Is Obama Ready to Be President?

Is Obama Ready to Be President?
Leading a coalition against untimely tax hikes could revive his presidency.

By HOLMAN W. JENKINS, JR.

President Obama needs a "win" for the economy, and for himself. An easy and constructive victory would be to join a growing number of House Democrats in calling for extension of the Bush tax cuts.

That the economy doesn't need tax hikes on job creators and investors hanging over it right now should be obvious, so let's skip to the political benefits for the president. Leading a coalition of Republicans and moderate Democrats to ward off the danger wouldn't just be "bipartisan," wouldn't just serve as a writ of divorce from the Pelosi left, but also would show Mr. Obama's leadership being tempered by realism, to do what is doable.

Mr. Obama would have to withstand the hot breath of MoveOn types who'd castigate him over what Democrats lazily deride as tax cuts for the rich. He'd have to withstand a simple-minded media dwelling on the fact that bankers would keep a bigger share of their bonuses.

He'd pay a price for his unwise rhetoric of late, not to mention his short-sighted political decision to run against the bank bailout that his own administration authored and that will be remembered as his finest hour. (The rejoinder for Republicans has been just too easy: Tim Geithner.)

He'd also have to pay a price for his implausible and belated deficit hawkery, as in Monday's announcement that nipped a few dimes from the budget on grounds that programs are cuttable only if they aren't succeeding in their aims—never mind whether those aims meet a cost-benefit test. Thus a program delivering ice-cream sandwiches to Eskimos is a good one by Obama standards as long as Eskimos are receiving ice-cream sandwiches.

Forget all that: The case for tax cuts as deficit-fighting has never been more valid, since getting the tax base growing is the only way to escape an even bigger fiscal and monetary crisis. Workers who are out of jobs over time become unemployable; plant and equipment depreciate and never contribute to the tax rolls again. Mr. Obama can easily and consistently argue that we need to go for growth above all.

But his steepest learning curve has been getting rid of the copybook approach to defining his agenda—sadly still evident in last week's State of the Union. The country has big problems—it always has big problems. It never doesn't have big problems. But the idea that he has to throw solutions on the table to everything at once is just what we've seen: a formula for irrelevance, a strategy to turn himself into a punch line.

Big problems—health care, energy—don't have to be solved with big solutions, and frequently aren't solvable at all in the sense that Mr. Obama keeps yakking about. But if you pick your battles intelligently, don't care who gets the credit, and launch some of your key bombing runs below the radar, a president can productively reshape the terrain on which problems can evolve.

A brief digression on health care is in order here: Our much maligned political system, even as it has done many unhelpful things in recent decades, has also done things to reshape the terrain in useful ways—by introducing health savings accounts, by injecting dollops of means-testing into Medicare, by enacting the otherwise egregious Medicare drug benefit as a subsidy to purchase private insurance.

Those efforts to reshape the terrain that Mr. Obama so blindly wasted and ignored go back to the 1998 Breaux Medicare commission; they go back to the 1993 Senate Finance hearings that explored how tax policy stokes cost-insensitive health care (an insight that all assumed would be fundamental to ClintonCare until the president's wife got her hands on the portfolio). They also go back to 2008, when Mr. Obama's opponent John McCain bravely called for ending the tax subsidy for employer-provided health insurance.

A quick and ideologically unembarrassed demonstration of bipartisan action to save the economy from untimely tax hikes would brace up the country's confidence in Mr. Obama and his approach to governing. When and if he returns to trying to help America with its long-running health-care policy woes, assuming he hasn't permanently spoiled the soup, he would come back as a different president.

He would come back as a president who understands there was a terrain in place that mattered before he came along. He would come back as a president who understands that elements of consensus have been forming for a long time that he should respect. He would come back as a president free of the notion that he is a special personage liberated from the grounding realities that other presidents have recognized and adapted to.