead to obsess about the finer intricacies of public policy.
Wilson hammers this point until you cant see the nail any more:
In the first two years the phrase I heard often in the White House was Good policy makes for good politics." Even then the principle seemed based on a naive reading of a hyperpartisan capital.Obamas policy-first approach diminished the importance of people people on Capitol Hill and along K Street let alone throughout the country in pushing through his program and providing the White House with valuable intelligence. Whether it was a matter of giving the American public too much credit or not enough remains an open question for many inside the administration. The presidents supreme confidence in his intellectual abilities and faith in the power of good public policy left the political advisers and policymakers in his White House estranged. The initiatives that have emerged have often been
unpopular and unsatisfying too small too big too beside the point to a country consumed by economic uncertainty.
Now I dont think Wilson is flat-out wrong. Obama certainly does see himself as a policy wonk and hes surrounded himself with people who see the president in precisely the way the president likes to be seen. Funny how that works. Also Obama is one of the most zealous members of the cult of experts weve had in the White House in a very long time. Remember when he told Katie Couric:
I would have loved nothing better than to simply come up with some very elegant academically approved approach to health care and didnt have any kinds of legislative fingerprints on it and just go ahead and have that passed. But thats not how it works in our democracy. Unfortunately what we end up having to do is to do a lot of negotiations with a lot of different people."
So whats my complaint? Simply this: Wheres the proof that Obama is a master of public policy? To be sure theres ample proof that hes a master at talking about public policy describing the problems summarizing the current thinking regurgitating all of the reigning clichs and platitudes. But wheres the evidence that hes actually good at public policy? Its a sincere question: What have been the truly innovative groundbreaking or even unconventional big public policy ideas to come out of this administration? Are there any? Because from where I sit it simply looks like Obama takes existing conventional liberal ideas some of them very very old off the liberal pantry shelf and hawks them like its new inventory. Wheres the evidence that Obamas mastery" over public policy has translated itself into creative approaches? Not in the stimulus from what I can tell. Maybe theres something impressive to tout in ObamaCare but Obama didnt actually have much to do with the crafting of ObamaCare a fact Wilson acknowledges. Was his genius to be found in shoveling cash into Solyndra and other embarrassing white elephants? Was he the guiding intellect behind a green jobs program that has produced dozens of jobs in places where it was supposed to create thousands? And if hes such a genius about public policy why did it take him so long to discover that theres no such thing as shovel ready jobs"? You dont have to be a Jedi Master of public policy to have known that. Heck if hes spent so much time focusing on getting the policies right why are things so bad? Why are they so much worse than he predicted? Why did it take him so long figuring out reality was sharply veering from his assumptions? Heres a thought: Maybe Obama is just a big fan of public policy the way Im a big fan of movies? I can talk about movies all day long. I can discuss camera work acting story directing etc. with some fluency. I can even talk about how movies are financed and the role of foreign markets. But you know what? I dont have a frickn clue how to make a Hollywood movie (and Ive actually made some documentaries). Maybe hes not a public policy Scorsese. Maybe hes at best the Roger Ebert of policymaking or more likely just a policy buff. This also raises an interesting question: Do you even want a super-wonk to be president? As Wilson discusses in his piece Bill Clinton was certainly a wonk and so was Jimmy Carter. But to the extent Clintons presidency was successful it was attributable to his political skills not his policy genius (and to an economic boom for which he deserves significantly less credit than he claims). Jimmy Carters presidency demonstrates that point well enough. If Obamas wonkiness translates itself into simply hawking the existing inventory of liberal ideas wouldnt it make more sense to have a salesman who can you know sell the inventory? The White House spent the first two years of this administration working from a slew of false assumptions not just about the economy but about the political skills of the president. As Noemie Emery recently laid out this president isnt nearly as good at politics as he and his advisors thought he was. Now their explanation is that while he may not be great at politics its only because his true gift is for getting the policies right." Good luck with that.
